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"content": "\n\u003ch2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Airdate: Tuesday, October 27, 2026 at 10 am\u003c/h2>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Next week’s midterm election will decide which party controls Congress for the second half of President Trump’s term. And in the wake of California’s redistricting in favor of Democratic candidates, the state could play an outsized role in shaping the outcome of the midterms. We’ll dig into key races here in California and across the nation, and how issues like inflation and Trump’s approval rating could influence the outcome.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Guests:\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n\u003cli>\u003cstrong>Erin Covey, \u003c/strong>editor covering the U.S. House of Representatives, The Cook Political Report\u003c/li>\n\n\n\n\u003cli>\u003cstrong>Guy Marzorati,\u003c/strong> correspondent, KQED’s California Politics and Government Desk\u003c/li>\n\u003c/ul>\n\n\n\n\u003ch2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Episode Transcript\u003c/h2>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cem>\u003cstrong>This is a computer-generated transcript. While our team has reviewed it, there may be errors.\u003c/strong>\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Welcome to \u003cem>Forum\u003c/em>. I’m Mina Kim. We’re now one week from Election Day, and one thing that’s been clear this midterm cycle is that many voters want change. They want relief from high gas and grocery prices and an end to the war in Iran. Democrats are hoping, and analysts are predicting, that the discontent will translate into a wave of votes for their party and control of Congress. But Democrats are also afraid to get their hopes up after past disappointments. Meantime, Republicans are hoping a last-minute spending blitz, along with the president’s red-state tour, will stave off a Democratic sweep.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">What do you think, listeners? Which House and Senate races here in California and nationwide are grabbing your attention? Tell us by calling 866-733-6786, emailing forum@kqed.org, or finding us on Discord, Bluesky, Facebook, or Instagram at KQED Forum.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Joining me this hour, Guy Marzorati, political correspondent for KQED, covering California politics. Hi, Guy.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Guy Marzorati:\u003c/strong> Hey, good morning.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Good morning to you. Erin Covey is also with us, editor at The Cook Political Report, who covers the U.S. House of Representatives. Erin, really glad to have you with us, too.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Erin Covey:\u003c/strong> Hey, very glad to be on!\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> So before we dig into specific races, I want to talk with you about the overall picture, Erin. I noticed The Cook Political Report Friday, I think, just moved another 19 House races away from the GOP. Tell me what drove that latest round of rating changes.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Erin Covey:\u003c/strong> Look, at this point, we believe that Republicans’ path to holding the House majority has all but evaporated. We’re currently projecting that Democrats will pick up anywhere from 12 to 22 seats in the House. They only need three to hit the magic number, 218, so they should be in a good position to win the majority regardless. It’s really a question of how large their majority will be.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">In the past couple of weeks, what we have seen is that a number of Republican incumbents have found themselves in much more competitive races than they were expecting. These are districts that Trump won by double digits in 2024, so that’s where the bulk of some of the swifter ratings changes have been, because these races have really come online late in the cycle.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">But it goes to show how much of a drag on Republicans Trump is right now, because his approval rating is deeply underwater, largely driven by his handling of economic issues. These Republican incumbents are suddenly having to worry about turning out voters who, you know, were coming out in droves for the president in 2024.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> So this is despite all that last-minute ad spending, or maybe the fact that they have to do this much ad spending is revealing to you, Erin?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Erin Covey:\u003c/strong> Look, I think that the ad spending has certainly kept Republicans competitive in places that may have looked worse for them at this point had they not spent as much as they did. We’ve also seen that the ad spending has been disproportionately good for Republicans in the Senate races.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">In the House races, it’s been a little bit more even than I think you would expect, and that’s because Democratic candidates have been raising quite a bit of money and have been outraising their Republican opponents for the past several quarters.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">And so the money, you know, I think it makes a difference, certainly, if a candidate is able to spend a couple million dollars in the last few weeks of the race. That may keep them from losing their race. But at a certain point, you know, all the money in the world starts to hit diminishing returns, and there’s only so much you can do to change the narrative.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Yeah. Guy, would you agree with Erin’s assessment that essentially Republicans’ path to maintaining control of the House has all but evaporated? And if you do, tell me why you think that is. What are the main issues that are driving voters?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Guy Marzorati:\u003c/strong> Well, I think it goes back to midterm elections being referendums on the president. You need to look no further than a couple of data points here. One is the president’s approval rating, which has been hovering below 40% in a lot of public polling. And two is the cost of living, which has driven as kind of the top issue for voters.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I’ve seen charts that have charted Trump’s approval rating alongside gas prices, and it’s almost a complete correlation. So when you look at the fact that voters going to the polls aren’t judging candidates in these House elections individually, maybe, but looking at it kind of in parliamentary terms — which party do they feel like they’d like to send into control in Washington? — and, look, we can talk about what a victory would mean for Democrats in the House or potentially the Senate, but I think you have to go back to the fundamentals of these House elections being referendums on the president. And that’s a really bad sign for Republicans.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> How have you seen Democrats capitalizing on this to draw votes? What has been some of the core messaging you’ve seen and heard from them, Guy?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Guy Marzorati:\u003c/strong> Well, I mean, one issue I focus on in these California House districts is gas prices, which is surprising in the sense that Democrats have seen this be such a bad issue for the party in California. We’ve had the nation’s highest gas prices for many years, driven largely by state policy pushed by Democrats at the state Capitol.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">And so it’s an issue that, if you look back in the last couple of congressional cycles, Democrats have really taken on the chin, especially in inland working-class areas where folks drive the most.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">That’s changed this year. We’ve seen nationally that Democrats are running more ads talking about gas prices than Republicans. And while Republicans are still campaigning on the issue in California because of some of our idiosyncrasies at a state level, this is an issue that California Democrats are talking about. You see Democratic candidates in swing districts in California filming ads at gas stations, something you would have just never dreamed of a couple of cycles ago.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">It just shows you that, I think — we can talk about this in the course of the show — on Medicaid, on gas prices, on cost of living, so much of the negative impacts of Trump and Republican policies these last couple of years have been concentrated in the very communities that shifted most toward Trump in 2024.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Democrats came into this election cycle in California really feeling on defense. In a lot of these inland areas that moved toward the GOP, both through redistricting and through the fact that the negative impacts of these policies have hit exactly those communities, there’s been a complete turnaround.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Erin, what have you been seeing in ads for House races across the country that Guy may not have touched on? I’m wondering if corruption is a big deal.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Erin Covey:\u003c/strong> We’re definitely seeing corruption pop up in a lot of these House races. And, you know, that’s an issue that members from both parties are vulnerable on. Obviously, Republicans are playing a lot more defense this cycle, and so Republican members are feeling much more of these attacks.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">But we also see Democratic incumbents who are facing attack ads over their history of stock trading or the fact that their wealth has increased during their time in Congress. I think a lot of voters start from the assumption that all politicians are corrupt. And so an attack ad that is going after stock trading and things that may not have been quite an issue even a few years ago for these members of Congress is suddenly a bigger vulnerability for them.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> What is the biggest defense, or the messaging that Republicans have been doing around issues related to the economy and so on, to motivate their base, Erin?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Erin Covey:\u003c/strong> Look, Republicans are talking about the fact that the One Big Beautiful Bill that was passed last summer cut taxes, and that is the one issue that they kind of have going for them economically speaking.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">They’re also trying to, whether explicitly or implicitly, distance themselves from the president’s policies, particularly the war with Iran. We’ve seen a number of Republican members of Congress express disapproval for it at this point and break with Trump in a way that these members haven’t before over the war with Iran, because it is so deeply unpopular with voters from both parties.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">We’ve also seen Republicans try to distance themselves from the president’s tariff policy, which is, of course, a major vulnerability for a lot of these Republicans as well.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">But I would say overall, when we’re looking at ads that are driven largely by cost-of-living issues, the three issues I’m hearing about the most are the war with Iran and its effect on gas and diesel prices, the tariffs, and then the cost of health care and Republicans’ cuts to federal health care funding last year.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Yeah. Still, Guy, despite those things and the lack of popularity of the president, I still hear many Democrats wary of getting their hopes up for a big blue wave. Tell us why.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Guy Marzorati:\u003c/strong> Well, I think that the structural factors are against the Democrats in a number of ways heading into this election, by which I mean most of all redistricting and the natural kind of sorting of seats that we’ve seen.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Democrats — and I can use California as an example — have already won the districts where voters have turned against Trump. Most of the parts of the state where voters had a lot of antipathy toward the president, Democrats won in 2018, 2020, 2022, and 2024.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">So the areas that are left are more on Republican terrain, and that’s kind of true nationwide. There’s just a lower ceiling on the possible gains that Democrats can make, even if we end up in a situation where the national popular vote mirrors a year like 2018, when we saw a huge wave. There just are fewer of those seats to win.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">And then Erin can talk about this specifically in the math, but the redistricting war that played out across the country probably ended up in the Republicans’ favor by a few seats.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">So Democrats came into this election with those structural disadvantages. Also, the money has been on the GOP side. That’s what the wave is running into: a wall of structural factors that favored Republicans going into this, but may, in the end, not be enough to prevent losses.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Yeah. This Bluesky user writes, “I wish we on the left could learn that disappointment with the GOP doesn’t mean votes for Democrats.” So, some of the nerves you’re hearing expressed there.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Erin, some other things that I’ve heard: People are worried that maybe polling is overestimating Democratic support, maybe because it has been overestimated in the past in some Midwestern states. I’m sure not a lot of Democrats would want to remember, but how is the polling this time around, do you think?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Erin Covey:\u003c/strong> Look, it is impossible to predict polling error going into an election. But what we do know is that in the past three presidential election cycles, when Trump has been on the ballot, polling has underestimated Republicans to varying extents. It was a bigger issue in 2020 than in 2024, I would say, when the polling was largely fairly accurate.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">But in midterm cycles in 2018 and 2022, the polling has held up pretty well. I’ll remind listeners that even in 2025, the polling actually underestimated Democratic gains in Virginia and New Jersey.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I think there is certainly recent history that points to polling error that did not favor Democrats, particularly in some of these white Midwestern states. But I do think that the polling I have seen — the public polling, the private polling from both parties — it’s all showing good signs for Democrats to varying extents. And so there really isn’t much of a reason to believe that this cycle isn’t going to be a good night for them.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> And the other big determinant of success is turnout, right? So what are you seeing with regard to that? Because midterms historically, of course, bring out fewer people than presidential elections. And, you know, there are demographics that really need to show up to make this blue wave possible, right?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Erin Covey:\u003c/strong> Yeah, I mean, what we’re seeing across the board in the early voting so far is that Democratic voters are, for the most part, more enthusiastic, turning out at higher levels than Republican voters compared to previous cycles.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">But, you know, this is not going to be even across every part of the country. There’s going to be some places like Texas and North Carolina, I think, where Democrats will do disproportionately well.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> We’re talking with Erin Covey of The Cook Political Report and Guy Marzorati of KQED’s politics team, a correspondent for them. And with you, listeners, we want to know how you’re feeling a week from midterm Election Day. There’s more after the break. Stay with us. This is \u003cem>Forum\u003c/em>.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Welcome back to \u003cem>Forum\u003c/em>. I’m Mina Kim. We’re talking this hour about the key races that will determine the balance of power in Congress, both in California and across the country. We’re talking about it with Guy Marzorati, politics correspondent for KQED, Erin Covey, editor at The Cook Political Report, and with you, our listeners.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">We want to hear your questions and how you’re feeling a week from Election Day. Are you nervous, hopeful, something else? Which House or Senate races here in California or nationwide are grabbing your attention? Are you a voter in a competitive district? How’s that influencing your vote? What are the issues driving your vote?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">866-733-6786 is the number. Email address: forum@kqed.org. Find us on Discord, Bluesky, Facebook, or Instagram at KQED Forum.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">All right, I want to look at the key California races that are truly toss-ups. And, Guy, once again, it’s David Valadao’s seat in the Central Valley. I mean, every time we do a show about elections, it’s always pretty much this one to watch. Tell us about District 22, Guy.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Guy Marzorati:\u003c/strong> Yeah, so the 22nd District is based in Bakersfield, Kern County, in the southern Central Valley. This is a seat that has, as you know, been competitive cycle after cycle. David Valadao has been the kind of rare Republican who’s been able to hold this seat even when the national winds have turned against the party.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">He famously voted for the impeachment of President Trump. He’s been kind of more of a centrist on issues like immigration. He’s been able to survive in really tough elections.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">2024 was a little bit different. This district had the largest swing toward Trump of any district in the country. Valadao won a much more comfortable victory than he had in the past. And so this was one that was still expected to be competitive, but seemed to be moving toward the Republican column.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Now, what really changed here was the Medicaid cuts. This is a district that has a higher percentage of folks on Medi-Cal than any other district in California. So, again, when we talk about GOP policy concentrating its downsides on these kinds of districts, the 22nd is a perfect example of this.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Then redistricting came in California with Proposition 50. This district got a little bit more blue, but it’s still competitive, and really it has remained the most competitive congressional district in the state throughout the whole cycle.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">There was a really competitive primary on the Democratic side. Randy Villegas, a local school board member who’s more progressive, came out of that primary. And this has become the district that outside Republican groups, the national Republican apparatus, have kind of looked at as their Alamo in California. It really remains the one district where they continue to spend heavily in this area. Democrats and outside groups supporting Democrats have also spent heavily.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">So this could end up being really our last competitive seat. I think Cook still has it as the only toss-up left in California, and one in which we’re also seeing a test case on the Democratic side, with Randy Villegas running much more of a kind of populist, progressive campaign than we’ve seen Democrats challenging Valadao with in the past.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">He’s brought Bernie Sanders to the district. He’s brought AOC to the district. And he’s running on much more of a systemic argument that politics writ large is broken, rather than just running against Trump, which has been more the traditional playbook that we’ve seen from Democrats.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Yeah, things like universal child care, Medicare for All, that.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Guy Marzorati:\u003c/strong> Yeah, I mean, a perfect example of this: My colleague Marisa Lagos sat down with Villegas last week in Bakersfield, and she asked, “If you are elected and Democrats win the House, are you interested in holding investigations, looking into potential corruption in the Trump family?”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">And he said, “Yeah, sure, I’m interested in that. But what I’m really interested in is looking at political spending and money in politics from both parties across the whole system and examining that.”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">That is not a DCCC talking point. You know, this is someone who is looking at the entire system as being at fault, rather than just the GOP or just Trump.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">And I think what worried Democrats a little bit heading into this race was, would Villegas kind of be the El-Sayed of California? Someone who is, you know, creating his own news, talking about things other than Trump, kind of taking the focus away from this being a referendum on the president.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">It might end up being that the wave is so large and the opposition to Trump is so great that it doesn’t matter that someone who’s as progressive as Villegas can win. But it’s an interesting test case because he’s running a very different race than the other Democrats in the state. And it may turn out to be a great bet. He might be able to bring out voters in the Bakersfield area who have not participated before and create a different electorate than Democrats have been able to produce in that part of the state.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Erin, I know you’ve been watching this race closely, too. Are there any dynamics that you want to note?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Erin Covey:\u003c/strong> Well, I think it’s just worth remembering that the one race Valadao did lose was in 2018, which was, of course, another election cycle that was defined by health care. So this is really a significant vulnerability for him.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I think Democrats have a better shot at ousting him this cycle than they have in the past several years. We still have this rated as a toss-up, but it would not surprise me if Democrats end up victorious here.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Guy, let’s move on to the 48th. I mean, speaking of redistricting, it feels like it had a big influence here.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Guy Marzorati:\u003c/strong> Yeah, this is maybe the most wildly gerrymandered seat of all the competitive races in California. Down in Southern California, Darrell Issa held this seat in kind of northern and eastern San Diego County. This was completely reworked to loop in Palm Springs, a hotbed of Democratic voters, and move toward some of the more Democratic parts of North County San Diego.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">What you ended up with was a seat where Democrats really liked their chances of winning. Issa decided not to run for reelection, and instead you have Marnie von Wilpert, who’s a San Diego City Council member, running against Jim Desmond, who is a county supervisor in San Diego.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Here you see one of the dynamics that you often have when a party is facing a potential wave, where Desmond has really tried to localize the race. He’s on the Board of Supervisors in San Diego, and he represents most of the folks in this congressional district.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">When I was down there, I really heard his supporters and his campaign talking about the local work that he’s done, his focus on constituent services. That is a signal to me that he doesn’t want to talk about Trump. He doesn’t want to talk about, you know, the national politics, whereas von Wilpert is really running on that platform.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">She’s the candidate I mentioned who filmed commercials at gas stations. I spent some time at gas stations in the area. That definitely was a big topic for folks in that district. They drive a lot.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">And actually, if you zoom out, if you break down the districts based on who drives the most in each congressional district in California, all of the competitive seats in the state are in kind of the top third of heaviest-driving districts.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">So this kind of issue resonates, and Democrats like von Wilpert are able to say, sure, we’ve had the highest gas prices for a while, but this recent spike is because of the war that the president started. And that turns out to have been a pretty effective message.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Yeah, we’re talking about the House races, the key races that will determine the balance of power in Congress in California as well as across the country.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">And listeners, tell us which ones are grabbing your attention, both the House and Senate races, how you’re feeling a week from Election Day, and what questions you have about whether this blue wave will materialize. The email address is forum@kqed.org. Post on our social channels at KQED Forum. Call 866-733-6786.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Brandon in Redwood City is on. Brandon, go ahead.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Brandon:\u003c/strong> Hi, everybody. Good morning. Um, I just want to say I saw Bernie and Jane Kim and Ro Khanna. I even handed a business card to Ro Khanna on the street. I don’t know why he was wandering around out in front of the Curran Theater after everything wrapped up, but I was just inspired.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I’ve already voted. I’ve voted yes on Prop 40 and no on 41 and 42. Those are the two big ones for me. I know it’s probably going to go, but my comment, and I’d like to hear some input, is just more so, I hope that not only, obviously, do we get a blue wave, but I hope the Democrats, you know, now that we finally throw the ball to them, catch it and get across the finish line, and do that by doing what the people want.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I, for one, am not interested in seeing a bunch of attacking Trump. I’d love to see the guy in jail. Don’t get me wrong, but I do think that we need to focus on bringing down prices and really reach a peace accord with everybody who has voted for them.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I don’t want to see retribution, and I just hope that we can do things that the farmers and the truckers and those people on the MAGA side can point to as beneficial for them, you know?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Yeah, thanks. It’s interesting. It’s almost like you’re hearing a little bit of what you were describing, Guy, about Randy Villegas’s approach and what Brandon is saying he wants to see.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Guy Marzorati:\u003c/strong> Yeah, and I think this is an open question for Democrats if they do win back the House and the Senate, what kind of approach they’ll take.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">You’ve heard Democratic leadership in recent weeks kind of dance around the question of whether their top priority would be pursuing an impeachment of the president. I think that’s an issue where Democrats feel cross-pressured from both the base, who would like to see hearings, investigations, and an acknowledgment that, look, the political impact of that might not be so great, and what voters are asking for as their top priority, which is addressing the cost of living.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">So that’ll be fascinating to watch. And I also think the margin really matters for Democrats. If it’s just a handful-of-seats majority that they’re able to hold, that creates a really difficult, interesting dynamic for the next potential speaker, probably Hakeem Jeffries.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">You’re going to be dealing with members, many of them newly elected and more progressive, who might have a different agenda and want to take the party in different directions. If the margin they’re able to gain on election night becomes larger, that gives more room to operate for whoever the next Democratic leader is.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Erin, do you think Brandon’s feelings align with what you’re hearing nationwide?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Erin Covey:\u003c/strong> I think so. I think that voters are frustrated with the system writ large right now. And I think Democrats are bearing the brunt of that criticism right now from some of their voters because they view them as not willing to fight back against the Trump administration as much as they would like.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">But, of course, fighting back looks different to different voters, whether or not it means widespread health care legislation or investigations into the president and members of his Cabinet. There is a lot of disagreement, both within the base and within party leadership, I think.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">And so it remains to be seen the direction that Democrats will take policy-wise, assuming they win the majority in the House. But what I will say is that Trump is still going to be president at the end of the day, even if Democrats have a majority in the Senate as well. It will not be filibuster-proof, and so there is very little that can actually get done legislatively.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Actually, Erin, while we’re on state-level races, I do want to just ask you quickly about a statewide race that has gotten a lot of national attention recently, and that’s the Ohio governor’s race, where the Republican candidate, of course, Vivek Ramaswamy, posted a malicious ad featuring Democratic candidate Amy Acton and essentially weaponizing her mother’s betrayal of Acton when she was sexually assaulted as a child.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">There has been so much criticism and condemnation of this ad. I’m just curious if Cook has seen that translate into any notable shift away from the Republican candidate.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Erin Covey:\u003c/strong> Yeah, so the answer is yes. We did recently move this race from toss-up to Lean Democrat, in part as a result of the backlash to that ad that Ramaswamy ran.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">But I think even before that, there was a sense that Acton was developing a bit of a clear edge here. And, look, I think the attacks in this race have been very personal all cycle. Sometimes when you have a candidate who is just so enmeshed in that, it can cause them to do things that are, you know, politically unwise.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">This ad clearly was going to backfire on Republicans. We’ve seen that it did. And there were a lot of Republicans who were critical of it after it was released. So it is not a surprise that it has given Acton further momentum in the final stretch of this race.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Guy Marzorati:\u003c/strong> And that just didn’t seem like an ad you would run if you felt like you were up by five points. You know, I think you roll the dice and hope that the impression voters get is the one that’s presented through the ad, but we saw a huge amount of media coverage of the ad as a story. So voters were getting the full information about the context of that, and clearly it backfired.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Yeah. Well, staying with California for one more toss-up race, this is one where there is a lot of spending, ad spending, and this is the 13th. Guy, remind us about this district, the race that Adam Gray won to claim it a couple of years ago, and why Republicans are spending so big here.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Guy Marzorati:\u003c/strong> Yeah, the nail-biter district. This was, I believe, the closest congressional election in the country in 2024. Adam Gray won this seat by 187 votes after losing it very narrowly in 2022.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">This was another district where the lines were moved because of Proposition 50. It’s in the Central Valley, centered around Merced and Modesto, but it also added parts of Stockton, which brought in more Democratic voters.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">And this is one where Gray is, as he’s been known, a Valley Democrat. He’s really run his career as a centrist, both in his time in the state legislature and in Congress. He’s really focused his messaging on the gains he’s been able to bring back to the district through the budget.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The Republicans have focused their attacks on Gray’s vote in support of the gas tax while he was in the state legislature, which ended up funding transportation and road repair.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">This is one where I think it’s so interesting. You look across these districts in California, and as much ground as Republicans have lost here in the last 10 years on the congressional level, I think they’ve actually been pretty good at candidate recruitment. I don’t think they necessarily lost because they put forward folks who just can’t find a way to win.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">In this case, the Republicans put forward Kevin Lincoln, who is the mayor of Stockton. I mentioned Democrats added a lot of blue voters in Stockton. Well, Kevin Lincoln has won in Stockton as mayor. Yet again, we go back to this national environment and these national headwinds that Lincoln is running against. I think it’s why you saw Cook shift this race toward Democrats in recent days.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Yeah, so what is Lincoln trying to attack Gray on for the most part, Guy?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Guy Marzorati:\u003c/strong> I mean, it’s focused on this 2017 vote that Gray took when he was a member of the state Assembly to increase the gas tax. He’s defended it. He’s said, you know, the state went a number of years before that without increasing the gas tax, which funds road repair in the state.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">But the gas tax is a big reason — you could say the number one reason — for the price differential between California gas and gas elsewhere in the country. So it’s become a real target issue for Republicans.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">It passed the Legislature. Voters approved it two years later when there was a repeal effort. So, you know, Gray might feel comfortable sticking by his vote, but certainly in a district like that, where the cost of living is the top issue and voters do drive a lot, that is something Republicans have keyed in on as they’ve attacked Gray.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Erin, do you have any insight into why Cook moved the race from toss-up to Lean Democrat? It was a while back, actually, so — so I actually moved it to Likely Democrat recently.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Erin Covey:\u003c/strong> Yeah, I was going to say, look, I think that both parties’ super PACs have stopped a lot of their spending here because they’re increasingly seeing this seat as out of reach for Republicans this cycle.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">You know, I don’t think it’s over, certainly. I think Kevin Lincoln — I agree that he’s a good candidate who could certainly make this race closer than it should be. But the polling has pretty consistently shown Gray with an edge.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I’ll remind folks that this district shifted six points to the left after redistricting. This obviously was an incredibly close race in 2024, when Trump was winning the district by about five and a half points. This is now a seat that Harris won narrowly.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">So it is different, and the environment is a lot different for Democrats as well, of course, nationally speaking. Even if Gray is vulnerable on his record in Sacramento before he went to Washington, I don’t think it’s going to be enough for Lincoln to close the gap here this cycle.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> So, Erin, how would you overall assess the success of redistricting efforts by both Democrats and Republicans midway through?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Erin Covey:\u003c/strong> Look, I think it’s basically a wash. Republicans came out slightly on top. We are projecting that they will be able to net around three seats due to redistricting alone, but that is not by the wide margin they were hoping for.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">That’s because a lot of the maps that Republicans redrew in the past year were predicated on the fact that Republicans would be able to match Trump’s margin in a lot of these parts of the country. What we have seen is that his approval rating has dropped off so much that they’re probably not going to be able to do so.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Guy Marzorati:\u003c/strong> I mean, one question I’ve been thinking about this last week is, given this national environment, do Democrats need to gerrymander in California? Could they have won two, three, four seats under the previous maps, given where things stand?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> I think they certainly could have. Well, but, right, these maps will be in play in ’28 and ’30, right, Guy? Maybe they’ll pay some dividends there for Democrats, at least.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Guy Marzorati:\u003c/strong> Yeah, and there’s a whole messaging component to this that we can talk about.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Yeah, we’re talking with Guy Marzorati, politics correspondent for KQED, and Erin Covey, editor at The Cook Political Report. And with you, our listeners, we’ll talk Senate after the break. Stay with us. This is \u003cem>Forum\u003c/em>.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> You’re listening to \u003cem>Forum\u003c/em>. I’m Mina Kim. The key House races in California and Senate races nationwide that will decide control of Congress for the rest of President Trump’s term — that’s the topic of our conversation this hour with Erin Covey, editor at The Cook Political Report, who specializes in the House of Representatives, and Guy Marzorati, politics correspondent for KQED, covering California politics with always an eye on the nation.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Listeners, how are you feeling a week from Election Day? Nervous, hopeful? What questions do you have about the strength of this so-called blue wave materializing? Which House and Senate races here in California and nationwide are grabbing your attention, and what are the issues driving your vote?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Email forum@kqed.org, find us on Discord, Bluesky, Facebook, or Instagram at KQED Forum. Call 866-733-6786, 866-733-6786 as well, to get your voice heard.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Before I go to calls, really quick, Erin, tell me where Cook has the Senate picture right now for Democrats and Republicans.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Erin Covey:\u003c/strong> Right now, we believe that control of the Senate is a pure toss-up. We’re projecting that Democrats will flip anywhere from two to six Senate seats. Now, they only need four for the majority, so that is now well within their reach, which is a very different picture from what we saw at the beginning of 2025, when it looked like Republicans were the overwhelming favorites to hold the Senate majority.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Yeah, so four to get to 51, right, to overcome the vice president’s tie-breaking vote?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Erin Covey:\u003c/strong> Correct.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> All right. Well, I think we have a question from listener Colin in San Francisco. Hi, Colin. Thanks for waiting.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Colin:\u003c/strong> Good morning. I’ve been following the campaign of Abdul El-Sayed for the open Senate seat in Michigan with great interest. Understanding Israel-Palestine isn’t the first issue that most voters base their decisions on, the University of Southern California’s Democracy Lab just ran a poll in Nancy Pelosi’s congressional district in which 72% of respondents answered that they have a very unfavorable opinion of the Israeli government, with an additional 15% answering that they had a somewhat unfavorable opinion.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Does this indicate that, at least until very recently within the Democratic Party, there’s a large gap between where most of the elected representatives are on Israel-Palestine and where their own voters are?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Colin, thanks. Erin, do you want to take that first, and then we can get into the dynamics of this particular race as well?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Erin Covey:\u003c/strong> Yeah, look, public opinion on Israel has shifted dramatically over the past couple of years. I believe that, according to Pew, only older Republicans now have a favorable view of Israel if you’re looking at various age groups divided by party.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">And so this is really an issue where increasingly there are a number of elected Democrats who are out of step with their base. It has been very difficult for them to navigate.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">And, of course, there are parts of the country with larger Jewish populations that have a more nuanced view of Israel. We’ve seen this play out in a number of House races. Of course, it’s been a factor in the Michigan Senate race as well.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I think, ultimately, there are other issues that are driving voters’ behavior more, largely the cost of living. But this is certainly an issue that could impact some voters’ decisions.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Where does Cook have this Senate race?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Erin Covey:\u003c/strong> We have it rated—\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> —as a pure toss-up. Pure toss-up. Okay, so not leaning down at all. But interestingly, people have been pointing out that El-Sayed’s — you know, the way that he’s been resonating with voters — was not predicted. What do you think is causing that?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Erin Covey:\u003c/strong> Look, I think this is a really interesting matchup. We’re seeing both candidates campaign in parts of the state that are unexpected.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Mike Rogers, the Republican, is campaigning down in Detroit, hoping to make some inroads with Black voters there who preferred Haley Stevens over El-Sayed in the Senate Democratic primary.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">At the same time, you’re seeing El-Sayed campaigning up in the Upper Peninsula, which is a historically very Republican part of the state. But I think his message on affordability and the way that he has clearly separated himself from the Democratic establishment has been compelling to a lot of voters in the state.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Yeah, interesting. He’s not a socialist himself, but has received a lot of support from democratic socialists and those to the left of the party. I’m just curious if you think that says something about where national Democrats could go, or whether they’re watching it to see if that’s where they’ll go, Erin.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Erin Covey:\u003c/strong> Yeah, I mean, I think that is the big question this cycle. Can we see these candidates who either are democratic socialists or have been tied heavily to the democratic socialist wing of the party? Can they still be successful in these swing seats, where historically moderates have done better?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Look, I do think that if they do end up winning in a lot of these places, that is largely going to be a result of the political environment, in which Trump is so unpopular that voters would rather vote for someone they might think is a socialist over a Republican who is going to be a rubber stamp for Trump.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">But that is the reason that this race, I think, is still quite close. The polling we’ve seen shows that El-Sayed has the edge, but it’s not by a wide enough margin to say that it’s really a Lean Democrat race at this point.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> I see. Anything you would add about this race, Guy?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Guy Marzorati:\u003c/strong> I mean, I think just looking across the polling in these Senate races, I don’t think people should be surprised one way or another with these results. There’s a lot of conversation about polling errors, but if you look at RealClearPolling, all of these races — whether you’re talking about Texas, Michigan, Iowa, Maine, or Alaska — are within three points.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">That going one way or another does not indicate a massive polling error. So I do think the Senate, as Erin says, really is in that kind of toss-up state.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Well, another seat that has gotten so much attention, Erin, of course, is the one in Texas: Republican Ken Paxton and Democrat James Talarico. Tell us about this race and what it might highlight in terms of an opportunity for Democrats in Texas.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Erin Covey:\u003c/strong> This is a really remarkable race. I mean, when we’re talking about the issue of corruption, it is a bigger issue here than in any other race in the country.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">And that is because the Republican nominee, State Attorney General Ken Paxton, who ousted the sitting Republican Senator John Cornyn in the primary earlier this year, has a litany of corruption allegations against him. He’s been indicted.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">There are a number of Republicans who are not going to vote for him. They’re not going to vote for the Democrat, James Talarico, either. But if enough of those Republicans decide not to vote in the Senate race at all, that is how Talarico gets to victory here.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">And we do see this race as a toss-up as well. Again, polling has also shown Talarico with a pretty consistent edge. Some polls show it’s shrunk a little bit in recent weeks, which makes sense. This is a state that voted for Trump by double digits in 2024, and so we really should not see a Democrat doing as well here as Talarico is.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">But I do think that Democrats are in a better position this cycle to flip the seat than they were even in 2018, when Beto O’Rourke got quite close.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Yeah, Democrats are definitely wary of that 2018 loss to Ted Cruz, pretty decisively, by Beto O’Rourke. And so I imagine they are very worried about having their hopes dashed. But why do you think Talarico has resonated so much with Texas to make it as close as it is, besides just the national headwinds against Republicans?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Erin Covey:\u003c/strong> I mean, look, I’ll say the big difference between 2018 and this cycle is that Paxton is not Ted Cruz. Cruz, of course, is a polarizing figure, but he was running a strong campaign. He was raising money, and he did not have this massive baggage that Paxton has, which is too far of a line for some Republican voters in Texas to cross. Even some prominent leaders in the state have mentioned recently that they are not going to be voting for Paxton.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">And so that is really the main issue driving things here.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Talarico, I think, has also run a really strong campaign and has been very successful at messaging voters in new ways. He’s really taken advantage of social media in a way that I think a lot of candidates have not done in recent years. So he has really been able to energize support on the ground.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">He’s also a seminarian and talks about his faith in a way that is unique for a Democratic candidate. I think that could help him make inroads with some Republican voters. Of course, he’s quite a bit more liberal than a lot of these voters, but if he’s seen as an upstanding religious man, that provides quite a contrast with Paxton.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> I want to hear, Guy, what you find interesting about the dynamics of this race, but I’d also love to ask a little bit more about the Latino vote in this case. Kind of like California, right? It’s an interesting bellwether.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Guy Marzorati:\u003c/strong> Yeah. I mean, on this statewide Senate race, keep an eye on races like this in Texas, where there’s more than two candidates on the ballot in the general election. Life is a lot easier for Democrats if their candidate doesn’t actually have to get over 50% to win. Talarico is in that position, and some of the other states are in that position as well.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">On the Latino vote in Texas, look, this was a huge factor in the gerrymandering that took place in the state, where Republicans in Texas used 2024 as the baseline for how they were drawing these districts. That baseline was Latino voters, especially along the border, shifting toward Trump.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">So if that’s your baseline and that vote completely changes between 2024 and 2026, suddenly that gerrymander is no longer in such a confident state. And so I think that’s what Republicans are dealing with.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">In California, of course, the gerrymandering was the other way. Democrats drew these districts to make them more advantageous to unseat Republicans. But it’s something we’re certainly also watching here in places like the Central Valley, where the Adam Gray seat, the 13th District, and the 22nd District are both majority-Latino seats that went toward Donald Trump in 2024 and could go back the other way in 2026.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Yeah, so Erin, what are you seeing? Are you seeing potentially a shift from 2024 to 2026, with Latinos moving away from Trump and the Republicans?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Erin Covey:\u003c/strong> Yes, we’re seeing a major shift both in polling and in special-election and off-year election results. We have seen significant reversion among Hispanic voters away from Republicans.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">And I think it’s important to remember that before 2024, a lot of Democratic Party leaders were taking Hispanic voters’ support for them for granted. Republicans were able to make significant inroads, and Trump was able to make significant inroads by talking a lot about economic issues and promising that he was going to improve these voters’ prospects.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">But, of course, the past two years have done the opposite of that for many of these voters, who are not Republican voters. They are more independent voters who liked Trump in 2024 but are much more willing to swing back toward a Democrat than a tried-and-true Republican voter in some of these other parts of the country.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">That’s why we’re seeing such a dramatic shift left in a lot of these South Texas seats in particular, which are majority Hispanic.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Yeah, it’s been really interesting to watch. Erin Covey is editor at The Cook Political Report, and Guy Marzorati is politics correspondent for KQED.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">And let me remind listeners, you are listening to \u003cem>Forum\u003c/em>. I’m Mina Kim. We’ve got a lot of people who are actually asking questions and focused on what happens after the Democrats take the House.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Barbara in Sunnyvale has a slightly different take from Brandon, who writes, “Unless we want more corruption, Dems need to vigorously investigate it if they take the House. Dems won’t have much power to legislate since their legislation will likely be vetoed by Trump.”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Well, that’s, of course, if they can get it through the Senate. Let me go to Dan in Santa Clara. Dan, go ahead. You’re on.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Dan:\u003c/strong> Well, good morning. Thanks for taking my call. Erin, you earlier mentioned the Senate not having a supermajority to be able to overcome a filibuster. I’m fairly active in the Democratic community, and there’s a lot of talk about doing specific carve-outs for specific votes. I was wondering, is that just idle chat, or is that a possibility?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Erin Covey:\u003c/strong> Yeah, no, I think it’s a possibility. But again, I think that actually getting any legislation signed into law is going to be close to impossible over the next two years, at least.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">But, of course, if Democrats enter the 2028 presidential cycle with majorities in the House and the Senate, if they even have maybe a 52- or 53-seat majority in the Senate, that puts them in a position in 2029. So we’ll see what happens there.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">But yes, I think, to the previous commenter’s point, there is still a lot of disagreement, both among Democratic voters and among Democratic Party leaders, about how to focus their efforts over the next two years with Trump still in office.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Guy Marzorati:\u003c/strong> And I think if it’s 51 votes, we have to talk about the Fetterman factor. You know, where does John Fetterman in Pennsylvania position himself? If he suddenly becomes the only thing standing between a potential Republican majority, how does he caucus? How does he vote?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Well, Alan in Benicia writes, “I hear folks saying that if the Democrats can’t win both houses now under these conditions, they will never win. But sadly, I can think of another scenario. After two more years of screwed-up policies, the backlash to Republicans could be even more pronounced.”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Guy, how soon do you think we’ll know the balance of power in Congress? How soon could these tight races in California, for example, be called? What do you think people should be prepared for?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Guy Marzorati:\u003c/strong> I mean, if history is any guide, a close congressional race in California is going to take probably more than a week to decipher. Now, it’ll depend on how close the margin is, but we’ve seen some of these races, especially in the Central Valley, where some of the counties have been on the slower end of vote counting, drag deep into November before we know the winner.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">In previous years, that’s been really key to the actual majority in the House. That might not be the case this year. We might know whether Democrats hold the majority before we know, for example, who’s won in the 22nd District in California.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">And, look, maybe some of the recent changes to speed up the vote count here, with more funding for counties to do that, will have an impact. But I’m certainly not expecting to know, for example, the result of that race on election night.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Yeah. Nationally, Erin, what should people expect? What should they be prepared for?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Erin Covey:\u003c/strong> Look, it’s going to take a while to count all these votes. I think that if we’re talking about which party is going to have a majority in the House, we’ll know that relatively quickly. I wouldn’t be surprised if we get a call on that within the first day.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">That’s because we expect Democrats to win by a wide enough majority that they won’t need to know the results of California’s 22nd District, for example, in order to get to that magic number. Hopefully, for all of our sakes, that is not the case.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">But in the Senate, things could take a while. In Alaska, there is a very competitive toss-up Senate race that is not going to be tabulated until two weeks after the election because it’s conducted using ranked-choice voting.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">So I would encourage folks to be patient and to remember that this is just the process playing out. Some states have to take longer than other states to count their votes.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Right, that’s, of course, Democrat Mary Peltola challenging Senator Dan Sullivan. And there’s been a lot of activity in that race, but that is too much to get into at the moment.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">But sort of related, Steve writes, “I’m particularly frightened that the post-election period will be violently divisive, as Trump already incites all kinds of thuggery. And the Trump administration has continued to be brazen in making threats about their plans to illegally subvert their predicted election losses into fake wins.”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">So what’s the plan to resist that? Either of you want to try to take that on?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Guy Marzorati:\u003c/strong> I mean, certainly what we’re seeing in California right now is unprecedented. This probe by the Justice Department into what they allege are noncitizens on the voter rolls, coming just a week before the election — I’ve never seen anything like this.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">We’ll see how it plays out in court and what impact it will have electorally, but I think it’s probably fair to say part of this is political, either sowing doubt or just kind of throwing spaghetti against the wall, given the electoral environment.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Even though it might not have a huge impact in any specific race, especially given just the numbers here. I mean, just to put it in context, the Department of Justice has brought forward this idea of 20,000 voters across the state who are noncitizens on the voter rolls, not necessarily having voted. So nothing that’s actually going to swing an election.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">But I think it’s just part of this kind of unprecedented action we’ve seen around legal activity in the polls.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Yeah, and of course, speaking of Alaska, right, Erin, basically the DOJ is saying that if the Republican candidate narrowly loses, Alaska should not certify that election.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Erin Covey:\u003c/strong> That’s correct. The DOJ has already preemptively filed a lawsuit essentially saying the results are not legitimate if Dan Sullivan, the incumbent, loses.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Look, I don’t think this is going to hold up in court, but it certainly could lead to a lot of mistrust and conspiracies in those weeks leading up to the Alaska result actually being tabulated.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Well, I really appreciate you coming on to share your analysis, Erin. Thank you so much.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Erin Covey:\u003c/strong> Thanks for having me on.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Again, Erin Covey is editor at The Cook Political Report, and Guy Marzorati is politics correspondent for KQED, covering California politics and beyond. Really appreciate you being on with us as well.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Guy Marzorati:\u003c/strong> Thanks, Mina.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> And, as always, to our listeners, thank you for sharing your questions and comments and really showing your engagement in the election process. We appreciate that, too.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">My thanks to Ana de Almeida Amaral for producing today’s segment. You’ve been listening to \u003cem>Forum\u003c/em>. I’m Mina Kim.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Announcer:\u003c/strong> Funds for the production of \u003cem>Forum\u003c/em> are provided by the Jenerosity Family Fund and the members of KQED.\u003c/p>\n",
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"text": "Airdate: Tuesday, October 27, 2026 at 10 am",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003ch2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Airdate: Tuesday, October 27, 2026 at 10 am\u003c/h2>\n",
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"\n\u003ch2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Airdate: Tuesday, October 27, 2026 at 10 am\u003c/h2>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Next week’s midterm election will decide which party controls Congress for the second half of President Trump’s term. And in the wake of California’s redistricting in favor of Democratic candidates, the state could play an outsized role in shaping the outcome of the midterms. We’ll dig into key races here in California and across the nation, and how issues like inflation and Trump’s approval rating could influence the outcome.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>Next week’s midterm election will decide which party controls Congress for the second half of President Trump’s term. And in the wake of California’s redistricting in favor of Democratic candidates, the state could play an outsized role in shaping the outcome of the midterms. We’ll dig into key races here in California and across the nation, and how issues like inflation and Trump’s approval rating could influence the outcome.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Guests:\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Guests:\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n"
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"Erin Covey, editor covering the U.S. House of Representatives, The Cook Political Report",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cli>\u003cstrong>Erin Covey, \u003c/strong>editor covering the U.S. House of Representatives, The Cook Political Report\u003c/li>\n",
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"\n\u003cli>\u003cstrong>Erin Covey, \u003c/strong>editor covering the U.S. House of Representatives, The Cook Political Report\u003c/li>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cli>\u003cstrong>Guy Marzorati,\u003c/strong> correspondent, KQED’s California Politics and Government Desk\u003c/li>\n",
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"\n\u003cli>\u003cstrong>Guy Marzorati,\u003c/strong> correspondent, KQED’s California Politics and Government Desk\u003c/li>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cem>\u003cstrong>This is a computer-generated transcript. While our team has reviewed it, there may be errors.\u003c/strong>\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cem>\u003cstrong>This is a computer-generated transcript. While our team has reviewed it, there may be errors.\u003c/strong>\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Welcome to \u003cem>Forum\u003c/em>. I’m Mina Kim. We’re now one week from Election Day, and one thing that’s been clear this midterm cycle is that many voters want change. They want relief from high gas and grocery prices and an end to the war in Iran. Democrats are hoping, and analysts are predicting, that the discontent will translate into a wave of votes for their party and control of Congress. But Democrats are also afraid to get their hopes up after past disappointments. Meantime, Republicans are hoping a last-minute spending blitz, along with the president’s red-state tour, will stave off a Democratic sweep.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Welcome to \u003cem>Forum\u003c/em>. I’m Mina Kim. We’re now one week from Election Day, and one thing that’s been clear this midterm cycle is that many voters want change. They want relief from high gas and grocery prices and an end to the war in Iran. Democrats are hoping, and analysts are predicting, that the discontent will translate into a wave of votes for their party and control of Congress. But Democrats are also afraid to get their hopes up after past disappointments. Meantime, Republicans are hoping a last-minute spending blitz, along with the president’s red-state tour, will stave off a Democratic sweep.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>What do you think, listeners? Which House and Senate races here in California and nationwide are grabbing your attention? Tell us by calling 866-733-6786, emailing forum@kqed.org, or finding us on Discord, Bluesky, Facebook, or Instagram at KQED Forum.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>What do you think, listeners? Which House and Senate races here in California and nationwide are grabbing your attention? Tell us by calling 866-733-6786, emailing forum@kqed.org, or finding us on Discord, Bluesky, Facebook, or Instagram at KQED Forum.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Joining me this hour, Guy Marzorati, political correspondent for KQED, covering California politics. Hi, Guy.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>Joining me this hour, Guy Marzorati, political correspondent for KQED, covering California politics. Hi, Guy.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Guy Marzorati:\u003c/strong> Hey, good morning.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Guy Marzorati:\u003c/strong> Hey, good morning.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Good morning to you. Erin Covey is also with us, editor at The Cook Political Report, who covers the U.S. House of Representatives. Erin, really glad to have you with us, too.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Good morning to you. Erin Covey is also with us, editor at The Cook Political Report, who covers the U.S. House of Representatives. Erin, really glad to have you with us, too.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Erin Covey:\u003c/strong> Hey, very glad to be on!\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Erin Covey:\u003c/strong> Hey, very glad to be on!\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> So before we dig into specific races, I want to talk with you about the overall picture, Erin. I noticed The Cook Political Report Friday, I think, just moved another 19 House races away from the GOP. Tell me what drove that latest round of rating changes.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> So before we dig into specific races, I want to talk with you about the overall picture, Erin. I noticed The Cook Political Report Friday, I think, just moved another 19 House races away from the GOP. Tell me what drove that latest round of rating changes.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Erin Covey:\u003c/strong> Look, at this point, we believe that Republicans’ path to holding the House majority has all but evaporated. We’re currently projecting that Democrats will pick up anywhere from 12 to 22 seats in the House. They only need three to hit the magic number, 218, so they should be in a good position to win the majority regardless. It’s really a question of how large their majority will be.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Erin Covey:\u003c/strong> Look, at this point, we believe that Republicans’ path to holding the House majority has all but evaporated. We’re currently projecting that Democrats will pick up anywhere from 12 to 22 seats in the House. They only need three to hit the magic number, 218, so they should be in a good position to win the majority regardless. It’s really a question of how large their majority will be.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>In the past couple of weeks, what we have seen is that a number of Republican incumbents have found themselves in much more competitive races than they were expecting. These are districts that Trump won by double digits in 2024, so that’s where the bulk of some of the swifter ratings changes have been, because these races have really come online late in the cycle.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>In the past couple of weeks, what we have seen is that a number of Republican incumbents have found themselves in much more competitive races than they were expecting. These are districts that Trump won by double digits in 2024, so that’s where the bulk of some of the swifter ratings changes have been, because these races have really come online late in the cycle.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>But it goes to show how much of a drag on Republicans Trump is right now, because his approval rating is deeply underwater, largely driven by his handling of economic issues. These Republican incumbents are suddenly having to worry about turning out voters who, you know, were coming out in droves for the president in 2024.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>But it goes to show how much of a drag on Republicans Trump is right now, because his approval rating is deeply underwater, largely driven by his handling of economic issues. These Republican incumbents are suddenly having to worry about turning out voters who, you know, were coming out in droves for the president in 2024.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> So this is despite all that last-minute ad spending, or maybe the fact that they have to do this much ad spending is revealing to you, Erin?\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> So this is despite all that last-minute ad spending, or maybe the fact that they have to do this much ad spending is revealing to you, Erin?\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Erin Covey:\u003c/strong> Look, I think that the ad spending has certainly kept Republicans competitive in places that may have looked worse for them at this point had they not spent as much as they did. We’ve also seen that the ad spending has been disproportionately good for Republicans in the Senate races.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Erin Covey:\u003c/strong> Look, I think that the ad spending has certainly kept Republicans competitive in places that may have looked worse for them at this point had they not spent as much as they did. We’ve also seen that the ad spending has been disproportionately good for Republicans in the Senate races.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>In the House races, it’s been a little bit more even than I think you would expect, and that’s because Democratic candidates have been raising quite a bit of money and have been outraising their Republican opponents for the past several quarters.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>In the House races, it’s been a little bit more even than I think you would expect, and that’s because Democratic candidates have been raising quite a bit of money and have been outraising their Republican opponents for the past several quarters.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>And so the money, you know, I think it makes a difference, certainly, if a candidate is able to spend a couple million dollars in the last few weeks of the race. That may keep them from losing their race. But at a certain point, you know, all the money in the world starts to hit diminishing returns, and there’s only so much you can do to change the narrative.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>And so the money, you know, I think it makes a difference, certainly, if a candidate is able to spend a couple million dollars in the last few weeks of the race. That may keep them from losing their race. But at a certain point, you know, all the money in the world starts to hit diminishing returns, and there’s only so much you can do to change the narrative.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Yeah. Guy, would you agree with Erin’s assessment that essentially Republicans’ path to maintaining control of the House has all but evaporated? And if you do, tell me why you think that is. What are the main issues that are driving voters?\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Yeah. Guy, would you agree with Erin’s assessment that essentially Republicans’ path to maintaining control of the House has all but evaporated? And if you do, tell me why you think that is. What are the main issues that are driving voters?\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Guy Marzorati:\u003c/strong> Well, I think it goes back to midterm elections being referendums on the president. You need to look no further than a couple of data points here. One is the president’s approval rating, which has been hovering below 40% in a lot of public polling. And two is the cost of living, which has driven as kind of the top issue for voters.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Guy Marzorati:\u003c/strong> Well, I think it goes back to midterm elections being referendums on the president. You need to look no further than a couple of data points here. One is the president’s approval rating, which has been hovering below 40% in a lot of public polling. And two is the cost of living, which has driven as kind of the top issue for voters.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>I’ve seen charts that have charted Trump’s approval rating alongside gas prices, and it’s almost a complete correlation. So when you look at the fact that voters going to the polls aren’t judging candidates in these House elections individually, maybe, but looking at it kind of in parliamentary terms — which party do they feel like they’d like to send into control in Washington? — and, look, we can talk about what a victory would mean for Democrats in the House or potentially the Senate, but I think you have to go back to the fundamentals of these House elections being referendums on the president. And that’s a really bad sign for Republicans.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>I’ve seen charts that have charted Trump’s approval rating alongside gas prices, and it’s almost a complete correlation. So when you look at the fact that voters going to the polls aren’t judging candidates in these House elections individually, maybe, but looking at it kind of in parliamentary terms — which party do they feel like they’d like to send into control in Washington? — and, look, we can talk about what a victory would mean for Democrats in the House or potentially the Senate, but I think you have to go back to the fundamentals of these House elections being referendums on the president. And that’s a really bad sign for Republicans.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> How have you seen Democrats capitalizing on this to draw votes? What has been some of the core messaging you’ve seen and heard from them, Guy?\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> How have you seen Democrats capitalizing on this to draw votes? What has been some of the core messaging you’ve seen and heard from them, Guy?\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Guy Marzorati:\u003c/strong> Well, I mean, one issue I focus on in these California House districts is gas prices, which is surprising in the sense that Democrats have seen this be such a bad issue for the party in California. We’ve had the nation’s highest gas prices for many years, driven largely by state policy pushed by Democrats at the state Capitol.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Guy Marzorati:\u003c/strong> Well, I mean, one issue I focus on in these California House districts is gas prices, which is surprising in the sense that Democrats have seen this be such a bad issue for the party in California. We’ve had the nation’s highest gas prices for many years, driven largely by state policy pushed by Democrats at the state Capitol.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>And so it’s an issue that, if you look back in the last couple of congressional cycles, Democrats have really taken on the chin, especially in inland working-class areas where folks drive the most.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>And so it’s an issue that, if you look back in the last couple of congressional cycles, Democrats have really taken on the chin, especially in inland working-class areas where folks drive the most.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>That’s changed this year. We’ve seen nationally that Democrats are running more ads talking about gas prices than Republicans. And while Republicans are still campaigning on the issue in California because of some of our idiosyncrasies at a state level, this is an issue that California Democrats are talking about. You see Democratic candidates in swing districts in California filming ads at gas stations, something you would have just never dreamed of a couple of cycles ago.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>That’s changed this year. We’ve seen nationally that Democrats are running more ads talking about gas prices than Republicans. And while Republicans are still campaigning on the issue in California because of some of our idiosyncrasies at a state level, this is an issue that California Democrats are talking about. You see Democratic candidates in swing districts in California filming ads at gas stations, something you would have just never dreamed of a couple of cycles ago.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>It just shows you that, I think — we can talk about this in the course of the show — on Medicaid, on gas prices, on cost of living, so much of the negative impacts of Trump and Republican policies these last couple of years have been concentrated in the very communities that shifted most toward Trump in 2024.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>It just shows you that, I think — we can talk about this in the course of the show — on Medicaid, on gas prices, on cost of living, so much of the negative impacts of Trump and Republican policies these last couple of years have been concentrated in the very communities that shifted most toward Trump in 2024.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Democrats came into this election cycle in California really feeling on defense. In a lot of these inland areas that moved toward the GOP, both through redistricting and through the fact that the negative impacts of these policies have hit exactly those communities, there’s been a complete turnaround.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>Democrats came into this election cycle in California really feeling on defense. In a lot of these inland areas that moved toward the GOP, both through redistricting and through the fact that the negative impacts of these policies have hit exactly those communities, there’s been a complete turnaround.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Erin, what have you been seeing in ads for House races across the country that Guy may not have touched on? I’m wondering if corruption is a big deal.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Erin, what have you been seeing in ads for House races across the country that Guy may not have touched on? I’m wondering if corruption is a big deal.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Erin Covey:\u003c/strong> We’re definitely seeing corruption pop up in a lot of these House races. And, you know, that’s an issue that members from both parties are vulnerable on. Obviously, Republicans are playing a lot more defense this cycle, and so Republican members are feeling much more of these attacks.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Erin Covey:\u003c/strong> We’re definitely seeing corruption pop up in a lot of these House races. And, you know, that’s an issue that members from both parties are vulnerable on. Obviously, Republicans are playing a lot more defense this cycle, and so Republican members are feeling much more of these attacks.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>But we also see Democratic incumbents who are facing attack ads over their history of stock trading or the fact that their wealth has increased during their time in Congress. I think a lot of voters start from the assumption that all politicians are corrupt. And so an attack ad that is going after stock trading and things that may not have been quite an issue even a few years ago for these members of Congress is suddenly a bigger vulnerability for them.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>But we also see Democratic incumbents who are facing attack ads over their history of stock trading or the fact that their wealth has increased during their time in Congress. I think a lot of voters start from the assumption that all politicians are corrupt. And so an attack ad that is going after stock trading and things that may not have been quite an issue even a few years ago for these members of Congress is suddenly a bigger vulnerability for them.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> What is the biggest defense, or the messaging that Republicans have been doing around issues related to the economy and so on, to motivate their base, Erin?\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> What is the biggest defense, or the messaging that Republicans have been doing around issues related to the economy and so on, to motivate their base, Erin?\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Erin Covey:\u003c/strong> Look, Republicans are talking about the fact that the One Big Beautiful Bill that was passed last summer cut taxes, and that is the one issue that they kind of have going for them economically speaking.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Erin Covey:\u003c/strong> Look, Republicans are talking about the fact that the One Big Beautiful Bill that was passed last summer cut taxes, and that is the one issue that they kind of have going for them economically speaking.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>They’re also trying to, whether explicitly or implicitly, distance themselves from the president’s policies, particularly the war with Iran. We’ve seen a number of Republican members of Congress express disapproval for it at this point and break with Trump in a way that these members haven’t before over the war with Iran, because it is so deeply unpopular with voters from both parties.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>They’re also trying to, whether explicitly or implicitly, distance themselves from the president’s policies, particularly the war with Iran. We’ve seen a number of Republican members of Congress express disapproval for it at this point and break with Trump in a way that these members haven’t before over the war with Iran, because it is so deeply unpopular with voters from both parties.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>We’ve also seen Republicans try to distance themselves from the president’s tariff policy, which is, of course, a major vulnerability for a lot of these Republicans as well.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>We’ve also seen Republicans try to distance themselves from the president’s tariff policy, which is, of course, a major vulnerability for a lot of these Republicans as well.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>But I would say overall, when we’re looking at ads that are driven largely by cost-of-living issues, the three issues I’m hearing about the most are the war with Iran and its effect on gas and diesel prices, the tariffs, and then the cost of health care and Republicans’ cuts to federal health care funding last year.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>But I would say overall, when we’re looking at ads that are driven largely by cost-of-living issues, the three issues I’m hearing about the most are the war with Iran and its effect on gas and diesel prices, the tariffs, and then the cost of health care and Republicans’ cuts to federal health care funding last year.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Yeah. Still, Guy, despite those things and the lack of popularity of the president, I still hear many Democrats wary of getting their hopes up for a big blue wave. Tell us why.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Yeah. Still, Guy, despite those things and the lack of popularity of the president, I still hear many Democrats wary of getting their hopes up for a big blue wave. Tell us why.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Guy Marzorati:\u003c/strong> Well, I think that the structural factors are against the Democrats in a number of ways heading into this election, by which I mean most of all redistricting and the natural kind of sorting of seats that we’ve seen.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Guy Marzorati:\u003c/strong> Well, I think that the structural factors are against the Democrats in a number of ways heading into this election, by which I mean most of all redistricting and the natural kind of sorting of seats that we’ve seen.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Democrats — and I can use California as an example — have already won the districts where voters have turned against Trump. Most of the parts of the state where voters had a lot of antipathy toward the president, Democrats won in 2018, 2020, 2022, and 2024.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>Democrats — and I can use California as an example — have already won the districts where voters have turned against Trump. Most of the parts of the state where voters had a lot of antipathy toward the president, Democrats won in 2018, 2020, 2022, and 2024.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>So the areas that are left are more on Republican terrain, and that’s kind of true nationwide. There’s just a lower ceiling on the possible gains that Democrats can make, even if we end up in a situation where the national popular vote mirrors a year like 2018, when we saw a huge wave. There just are fewer of those seats to win.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>So the areas that are left are more on Republican terrain, and that’s kind of true nationwide. There’s just a lower ceiling on the possible gains that Democrats can make, even if we end up in a situation where the national popular vote mirrors a year like 2018, when we saw a huge wave. There just are fewer of those seats to win.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>And then Erin can talk about this specifically in the math, but the redistricting war that played out across the country probably ended up in the Republicans’ favor by a few seats.\u003c/p>\n",
"innerContent": [
"\n\u003cp>And then Erin can talk about this specifically in the math, but the redistricting war that played out across the country probably ended up in the Republicans’ favor by a few seats.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>So Democrats came into this election with those structural disadvantages. Also, the money has been on the GOP side. That’s what the wave is running into: a wall of structural factors that favored Republicans going into this, but may, in the end, not be enough to prevent losses.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>So Democrats came into this election with those structural disadvantages. Also, the money has been on the GOP side. That’s what the wave is running into: a wall of structural factors that favored Republicans going into this, but may, in the end, not be enough to prevent losses.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Yeah. This Bluesky user writes, “I wish we on the left could learn that disappointment with the GOP doesn’t mean votes for Democrats.” So, some of the nerves you’re hearing expressed there.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Yeah. This Bluesky user writes, “I wish we on the left could learn that disappointment with the GOP doesn’t mean votes for Democrats.” So, some of the nerves you’re hearing expressed there.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Erin, some other things that I’ve heard: People are worried that maybe polling is overestimating Democratic support, maybe because it has been overestimated in the past in some Midwestern states. I’m sure not a lot of Democrats would want to remember, but how is the polling this time around, do you think?\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>Erin, some other things that I’ve heard: People are worried that maybe polling is overestimating Democratic support, maybe because it has been overestimated in the past in some Midwestern states. I’m sure not a lot of Democrats would want to remember, but how is the polling this time around, do you think?\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Erin Covey:\u003c/strong> Look, it is impossible to predict polling error going into an election. But what we do know is that in the past three presidential election cycles, when Trump has been on the ballot, polling has underestimated Republicans to varying extents. It was a bigger issue in 2020 than in 2024, I would say, when the polling was largely fairly accurate.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Erin Covey:\u003c/strong> Look, it is impossible to predict polling error going into an election. But what we do know is that in the past three presidential election cycles, when Trump has been on the ballot, polling has underestimated Republicans to varying extents. It was a bigger issue in 2020 than in 2024, I would say, when the polling was largely fairly accurate.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>But in midterm cycles in 2018 and 2022, the polling has held up pretty well. I’ll remind listeners that even in 2025, the polling actually underestimated Democratic gains in Virginia and New Jersey.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>But in midterm cycles in 2018 and 2022, the polling has held up pretty well. I’ll remind listeners that even in 2025, the polling actually underestimated Democratic gains in Virginia and New Jersey.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>I think there is certainly recent history that points to polling error that did not favor Democrats, particularly in some of these white Midwestern states. But I do think that the polling I have seen — the public polling, the private polling from both parties — it’s all showing good signs for Democrats to varying extents. And so there really isn’t much of a reason to believe that this cycle isn’t going to be a good night for them.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>I think there is certainly recent history that points to polling error that did not favor Democrats, particularly in some of these white Midwestern states. But I do think that the polling I have seen — the public polling, the private polling from both parties — it’s all showing good signs for Democrats to varying extents. And so there really isn’t much of a reason to believe that this cycle isn’t going to be a good night for them.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> And the other big determinant of success is turnout, right? So what are you seeing with regard to that? Because midterms historically, of course, bring out fewer people than presidential elections. And, you know, there are demographics that really need to show up to make this blue wave possible, right?\u003c/p>\n",
"innerContent": [
"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> And the other big determinant of success is turnout, right? So what are you seeing with regard to that? Because midterms historically, of course, bring out fewer people than presidential elections. And, you know, there are demographics that really need to show up to make this blue wave possible, right?\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Erin Covey:\u003c/strong> Yeah, I mean, what we’re seeing across the board in the early voting so far is that Democratic voters are, for the most part, more enthusiastic, turning out at higher levels than Republican voters compared to previous cycles.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Erin Covey:\u003c/strong> Yeah, I mean, what we’re seeing across the board in the early voting so far is that Democratic voters are, for the most part, more enthusiastic, turning out at higher levels than Republican voters compared to previous cycles.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>But, you know, this is not going to be even across every part of the country. There’s going to be some places like Texas and North Carolina, I think, where Democrats will do disproportionately well.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>But, you know, this is not going to be even across every part of the country. There’s going to be some places like Texas and North Carolina, I think, where Democrats will do disproportionately well.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> We’re talking with Erin Covey of The Cook Political Report and Guy Marzorati of KQED’s politics team, a correspondent for them. And with you, listeners, we want to know how you’re feeling a week from midterm Election Day. There’s more after the break. Stay with us. This is \u003cem>Forum\u003c/em>.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> We’re talking with Erin Covey of The Cook Political Report and Guy Marzorati of KQED’s politics team, a correspondent for them. And with you, listeners, we want to know how you’re feeling a week from midterm Election Day. There’s more after the break. Stay with us. This is \u003cem>Forum\u003c/em>.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Welcome back to \u003cem>Forum\u003c/em>. I’m Mina Kim. We’re talking this hour about the key races that will determine the balance of power in Congress, both in California and across the country. We’re talking about it with Guy Marzorati, politics correspondent for KQED, Erin Covey, editor at The Cook Political Report, and with you, our listeners.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Welcome back to \u003cem>Forum\u003c/em>. I’m Mina Kim. We’re talking this hour about the key races that will determine the balance of power in Congress, both in California and across the country. We’re talking about it with Guy Marzorati, politics correspondent for KQED, Erin Covey, editor at The Cook Political Report, and with you, our listeners.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>We want to hear your questions and how you’re feeling a week from Election Day. Are you nervous, hopeful, something else? Which House or Senate races here in California or nationwide are grabbing your attention? Are you a voter in a competitive district? How’s that influencing your vote? What are the issues driving your vote?\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>We want to hear your questions and how you’re feeling a week from Election Day. Are you nervous, hopeful, something else? Which House or Senate races here in California or nationwide are grabbing your attention? Are you a voter in a competitive district? How’s that influencing your vote? What are the issues driving your vote?\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>866-733-6786 is the number. Email address: forum@kqed.org. Find us on Discord, Bluesky, Facebook, or Instagram at KQED Forum.\u003c/p>\n",
"innerContent": [
"\n\u003cp>866-733-6786 is the number. Email address: forum@kqed.org. Find us on Discord, Bluesky, Facebook, or Instagram at KQED Forum.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>All right, I want to look at the key California races that are truly toss-ups. And, Guy, once again, it’s David Valadao’s seat in the Central Valley. I mean, every time we do a show about elections, it’s always pretty much this one to watch. Tell us about District 22, Guy.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>All right, I want to look at the key California races that are truly toss-ups. And, Guy, once again, it’s David Valadao’s seat in the Central Valley. I mean, every time we do a show about elections, it’s always pretty much this one to watch. Tell us about District 22, Guy.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Guy Marzorati:\u003c/strong> Yeah, so the 22nd District is based in Bakersfield, Kern County, in the southern Central Valley. This is a seat that has, as you know, been competitive cycle after cycle. David Valadao has been the kind of rare Republican who’s been able to hold this seat even when the national winds have turned against the party.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Guy Marzorati:\u003c/strong> Yeah, so the 22nd District is based in Bakersfield, Kern County, in the southern Central Valley. This is a seat that has, as you know, been competitive cycle after cycle. David Valadao has been the kind of rare Republican who’s been able to hold this seat even when the national winds have turned against the party.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>He famously voted for the impeachment of President Trump. He’s been kind of more of a centrist on issues like immigration. He’s been able to survive in really tough elections.\u003c/p>\n",
"innerContent": [
"\n\u003cp>He famously voted for the impeachment of President Trump. He’s been kind of more of a centrist on issues like immigration. He’s been able to survive in really tough elections.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>2024 was a little bit different. This district had the largest swing toward Trump of any district in the country. Valadao won a much more comfortable victory than he had in the past. And so this was one that was still expected to be competitive, but seemed to be moving toward the Republican column.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>2024 was a little bit different. This district had the largest swing toward Trump of any district in the country. Valadao won a much more comfortable victory than he had in the past. And so this was one that was still expected to be competitive, but seemed to be moving toward the Republican column.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Now, what really changed here was the Medicaid cuts. This is a district that has a higher percentage of folks on Medi-Cal than any other district in California. So, again, when we talk about GOP policy concentrating its downsides on these kinds of districts, the 22nd is a perfect example of this.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>Now, what really changed here was the Medicaid cuts. This is a district that has a higher percentage of folks on Medi-Cal than any other district in California. So, again, when we talk about GOP policy concentrating its downsides on these kinds of districts, the 22nd is a perfect example of this.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Then redistricting came in California with Proposition 50. This district got a little bit more blue, but it’s still competitive, and really it has remained the most competitive congressional district in the state throughout the whole cycle.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>Then redistricting came in California with Proposition 50. This district got a little bit more blue, but it’s still competitive, and really it has remained the most competitive congressional district in the state throughout the whole cycle.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>There was a really competitive primary on the Democratic side. Randy Villegas, a local school board member who’s more progressive, came out of that primary. And this has become the district that outside Republican groups, the national Republican apparatus, have kind of looked at as their Alamo in California. It really remains the one district where they continue to spend heavily in this area. Democrats and outside groups supporting Democrats have also spent heavily.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>There was a really competitive primary on the Democratic side. Randy Villegas, a local school board member who’s more progressive, came out of that primary. And this has become the district that outside Republican groups, the national Republican apparatus, have kind of looked at as their Alamo in California. It really remains the one district where they continue to spend heavily in this area. Democrats and outside groups supporting Democrats have also spent heavily.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>So this could end up being really our last competitive seat. I think Cook still has it as the only toss-up left in California, and one in which we’re also seeing a test case on the Democratic side, with Randy Villegas running much more of a kind of populist, progressive campaign than we’ve seen Democrats challenging Valadao with in the past.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>So this could end up being really our last competitive seat. I think Cook still has it as the only toss-up left in California, and one in which we’re also seeing a test case on the Democratic side, with Randy Villegas running much more of a kind of populist, progressive campaign than we’ve seen Democrats challenging Valadao with in the past.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>He’s brought Bernie Sanders to the district. He’s brought AOC to the district. And he’s running on much more of a systemic argument that politics writ large is broken, rather than just running against Trump, which has been more the traditional playbook that we’ve seen from Democrats.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>He’s brought Bernie Sanders to the district. He’s brought AOC to the district. And he’s running on much more of a systemic argument that politics writ large is broken, rather than just running against Trump, which has been more the traditional playbook that we’ve seen from Democrats.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Yeah, things like universal child care, Medicare for All, that.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Yeah, things like universal child care, Medicare for All, that.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Guy Marzorati:\u003c/strong> Yeah, I mean, a perfect example of this: My colleague Marisa Lagos sat down with Villegas last week in Bakersfield, and she asked, “If you are elected and Democrats win the House, are you interested in holding investigations, looking into potential corruption in the Trump family?”\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Guy Marzorati:\u003c/strong> Yeah, I mean, a perfect example of this: My colleague Marisa Lagos sat down with Villegas last week in Bakersfield, and she asked, “If you are elected and Democrats win the House, are you interested in holding investigations, looking into potential corruption in the Trump family?”\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>And he said, “Yeah, sure, I’m interested in that. But what I’m really interested in is looking at political spending and money in politics from both parties across the whole system and examining that.”\u003c/p>\n",
"innerContent": [
"\n\u003cp>And he said, “Yeah, sure, I’m interested in that. But what I’m really interested in is looking at political spending and money in politics from both parties across the whole system and examining that.”\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>That is not a DCCC talking point. You know, this is someone who is looking at the entire system as being at fault, rather than just the GOP or just Trump.\u003c/p>\n",
"innerContent": [
"\n\u003cp>That is not a DCCC talking point. You know, this is someone who is looking at the entire system as being at fault, rather than just the GOP or just Trump.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>And I think what worried Democrats a little bit heading into this race was, would Villegas kind of be the El-Sayed of California? Someone who is, you know, creating his own news, talking about things other than Trump, kind of taking the focus away from this being a referendum on the president.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>And I think what worried Democrats a little bit heading into this race was, would Villegas kind of be the El-Sayed of California? Someone who is, you know, creating his own news, talking about things other than Trump, kind of taking the focus away from this being a referendum on the president.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>It might end up being that the wave is so large and the opposition to Trump is so great that it doesn’t matter that someone who’s as progressive as Villegas can win. But it’s an interesting test case because he’s running a very different race than the other Democrats in the state. And it may turn out to be a great bet. He might be able to bring out voters in the Bakersfield area who have not participated before and create a different electorate than Democrats have been able to produce in that part of the state.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>It might end up being that the wave is so large and the opposition to Trump is so great that it doesn’t matter that someone who’s as progressive as Villegas can win. But it’s an interesting test case because he’s running a very different race than the other Democrats in the state. And it may turn out to be a great bet. He might be able to bring out voters in the Bakersfield area who have not participated before and create a different electorate than Democrats have been able to produce in that part of the state.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Erin, I know you’ve been watching this race closely, too. Are there any dynamics that you want to note?\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Erin, I know you’ve been watching this race closely, too. Are there any dynamics that you want to note?\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Erin Covey:\u003c/strong> Well, I think it’s just worth remembering that the one race Valadao did lose was in 2018, which was, of course, another election cycle that was defined by health care. So this is really a significant vulnerability for him.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Erin Covey:\u003c/strong> Well, I think it’s just worth remembering that the one race Valadao did lose was in 2018, which was, of course, another election cycle that was defined by health care. So this is really a significant vulnerability for him.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>I think Democrats have a better shot at ousting him this cycle than they have in the past several years. We still have this rated as a toss-up, but it would not surprise me if Democrats end up victorious here.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>I think Democrats have a better shot at ousting him this cycle than they have in the past several years. We still have this rated as a toss-up, but it would not surprise me if Democrats end up victorious here.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Guy, let’s move on to the 48th. I mean, speaking of redistricting, it feels like it had a big influence here.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Guy, let’s move on to the 48th. I mean, speaking of redistricting, it feels like it had a big influence here.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Guy Marzorati:\u003c/strong> Yeah, this is maybe the most wildly gerrymandered seat of all the competitive races in California. Down in Southern California, Darrell Issa held this seat in kind of northern and eastern San Diego County. This was completely reworked to loop in Palm Springs, a hotbed of Democratic voters, and move toward some of the more Democratic parts of North County San Diego.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Guy Marzorati:\u003c/strong> Yeah, this is maybe the most wildly gerrymandered seat of all the competitive races in California. Down in Southern California, Darrell Issa held this seat in kind of northern and eastern San Diego County. This was completely reworked to loop in Palm Springs, a hotbed of Democratic voters, and move toward some of the more Democratic parts of North County San Diego.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>What you ended up with was a seat where Democrats really liked their chances of winning. Issa decided not to run for reelection, and instead you have Marnie von Wilpert, who’s a San Diego City Council member, running against Jim Desmond, who is a county supervisor in San Diego.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>What you ended up with was a seat where Democrats really liked their chances of winning. Issa decided not to run for reelection, and instead you have Marnie von Wilpert, who’s a San Diego City Council member, running against Jim Desmond, who is a county supervisor in San Diego.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Here you see one of the dynamics that you often have when a party is facing a potential wave, where Desmond has really tried to localize the race. He’s on the Board of Supervisors in San Diego, and he represents most of the folks in this congressional district.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>Here you see one of the dynamics that you often have when a party is facing a potential wave, where Desmond has really tried to localize the race. He’s on the Board of Supervisors in San Diego, and he represents most of the folks in this congressional district.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>When I was down there, I really heard his supporters and his campaign talking about the local work that he’s done, his focus on constituent services. That is a signal to me that he doesn’t want to talk about Trump. He doesn’t want to talk about, you know, the national politics, whereas von Wilpert is really running on that platform.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>When I was down there, I really heard his supporters and his campaign talking about the local work that he’s done, his focus on constituent services. That is a signal to me that he doesn’t want to talk about Trump. He doesn’t want to talk about, you know, the national politics, whereas von Wilpert is really running on that platform.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>She’s the candidate I mentioned who filmed commercials at gas stations. I spent some time at gas stations in the area. That definitely was a big topic for folks in that district. They drive a lot.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>She’s the candidate I mentioned who filmed commercials at gas stations. I spent some time at gas stations in the area. That definitely was a big topic for folks in that district. They drive a lot.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>And actually, if you zoom out, if you break down the districts based on who drives the most in each congressional district in California, all of the competitive seats in the state are in kind of the top third of heaviest-driving districts.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>And actually, if you zoom out, if you break down the districts based on who drives the most in each congressional district in California, all of the competitive seats in the state are in kind of the top third of heaviest-driving districts.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>So this kind of issue resonates, and Democrats like von Wilpert are able to say, sure, we’ve had the highest gas prices for a while, but this recent spike is because of the war that the president started. And that turns out to have been a pretty effective message.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>So this kind of issue resonates, and Democrats like von Wilpert are able to say, sure, we’ve had the highest gas prices for a while, but this recent spike is because of the war that the president started. And that turns out to have been a pretty effective message.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Yeah, we’re talking about the House races, the key races that will determine the balance of power in Congress in California as well as across the country.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Yeah, we’re talking about the House races, the key races that will determine the balance of power in Congress in California as well as across the country.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>And listeners, tell us which ones are grabbing your attention, both the House and Senate races, how you’re feeling a week from Election Day, and what questions you have about whether this blue wave will materialize. The email address is forum@kqed.org. Post on our social channels at KQED Forum. Call 866-733-6786.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>And listeners, tell us which ones are grabbing your attention, both the House and Senate races, how you’re feeling a week from Election Day, and what questions you have about whether this blue wave will materialize. The email address is forum@kqed.org. Post on our social channels at KQED Forum. Call 866-733-6786.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Brandon in Redwood City is on. Brandon, go ahead.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>Brandon in Redwood City is on. Brandon, go ahead.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Brandon:\u003c/strong> Hi, everybody. Good morning. Um, I just want to say I saw Bernie and Jane Kim and Ro Khanna. I even handed a business card to Ro Khanna on the street. I don’t know why he was wandering around out in front of the Curran Theater after everything wrapped up, but I was just inspired.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Brandon:\u003c/strong> Hi, everybody. Good morning. Um, I just want to say I saw Bernie and Jane Kim and Ro Khanna. I even handed a business card to Ro Khanna on the street. I don’t know why he was wandering around out in front of the Curran Theater after everything wrapped up, but I was just inspired.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>I’ve already voted. I’ve voted yes on Prop 40 and no on 41 and 42. Those are the two big ones for me. I know it’s probably going to go, but my comment, and I’d like to hear some input, is just more so, I hope that not only, obviously, do we get a blue wave, but I hope the Democrats, you know, now that we finally throw the ball to them, catch it and get across the finish line, and do that by doing what the people want.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>I’ve already voted. I’ve voted yes on Prop 40 and no on 41 and 42. Those are the two big ones for me. I know it’s probably going to go, but my comment, and I’d like to hear some input, is just more so, I hope that not only, obviously, do we get a blue wave, but I hope the Democrats, you know, now that we finally throw the ball to them, catch it and get across the finish line, and do that by doing what the people want.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>I, for one, am not interested in seeing a bunch of attacking Trump. I’d love to see the guy in jail. Don’t get me wrong, but I do think that we need to focus on bringing down prices and really reach a peace accord with everybody who has voted for them.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>I, for one, am not interested in seeing a bunch of attacking Trump. I’d love to see the guy in jail. Don’t get me wrong, but I do think that we need to focus on bringing down prices and really reach a peace accord with everybody who has voted for them.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>I don’t want to see retribution, and I just hope that we can do things that the farmers and the truckers and those people on the MAGA side can point to as beneficial for them, you know?\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>I don’t want to see retribution, and I just hope that we can do things that the farmers and the truckers and those people on the MAGA side can point to as beneficial for them, you know?\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Yeah, thanks. It’s interesting. It’s almost like you’re hearing a little bit of what you were describing, Guy, about Randy Villegas’s approach and what Brandon is saying he wants to see.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Yeah, thanks. It’s interesting. It’s almost like you’re hearing a little bit of what you were describing, Guy, about Randy Villegas’s approach and what Brandon is saying he wants to see.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Guy Marzorati:\u003c/strong> Yeah, and I think this is an open question for Democrats if they do win back the House and the Senate, what kind of approach they’ll take.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Guy Marzorati:\u003c/strong> Yeah, and I think this is an open question for Democrats if they do win back the House and the Senate, what kind of approach they’ll take.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>You’ve heard Democratic leadership in recent weeks kind of dance around the question of whether their top priority would be pursuing an impeachment of the president. I think that’s an issue where Democrats feel cross-pressured from both the base, who would like to see hearings, investigations, and an acknowledgment that, look, the political impact of that might not be so great, and what voters are asking for as their top priority, which is addressing the cost of living.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>You’ve heard Democratic leadership in recent weeks kind of dance around the question of whether their top priority would be pursuing an impeachment of the president. I think that’s an issue where Democrats feel cross-pressured from both the base, who would like to see hearings, investigations, and an acknowledgment that, look, the political impact of that might not be so great, and what voters are asking for as their top priority, which is addressing the cost of living.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>So that’ll be fascinating to watch. And I also think the margin really matters for Democrats. If it’s just a handful-of-seats majority that they’re able to hold, that creates a really difficult, interesting dynamic for the next potential speaker, probably Hakeem Jeffries.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>So that’ll be fascinating to watch. And I also think the margin really matters for Democrats. If it’s just a handful-of-seats majority that they’re able to hold, that creates a really difficult, interesting dynamic for the next potential speaker, probably Hakeem Jeffries.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>You’re going to be dealing with members, many of them newly elected and more progressive, who might have a different agenda and want to take the party in different directions. If the margin they’re able to gain on election night becomes larger, that gives more room to operate for whoever the next Democratic leader is.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>You’re going to be dealing with members, many of them newly elected and more progressive, who might have a different agenda and want to take the party in different directions. If the margin they’re able to gain on election night becomes larger, that gives more room to operate for whoever the next Democratic leader is.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Erin, do you think Brandon’s feelings align with what you’re hearing nationwide?\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Erin, do you think Brandon’s feelings align with what you’re hearing nationwide?\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Erin Covey:\u003c/strong> I think so. I think that voters are frustrated with the system writ large right now. And I think Democrats are bearing the brunt of that criticism right now from some of their voters because they view them as not willing to fight back against the Trump administration as much as they would like.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Erin Covey:\u003c/strong> I think so. I think that voters are frustrated with the system writ large right now. And I think Democrats are bearing the brunt of that criticism right now from some of their voters because they view them as not willing to fight back against the Trump administration as much as they would like.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>But, of course, fighting back looks different to different voters, whether or not it means widespread health care legislation or investigations into the president and members of his Cabinet. There is a lot of disagreement, both within the base and within party leadership, I think.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>But, of course, fighting back looks different to different voters, whether or not it means widespread health care legislation or investigations into the president and members of his Cabinet. There is a lot of disagreement, both within the base and within party leadership, I think.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>And so it remains to be seen the direction that Democrats will take policy-wise, assuming they win the majority in the House. But what I will say is that Trump is still going to be president at the end of the day, even if Democrats have a majority in the Senate as well. It will not be filibuster-proof, and so there is very little that can actually get done legislatively.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>And so it remains to be seen the direction that Democrats will take policy-wise, assuming they win the majority in the House. But what I will say is that Trump is still going to be president at the end of the day, even if Democrats have a majority in the Senate as well. It will not be filibuster-proof, and so there is very little that can actually get done legislatively.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Actually, Erin, while we’re on state-level races, I do want to just ask you quickly about a statewide race that has gotten a lot of national attention recently, and that’s the Ohio governor’s race, where the Republican candidate, of course, Vivek Ramaswamy, posted a malicious ad featuring Democratic candidate Amy Acton and essentially weaponizing her mother’s betrayal of Acton when she was sexually assaulted as a child.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Actually, Erin, while we’re on state-level races, I do want to just ask you quickly about a statewide race that has gotten a lot of national attention recently, and that’s the Ohio governor’s race, where the Republican candidate, of course, Vivek Ramaswamy, posted a malicious ad featuring Democratic candidate Amy Acton and essentially weaponizing her mother’s betrayal of Acton when she was sexually assaulted as a child.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>There has been so much criticism and condemnation of this ad. I’m just curious if Cook has seen that translate into any notable shift away from the Republican candidate.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>There has been so much criticism and condemnation of this ad. I’m just curious if Cook has seen that translate into any notable shift away from the Republican candidate.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Erin Covey:\u003c/strong> Yeah, so the answer is yes. We did recently move this race from toss-up to Lean Democrat, in part as a result of the backlash to that ad that Ramaswamy ran.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Erin Covey:\u003c/strong> Yeah, so the answer is yes. We did recently move this race from toss-up to Lean Democrat, in part as a result of the backlash to that ad that Ramaswamy ran.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>But I think even before that, there was a sense that Acton was developing a bit of a clear edge here. And, look, I think the attacks in this race have been very personal all cycle. Sometimes when you have a candidate who is just so enmeshed in that, it can cause them to do things that are, you know, politically unwise.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>But I think even before that, there was a sense that Acton was developing a bit of a clear edge here. And, look, I think the attacks in this race have been very personal all cycle. Sometimes when you have a candidate who is just so enmeshed in that, it can cause them to do things that are, you know, politically unwise.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>This ad clearly was going to backfire on Republicans. We’ve seen that it did. And there were a lot of Republicans who were critical of it after it was released. So it is not a surprise that it has given Acton further momentum in the final stretch of this race.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>This ad clearly was going to backfire on Republicans. We’ve seen that it did. And there were a lot of Republicans who were critical of it after it was released. So it is not a surprise that it has given Acton further momentum in the final stretch of this race.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Guy Marzorati:\u003c/strong> And that just didn’t seem like an ad you would run if you felt like you were up by five points. You know, I think you roll the dice and hope that the impression voters get is the one that’s presented through the ad, but we saw a huge amount of media coverage of the ad as a story. So voters were getting the full information about the context of that, and clearly it backfired.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Guy Marzorati:\u003c/strong> And that just didn’t seem like an ad you would run if you felt like you were up by five points. You know, I think you roll the dice and hope that the impression voters get is the one that’s presented through the ad, but we saw a huge amount of media coverage of the ad as a story. So voters were getting the full information about the context of that, and clearly it backfired.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Yeah. Well, staying with California for one more toss-up race, this is one where there is a lot of spending, ad spending, and this is the 13th. Guy, remind us about this district, the race that Adam Gray won to claim it a couple of years ago, and why Republicans are spending so big here.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Yeah. Well, staying with California for one more toss-up race, this is one where there is a lot of spending, ad spending, and this is the 13th. Guy, remind us about this district, the race that Adam Gray won to claim it a couple of years ago, and why Republicans are spending so big here.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Guy Marzorati:\u003c/strong> Yeah, the nail-biter district. This was, I believe, the closest congressional election in the country in 2024. Adam Gray won this seat by 187 votes after losing it very narrowly in 2022.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Guy Marzorati:\u003c/strong> Yeah, the nail-biter district. This was, I believe, the closest congressional election in the country in 2024. Adam Gray won this seat by 187 votes after losing it very narrowly in 2022.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>This was another district where the lines were moved because of Proposition 50. It’s in the Central Valley, centered around Merced and Modesto, but it also added parts of Stockton, which brought in more Democratic voters.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>This was another district where the lines were moved because of Proposition 50. It’s in the Central Valley, centered around Merced and Modesto, but it also added parts of Stockton, which brought in more Democratic voters.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>And this is one where Gray is, as he’s been known, a Valley Democrat. He’s really run his career as a centrist, both in his time in the state legislature and in Congress. He’s really focused his messaging on the gains he’s been able to bring back to the district through the budget.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>And this is one where Gray is, as he’s been known, a Valley Democrat. He’s really run his career as a centrist, both in his time in the state legislature and in Congress. He’s really focused his messaging on the gains he’s been able to bring back to the district through the budget.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>The Republicans have focused their attacks on Gray’s vote in support of the gas tax while he was in the state legislature, which ended up funding transportation and road repair.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>The Republicans have focused their attacks on Gray’s vote in support of the gas tax while he was in the state legislature, which ended up funding transportation and road repair.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>This is one where I think it’s so interesting. You look across these districts in California, and as much ground as Republicans have lost here in the last 10 years on the congressional level, I think they’ve actually been pretty good at candidate recruitment. I don’t think they necessarily lost because they put forward folks who just can’t find a way to win.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>This is one where I think it’s so interesting. You look across these districts in California, and as much ground as Republicans have lost here in the last 10 years on the congressional level, I think they’ve actually been pretty good at candidate recruitment. I don’t think they necessarily lost because they put forward folks who just can’t find a way to win.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>In this case, the Republicans put forward Kevin Lincoln, who is the mayor of Stockton. I mentioned Democrats added a lot of blue voters in Stockton. Well, Kevin Lincoln has won in Stockton as mayor. Yet again, we go back to this national environment and these national headwinds that Lincoln is running against. I think it’s why you saw Cook shift this race toward Democrats in recent days.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>In this case, the Republicans put forward Kevin Lincoln, who is the mayor of Stockton. I mentioned Democrats added a lot of blue voters in Stockton. Well, Kevin Lincoln has won in Stockton as mayor. Yet again, we go back to this national environment and these national headwinds that Lincoln is running against. I think it’s why you saw Cook shift this race toward Democrats in recent days.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Yeah, so what is Lincoln trying to attack Gray on for the most part, Guy?\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Yeah, so what is Lincoln trying to attack Gray on for the most part, Guy?\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Guy Marzorati:\u003c/strong> I mean, it’s focused on this 2017 vote that Gray took when he was a member of the state Assembly to increase the gas tax. He’s defended it. He’s said, you know, the state went a number of years before that without increasing the gas tax, which funds road repair in the state.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Guy Marzorati:\u003c/strong> I mean, it’s focused on this 2017 vote that Gray took when he was a member of the state Assembly to increase the gas tax. He’s defended it. He’s said, you know, the state went a number of years before that without increasing the gas tax, which funds road repair in the state.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>But the gas tax is a big reason — you could say the number one reason — for the price differential between California gas and gas elsewhere in the country. So it’s become a real target issue for Republicans.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>But the gas tax is a big reason — you could say the number one reason — for the price differential between California gas and gas elsewhere in the country. So it’s become a real target issue for Republicans.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>It passed the Legislature. Voters approved it two years later when there was a repeal effort. So, you know, Gray might feel comfortable sticking by his vote, but certainly in a district like that, where the cost of living is the top issue and voters do drive a lot, that is something Republicans have keyed in on as they’ve attacked Gray.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>It passed the Legislature. Voters approved it two years later when there was a repeal effort. So, you know, Gray might feel comfortable sticking by his vote, but certainly in a district like that, where the cost of living is the top issue and voters do drive a lot, that is something Republicans have keyed in on as they’ve attacked Gray.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Erin, do you have any insight into why Cook moved the race from toss-up to Lean Democrat? It was a while back, actually, so — so I actually moved it to Likely Democrat recently.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Erin, do you have any insight into why Cook moved the race from toss-up to Lean Democrat? It was a while back, actually, so — so I actually moved it to Likely Democrat recently.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Erin Covey:\u003c/strong> Yeah, I was going to say, look, I think that both parties’ super PACs have stopped a lot of their spending here because they’re increasingly seeing this seat as out of reach for Republicans this cycle.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Erin Covey:\u003c/strong> Yeah, I was going to say, look, I think that both parties’ super PACs have stopped a lot of their spending here because they’re increasingly seeing this seat as out of reach for Republicans this cycle.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>You know, I don’t think it’s over, certainly. I think Kevin Lincoln — I agree that he’s a good candidate who could certainly make this race closer than it should be. But the polling has pretty consistently shown Gray with an edge.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>You know, I don’t think it’s over, certainly. I think Kevin Lincoln — I agree that he’s a good candidate who could certainly make this race closer than it should be. But the polling has pretty consistently shown Gray with an edge.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>I’ll remind folks that this district shifted six points to the left after redistricting. This obviously was an incredibly close race in 2024, when Trump was winning the district by about five and a half points. This is now a seat that Harris won narrowly.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>I’ll remind folks that this district shifted six points to the left after redistricting. This obviously was an incredibly close race in 2024, when Trump was winning the district by about five and a half points. This is now a seat that Harris won narrowly.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>So it is different, and the environment is a lot different for Democrats as well, of course, nationally speaking. Even if Gray is vulnerable on his record in Sacramento before he went to Washington, I don’t think it’s going to be enough for Lincoln to close the gap here this cycle.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>So it is different, and the environment is a lot different for Democrats as well, of course, nationally speaking. Even if Gray is vulnerable on his record in Sacramento before he went to Washington, I don’t think it’s going to be enough for Lincoln to close the gap here this cycle.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> So, Erin, how would you overall assess the success of redistricting efforts by both Democrats and Republicans midway through?\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> So, Erin, how would you overall assess the success of redistricting efforts by both Democrats and Republicans midway through?\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Erin Covey:\u003c/strong> Look, I think it’s basically a wash. Republicans came out slightly on top. We are projecting that they will be able to net around three seats due to redistricting alone, but that is not by the wide margin they were hoping for.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Erin Covey:\u003c/strong> Look, I think it’s basically a wash. Republicans came out slightly on top. We are projecting that they will be able to net around three seats due to redistricting alone, but that is not by the wide margin they were hoping for.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>That’s because a lot of the maps that Republicans redrew in the past year were predicated on the fact that Republicans would be able to match Trump’s margin in a lot of these parts of the country. What we have seen is that his approval rating has dropped off so much that they’re probably not going to be able to do so.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>That’s because a lot of the maps that Republicans redrew in the past year were predicated on the fact that Republicans would be able to match Trump’s margin in a lot of these parts of the country. What we have seen is that his approval rating has dropped off so much that they’re probably not going to be able to do so.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Guy Marzorati:\u003c/strong> I mean, one question I’ve been thinking about this last week is, given this national environment, do Democrats need to gerrymander in California? Could they have won two, three, four seats under the previous maps, given where things stand?\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Guy Marzorati:\u003c/strong> I mean, one question I’ve been thinking about this last week is, given this national environment, do Democrats need to gerrymander in California? Could they have won two, three, four seats under the previous maps, given where things stand?\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> I think they certainly could have. Well, but, right, these maps will be in play in ’28 and ’30, right, Guy? Maybe they’ll pay some dividends there for Democrats, at least.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> I think they certainly could have. Well, but, right, these maps will be in play in ’28 and ’30, right, Guy? Maybe they’ll pay some dividends there for Democrats, at least.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Guy Marzorati:\u003c/strong> Yeah, and there’s a whole messaging component to this that we can talk about.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Guy Marzorati:\u003c/strong> Yeah, and there’s a whole messaging component to this that we can talk about.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Yeah, we’re talking with Guy Marzorati, politics correspondent for KQED, and Erin Covey, editor at The Cook Political Report. And with you, our listeners, we’ll talk Senate after the break. Stay with us. This is \u003cem>Forum\u003c/em>.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Yeah, we’re talking with Guy Marzorati, politics correspondent for KQED, and Erin Covey, editor at The Cook Political Report. And with you, our listeners, we’ll talk Senate after the break. Stay with us. This is \u003cem>Forum\u003c/em>.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> You’re listening to \u003cem>Forum\u003c/em>. I’m Mina Kim. The key House races in California and Senate races nationwide that will decide control of Congress for the rest of President Trump’s term — that’s the topic of our conversation this hour with Erin Covey, editor at The Cook Political Report, who specializes in the House of Representatives, and Guy Marzorati, politics correspondent for KQED, covering California politics with always an eye on the nation.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> You’re listening to \u003cem>Forum\u003c/em>. I’m Mina Kim. The key House races in California and Senate races nationwide that will decide control of Congress for the rest of President Trump’s term — that’s the topic of our conversation this hour with Erin Covey, editor at The Cook Political Report, who specializes in the House of Representatives, and Guy Marzorati, politics correspondent for KQED, covering California politics with always an eye on the nation.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Listeners, how are you feeling a week from Election Day? Nervous, hopeful? What questions do you have about the strength of this so-called blue wave materializing? Which House and Senate races here in California and nationwide are grabbing your attention, and what are the issues driving your vote?\u003c/p>\n",
"innerContent": [
"\n\u003cp>Listeners, how are you feeling a week from Election Day? Nervous, hopeful? What questions do you have about the strength of this so-called blue wave materializing? Which House and Senate races here in California and nationwide are grabbing your attention, and what are the issues driving your vote?\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Email forum@kqed.org, find us on Discord, Bluesky, Facebook, or Instagram at KQED Forum. Call 866-733-6786, 866-733-6786 as well, to get your voice heard.\u003c/p>\n",
"innerContent": [
"\n\u003cp>Email forum@kqed.org, find us on Discord, Bluesky, Facebook, or Instagram at KQED Forum. Call 866-733-6786, 866-733-6786 as well, to get your voice heard.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Before I go to calls, really quick, Erin, tell me where Cook has the Senate picture right now for Democrats and Republicans.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>Before I go to calls, really quick, Erin, tell me where Cook has the Senate picture right now for Democrats and Republicans.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Erin Covey:\u003c/strong> Right now, we believe that control of the Senate is a pure toss-up. We’re projecting that Democrats will flip anywhere from two to six Senate seats. Now, they only need four for the majority, so that is now well within their reach, which is a very different picture from what we saw at the beginning of 2025, when it looked like Republicans were the overwhelming favorites to hold the Senate majority.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Erin Covey:\u003c/strong> Right now, we believe that control of the Senate is a pure toss-up. We’re projecting that Democrats will flip anywhere from two to six Senate seats. Now, they only need four for the majority, so that is now well within their reach, which is a very different picture from what we saw at the beginning of 2025, when it looked like Republicans were the overwhelming favorites to hold the Senate majority.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Yeah, so four to get to 51, right, to overcome the vice president’s tie-breaking vote?\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Yeah, so four to get to 51, right, to overcome the vice president’s tie-breaking vote?\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Erin Covey:\u003c/strong> Correct.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Erin Covey:\u003c/strong> Correct.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> All right. Well, I think we have a question from listener Colin in San Francisco. Hi, Colin. Thanks for waiting.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> All right. Well, I think we have a question from listener Colin in San Francisco. Hi, Colin. Thanks for waiting.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Colin:\u003c/strong> Good morning. I’ve been following the campaign of Abdul El-Sayed for the open Senate seat in Michigan with great interest. Understanding Israel-Palestine isn’t the first issue that most voters base their decisions on, the University of Southern California’s Democracy Lab just ran a poll in Nancy Pelosi’s congressional district in which 72% of respondents answered that they have a very unfavorable opinion of the Israeli government, with an additional 15% answering that they had a somewhat unfavorable opinion.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Colin:\u003c/strong> Good morning. I’ve been following the campaign of Abdul El-Sayed for the open Senate seat in Michigan with great interest. Understanding Israel-Palestine isn’t the first issue that most voters base their decisions on, the University of Southern California’s Democracy Lab just ran a poll in Nancy Pelosi’s congressional district in which 72% of respondents answered that they have a very unfavorable opinion of the Israeli government, with an additional 15% answering that they had a somewhat unfavorable opinion.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Does this indicate that, at least until very recently within the Democratic Party, there’s a large gap between where most of the elected representatives are on Israel-Palestine and where their own voters are?\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>Does this indicate that, at least until very recently within the Democratic Party, there’s a large gap between where most of the elected representatives are on Israel-Palestine and where their own voters are?\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Colin, thanks. Erin, do you want to take that first, and then we can get into the dynamics of this particular race as well?\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Colin, thanks. Erin, do you want to take that first, and then we can get into the dynamics of this particular race as well?\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Erin Covey:\u003c/strong> Yeah, look, public opinion on Israel has shifted dramatically over the past couple of years. I believe that, according to Pew, only older Republicans now have a favorable view of Israel if you’re looking at various age groups divided by party.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Erin Covey:\u003c/strong> Yeah, look, public opinion on Israel has shifted dramatically over the past couple of years. I believe that, according to Pew, only older Republicans now have a favorable view of Israel if you’re looking at various age groups divided by party.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>And so this is really an issue where increasingly there are a number of elected Democrats who are out of step with their base. It has been very difficult for them to navigate.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>And so this is really an issue where increasingly there are a number of elected Democrats who are out of step with their base. It has been very difficult for them to navigate.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>And, of course, there are parts of the country with larger Jewish populations that have a more nuanced view of Israel. We’ve seen this play out in a number of House races. Of course, it’s been a factor in the Michigan Senate race as well.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>And, of course, there are parts of the country with larger Jewish populations that have a more nuanced view of Israel. We’ve seen this play out in a number of House races. Of course, it’s been a factor in the Michigan Senate race as well.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>I think, ultimately, there are other issues that are driving voters’ behavior more, largely the cost of living. But this is certainly an issue that could impact some voters’ decisions.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>I think, ultimately, there are other issues that are driving voters’ behavior more, largely the cost of living. But this is certainly an issue that could impact some voters’ decisions.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Where does Cook have this Senate race?\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Where does Cook have this Senate race?\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Erin Covey:\u003c/strong> We have it rated—\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Erin Covey:\u003c/strong> We have it rated—\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> —as a pure toss-up. Pure toss-up. Okay, so not leaning down at all. But interestingly, people have been pointing out that El-Sayed’s — you know, the way that he’s been resonating with voters — was not predicted. What do you think is causing that?\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> —as a pure toss-up. Pure toss-up. Okay, so not leaning down at all. But interestingly, people have been pointing out that El-Sayed’s — you know, the way that he’s been resonating with voters — was not predicted. What do you think is causing that?\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Erin Covey:\u003c/strong> Look, I think this is a really interesting matchup. We’re seeing both candidates campaign in parts of the state that are unexpected.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Erin Covey:\u003c/strong> Look, I think this is a really interesting matchup. We’re seeing both candidates campaign in parts of the state that are unexpected.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Mike Rogers, the Republican, is campaigning down in Detroit, hoping to make some inroads with Black voters there who preferred Haley Stevens over El-Sayed in the Senate Democratic primary.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>Mike Rogers, the Republican, is campaigning down in Detroit, hoping to make some inroads with Black voters there who preferred Haley Stevens over El-Sayed in the Senate Democratic primary.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>At the same time, you’re seeing El-Sayed campaigning up in the Upper Peninsula, which is a historically very Republican part of the state. But I think his message on affordability and the way that he has clearly separated himself from the Democratic establishment has been compelling to a lot of voters in the state.\u003c/p>\n",
"innerContent": [
"\n\u003cp>At the same time, you’re seeing El-Sayed campaigning up in the Upper Peninsula, which is a historically very Republican part of the state. But I think his message on affordability and the way that he has clearly separated himself from the Democratic establishment has been compelling to a lot of voters in the state.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Yeah, interesting. He’s not a socialist himself, but has received a lot of support from democratic socialists and those to the left of the party. I’m just curious if you think that says something about where national Democrats could go, or whether they’re watching it to see if that’s where they’ll go, Erin.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Yeah, interesting. He’s not a socialist himself, but has received a lot of support from democratic socialists and those to the left of the party. I’m just curious if you think that says something about where national Democrats could go, or whether they’re watching it to see if that’s where they’ll go, Erin.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Erin Covey:\u003c/strong> Yeah, I mean, I think that is the big question this cycle. Can we see these candidates who either are democratic socialists or have been tied heavily to the democratic socialist wing of the party? Can they still be successful in these swing seats, where historically moderates have done better?\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Erin Covey:\u003c/strong> Yeah, I mean, I think that is the big question this cycle. Can we see these candidates who either are democratic socialists or have been tied heavily to the democratic socialist wing of the party? Can they still be successful in these swing seats, where historically moderates have done better?\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Look, I do think that if they do end up winning in a lot of these places, that is largely going to be a result of the political environment, in which Trump is so unpopular that voters would rather vote for someone they might think is a socialist over a Republican who is going to be a rubber stamp for Trump.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>Look, I do think that if they do end up winning in a lot of these places, that is largely going to be a result of the political environment, in which Trump is so unpopular that voters would rather vote for someone they might think is a socialist over a Republican who is going to be a rubber stamp for Trump.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>But that is the reason that this race, I think, is still quite close. The polling we’ve seen shows that El-Sayed has the edge, but it’s not by a wide enough margin to say that it’s really a Lean Democrat race at this point.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>But that is the reason that this race, I think, is still quite close. The polling we’ve seen shows that El-Sayed has the edge, but it’s not by a wide enough margin to say that it’s really a Lean Democrat race at this point.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> I see. Anything you would add about this race, Guy?\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> I see. Anything you would add about this race, Guy?\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Guy Marzorati:\u003c/strong> I mean, I think just looking across the polling in these Senate races, I don’t think people should be surprised one way or another with these results. There’s a lot of conversation about polling errors, but if you look at RealClearPolling, all of these races — whether you’re talking about Texas, Michigan, Iowa, Maine, or Alaska — are within three points.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Guy Marzorati:\u003c/strong> I mean, I think just looking across the polling in these Senate races, I don’t think people should be surprised one way or another with these results. There’s a lot of conversation about polling errors, but if you look at RealClearPolling, all of these races — whether you’re talking about Texas, Michigan, Iowa, Maine, or Alaska — are within three points.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>That going one way or another does not indicate a massive polling error. So I do think the Senate, as Erin says, really is in that kind of toss-up state.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>That going one way or another does not indicate a massive polling error. So I do think the Senate, as Erin says, really is in that kind of toss-up state.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Well, another seat that has gotten so much attention, Erin, of course, is the one in Texas: Republican Ken Paxton and Democrat James Talarico. Tell us about this race and what it might highlight in terms of an opportunity for Democrats in Texas.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Well, another seat that has gotten so much attention, Erin, of course, is the one in Texas: Republican Ken Paxton and Democrat James Talarico. Tell us about this race and what it might highlight in terms of an opportunity for Democrats in Texas.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Erin Covey:\u003c/strong> This is a really remarkable race. I mean, when we’re talking about the issue of corruption, it is a bigger issue here than in any other race in the country.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Erin Covey:\u003c/strong> This is a really remarkable race. I mean, when we’re talking about the issue of corruption, it is a bigger issue here than in any other race in the country.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>And that is because the Republican nominee, State Attorney General Ken Paxton, who ousted the sitting Republican Senator John Cornyn in the primary earlier this year, has a litany of corruption allegations against him. He’s been indicted.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>And that is because the Republican nominee, State Attorney General Ken Paxton, who ousted the sitting Republican Senator John Cornyn in the primary earlier this year, has a litany of corruption allegations against him. He’s been indicted.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>There are a number of Republicans who are not going to vote for him. They’re not going to vote for the Democrat, James Talarico, either. But if enough of those Republicans decide not to vote in the Senate race at all, that is how Talarico gets to victory here.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>There are a number of Republicans who are not going to vote for him. They’re not going to vote for the Democrat, James Talarico, either. But if enough of those Republicans decide not to vote in the Senate race at all, that is how Talarico gets to victory here.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>And we do see this race as a toss-up as well. Again, polling has also shown Talarico with a pretty consistent edge. Some polls show it’s shrunk a little bit in recent weeks, which makes sense. This is a state that voted for Trump by double digits in 2024, and so we really should not see a Democrat doing as well here as Talarico is.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>And we do see this race as a toss-up as well. Again, polling has also shown Talarico with a pretty consistent edge. Some polls show it’s shrunk a little bit in recent weeks, which makes sense. This is a state that voted for Trump by double digits in 2024, and so we really should not see a Democrat doing as well here as Talarico is.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>But I do think that Democrats are in a better position this cycle to flip the seat than they were even in 2018, when Beto O’Rourke got quite close.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>But I do think that Democrats are in a better position this cycle to flip the seat than they were even in 2018, when Beto O’Rourke got quite close.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Yeah, Democrats are definitely wary of that 2018 loss to Ted Cruz, pretty decisively, by Beto O’Rourke. And so I imagine they are very worried about having their hopes dashed. But why do you think Talarico has resonated so much with Texas to make it as close as it is, besides just the national headwinds against Republicans?\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Yeah, Democrats are definitely wary of that 2018 loss to Ted Cruz, pretty decisively, by Beto O’Rourke. And so I imagine they are very worried about having their hopes dashed. But why do you think Talarico has resonated so much with Texas to make it as close as it is, besides just the national headwinds against Republicans?\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Erin Covey:\u003c/strong> I mean, look, I’ll say the big difference between 2018 and this cycle is that Paxton is not Ted Cruz. Cruz, of course, is a polarizing figure, but he was running a strong campaign. He was raising money, and he did not have this massive baggage that Paxton has, which is too far of a line for some Republican voters in Texas to cross. Even some prominent leaders in the state have mentioned recently that they are not going to be voting for Paxton.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Erin Covey:\u003c/strong> I mean, look, I’ll say the big difference between 2018 and this cycle is that Paxton is not Ted Cruz. Cruz, of course, is a polarizing figure, but he was running a strong campaign. He was raising money, and he did not have this massive baggage that Paxton has, which is too far of a line for some Republican voters in Texas to cross. Even some prominent leaders in the state have mentioned recently that they are not going to be voting for Paxton.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>And so that is really the main issue driving things here.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>And so that is really the main issue driving things here.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Talarico, I think, has also run a really strong campaign and has been very successful at messaging voters in new ways. He’s really taken advantage of social media in a way that I think a lot of candidates have not done in recent years. So he has really been able to energize support on the ground.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>Talarico, I think, has also run a really strong campaign and has been very successful at messaging voters in new ways. He’s really taken advantage of social media in a way that I think a lot of candidates have not done in recent years. So he has really been able to energize support on the ground.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>He’s also a seminarian and talks about his faith in a way that is unique for a Democratic candidate. I think that could help him make inroads with some Republican voters. Of course, he’s quite a bit more liberal than a lot of these voters, but if he’s seen as an upstanding religious man, that provides quite a contrast with Paxton.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>He’s also a seminarian and talks about his faith in a way that is unique for a Democratic candidate. I think that could help him make inroads with some Republican voters. Of course, he’s quite a bit more liberal than a lot of these voters, but if he’s seen as an upstanding religious man, that provides quite a contrast with Paxton.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> I want to hear, Guy, what you find interesting about the dynamics of this race, but I’d also love to ask a little bit more about the Latino vote in this case. Kind of like California, right? It’s an interesting bellwether.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> I want to hear, Guy, what you find interesting about the dynamics of this race, but I’d also love to ask a little bit more about the Latino vote in this case. Kind of like California, right? It’s an interesting bellwether.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Guy Marzorati:\u003c/strong> Yeah. I mean, on this statewide Senate race, keep an eye on races like this in Texas, where there’s more than two candidates on the ballot in the general election. Life is a lot easier for Democrats if their candidate doesn’t actually have to get over 50% to win. Talarico is in that position, and some of the other states are in that position as well.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Guy Marzorati:\u003c/strong> Yeah. I mean, on this statewide Senate race, keep an eye on races like this in Texas, where there’s more than two candidates on the ballot in the general election. Life is a lot easier for Democrats if their candidate doesn’t actually have to get over 50% to win. Talarico is in that position, and some of the other states are in that position as well.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>On the Latino vote in Texas, look, this was a huge factor in the gerrymandering that took place in the state, where Republicans in Texas used 2024 as the baseline for how they were drawing these districts. That baseline was Latino voters, especially along the border, shifting toward Trump.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>On the Latino vote in Texas, look, this was a huge factor in the gerrymandering that took place in the state, where Republicans in Texas used 2024 as the baseline for how they were drawing these districts. That baseline was Latino voters, especially along the border, shifting toward Trump.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>So if that’s your baseline and that vote completely changes between 2024 and 2026, suddenly that gerrymander is no longer in such a confident state. And so I think that’s what Republicans are dealing with.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>So if that’s your baseline and that vote completely changes between 2024 and 2026, suddenly that gerrymander is no longer in such a confident state. And so I think that’s what Republicans are dealing with.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>In California, of course, the gerrymandering was the other way. Democrats drew these districts to make them more advantageous to unseat Republicans. But it’s something we’re certainly also watching here in places like the Central Valley, where the Adam Gray seat, the 13th District, and the 22nd District are both majority-Latino seats that went toward Donald Trump in 2024 and could go back the other way in 2026.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>In California, of course, the gerrymandering was the other way. Democrats drew these districts to make them more advantageous to unseat Republicans. But it’s something we’re certainly also watching here in places like the Central Valley, where the Adam Gray seat, the 13th District, and the 22nd District are both majority-Latino seats that went toward Donald Trump in 2024 and could go back the other way in 2026.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Yeah, so Erin, what are you seeing? Are you seeing potentially a shift from 2024 to 2026, with Latinos moving away from Trump and the Republicans?\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Yeah, so Erin, what are you seeing? Are you seeing potentially a shift from 2024 to 2026, with Latinos moving away from Trump and the Republicans?\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Erin Covey:\u003c/strong> Yes, we’re seeing a major shift both in polling and in special-election and off-year election results. We have seen significant reversion among Hispanic voters away from Republicans.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Erin Covey:\u003c/strong> Yes, we’re seeing a major shift both in polling and in special-election and off-year election results. We have seen significant reversion among Hispanic voters away from Republicans.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>And I think it’s important to remember that before 2024, a lot of Democratic Party leaders were taking Hispanic voters’ support for them for granted. Republicans were able to make significant inroads, and Trump was able to make significant inroads by talking a lot about economic issues and promising that he was going to improve these voters’ prospects.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>And I think it’s important to remember that before 2024, a lot of Democratic Party leaders were taking Hispanic voters’ support for them for granted. Republicans were able to make significant inroads, and Trump was able to make significant inroads by talking a lot about economic issues and promising that he was going to improve these voters’ prospects.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>But, of course, the past two years have done the opposite of that for many of these voters, who are not Republican voters. They are more independent voters who liked Trump in 2024 but are much more willing to swing back toward a Democrat than a tried-and-true Republican voter in some of these other parts of the country.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>But, of course, the past two years have done the opposite of that for many of these voters, who are not Republican voters. They are more independent voters who liked Trump in 2024 but are much more willing to swing back toward a Democrat than a tried-and-true Republican voter in some of these other parts of the country.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>That’s why we’re seeing such a dramatic shift left in a lot of these South Texas seats in particular, which are majority Hispanic.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>That’s why we’re seeing such a dramatic shift left in a lot of these South Texas seats in particular, which are majority Hispanic.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Yeah, it’s been really interesting to watch. Erin Covey is editor at The Cook Political Report, and Guy Marzorati is politics correspondent for KQED.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Yeah, it’s been really interesting to watch. Erin Covey is editor at The Cook Political Report, and Guy Marzorati is politics correspondent for KQED.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>And let me remind listeners, you are listening to \u003cem>Forum\u003c/em>. I’m Mina Kim. We’ve got a lot of people who are actually asking questions and focused on what happens after the Democrats take the House.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>And let me remind listeners, you are listening to \u003cem>Forum\u003c/em>. I’m Mina Kim. We’ve got a lot of people who are actually asking questions and focused on what happens after the Democrats take the House.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Barbara in Sunnyvale has a slightly different take from Brandon, who writes, “Unless we want more corruption, Dems need to vigorously investigate it if they take the House. Dems won’t have much power to legislate since their legislation will likely be vetoed by Trump.”\u003c/p>\n",
"innerContent": [
"\n\u003cp>Barbara in Sunnyvale has a slightly different take from Brandon, who writes, “Unless we want more corruption, Dems need to vigorously investigate it if they take the House. Dems won’t have much power to legislate since their legislation will likely be vetoed by Trump.”\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Well, that’s, of course, if they can get it through the Senate. Let me go to Dan in Santa Clara. Dan, go ahead. You’re on.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>Well, that’s, of course, if they can get it through the Senate. Let me go to Dan in Santa Clara. Dan, go ahead. You’re on.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Dan:\u003c/strong> Well, good morning. Thanks for taking my call. Erin, you earlier mentioned the Senate not having a supermajority to be able to overcome a filibuster. I’m fairly active in the Democratic community, and there’s a lot of talk about doing specific carve-outs for specific votes. I was wondering, is that just idle chat, or is that a possibility?\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Dan:\u003c/strong> Well, good morning. Thanks for taking my call. Erin, you earlier mentioned the Senate not having a supermajority to be able to overcome a filibuster. I’m fairly active in the Democratic community, and there’s a lot of talk about doing specific carve-outs for specific votes. I was wondering, is that just idle chat, or is that a possibility?\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Erin Covey:\u003c/strong> Yeah, no, I think it’s a possibility. But again, I think that actually getting any legislation signed into law is going to be close to impossible over the next two years, at least.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Erin Covey:\u003c/strong> Yeah, no, I think it’s a possibility. But again, I think that actually getting any legislation signed into law is going to be close to impossible over the next two years, at least.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>But, of course, if Democrats enter the 2028 presidential cycle with majorities in the House and the Senate, if they even have maybe a 52- or 53-seat majority in the Senate, that puts them in a position in 2029. So we’ll see what happens there.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>But, of course, if Democrats enter the 2028 presidential cycle with majorities in the House and the Senate, if they even have maybe a 52- or 53-seat majority in the Senate, that puts them in a position in 2029. So we’ll see what happens there.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>But yes, I think, to the previous commenter’s point, there is still a lot of disagreement, both among Democratic voters and among Democratic Party leaders, about how to focus their efforts over the next two years with Trump still in office.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>But yes, I think, to the previous commenter’s point, there is still a lot of disagreement, both among Democratic voters and among Democratic Party leaders, about how to focus their efforts over the next two years with Trump still in office.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Guy Marzorati:\u003c/strong> And I think if it’s 51 votes, we have to talk about the Fetterman factor. You know, where does John Fetterman in Pennsylvania position himself? If he suddenly becomes the only thing standing between a potential Republican majority, how does he caucus? How does he vote?\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Guy Marzorati:\u003c/strong> And I think if it’s 51 votes, we have to talk about the Fetterman factor. You know, where does John Fetterman in Pennsylvania position himself? If he suddenly becomes the only thing standing between a potential Republican majority, how does he caucus? How does he vote?\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Well, Alan in Benicia writes, “I hear folks saying that if the Democrats can’t win both houses now under these conditions, they will never win. But sadly, I can think of another scenario. After two more years of screwed-up policies, the backlash to Republicans could be even more pronounced.”\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Well, Alan in Benicia writes, “I hear folks saying that if the Democrats can’t win both houses now under these conditions, they will never win. But sadly, I can think of another scenario. After two more years of screwed-up policies, the backlash to Republicans could be even more pronounced.”\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Guy, how soon do you think we’ll know the balance of power in Congress? How soon could these tight races in California, for example, be called? What do you think people should be prepared for?\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>Guy, how soon do you think we’ll know the balance of power in Congress? How soon could these tight races in California, for example, be called? What do you think people should be prepared for?\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Guy Marzorati:\u003c/strong> I mean, if history is any guide, a close congressional race in California is going to take probably more than a week to decipher. Now, it’ll depend on how close the margin is, but we’ve seen some of these races, especially in the Central Valley, where some of the counties have been on the slower end of vote counting, drag deep into November before we know the winner.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Guy Marzorati:\u003c/strong> I mean, if history is any guide, a close congressional race in California is going to take probably more than a week to decipher. Now, it’ll depend on how close the margin is, but we’ve seen some of these races, especially in the Central Valley, where some of the counties have been on the slower end of vote counting, drag deep into November before we know the winner.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>In previous years, that’s been really key to the actual majority in the House. That might not be the case this year. We might know whether Democrats hold the majority before we know, for example, who’s won in the 22nd District in California.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>In previous years, that’s been really key to the actual majority in the House. That might not be the case this year. We might know whether Democrats hold the majority before we know, for example, who’s won in the 22nd District in California.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>And, look, maybe some of the recent changes to speed up the vote count here, with more funding for counties to do that, will have an impact. But I’m certainly not expecting to know, for example, the result of that race on election night.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>And, look, maybe some of the recent changes to speed up the vote count here, with more funding for counties to do that, will have an impact. But I’m certainly not expecting to know, for example, the result of that race on election night.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Yeah. Nationally, Erin, what should people expect? What should they be prepared for?\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Yeah. Nationally, Erin, what should people expect? What should they be prepared for?\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Erin Covey:\u003c/strong> Look, it’s going to take a while to count all these votes. I think that if we’re talking about which party is going to have a majority in the House, we’ll know that relatively quickly. I wouldn’t be surprised if we get a call on that within the first day.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Erin Covey:\u003c/strong> Look, it’s going to take a while to count all these votes. I think that if we’re talking about which party is going to have a majority in the House, we’ll know that relatively quickly. I wouldn’t be surprised if we get a call on that within the first day.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>That’s because we expect Democrats to win by a wide enough majority that they won’t need to know the results of California’s 22nd District, for example, in order to get to that magic number. Hopefully, for all of our sakes, that is not the case.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>That’s because we expect Democrats to win by a wide enough majority that they won’t need to know the results of California’s 22nd District, for example, in order to get to that magic number. Hopefully, for all of our sakes, that is not the case.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>But in the Senate, things could take a while. In Alaska, there is a very competitive toss-up Senate race that is not going to be tabulated until two weeks after the election because it’s conducted using ranked-choice voting.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>But in the Senate, things could take a while. In Alaska, there is a very competitive toss-up Senate race that is not going to be tabulated until two weeks after the election because it’s conducted using ranked-choice voting.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>So I would encourage folks to be patient and to remember that this is just the process playing out. Some states have to take longer than other states to count their votes.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>So I would encourage folks to be patient and to remember that this is just the process playing out. Some states have to take longer than other states to count their votes.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Right, that’s, of course, Democrat Mary Peltola challenging Senator Dan Sullivan. And there’s been a lot of activity in that race, but that is too much to get into at the moment.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Right, that’s, of course, Democrat Mary Peltola challenging Senator Dan Sullivan. And there’s been a lot of activity in that race, but that is too much to get into at the moment.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>But sort of related, Steve writes, “I’m particularly frightened that the post-election period will be violently divisive, as Trump already incites all kinds of thuggery. And the Trump administration has continued to be brazen in making threats about their plans to illegally subvert their predicted election losses into fake wins.”\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>But sort of related, Steve writes, “I’m particularly frightened that the post-election period will be violently divisive, as Trump already incites all kinds of thuggery. And the Trump administration has continued to be brazen in making threats about their plans to illegally subvert their predicted election losses into fake wins.”\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>So what’s the plan to resist that? Either of you want to try to take that on?\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>So what’s the plan to resist that? Either of you want to try to take that on?\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Guy Marzorati:\u003c/strong> I mean, certainly what we’re seeing in California right now is unprecedented. This probe by the Justice Department into what they allege are noncitizens on the voter rolls, coming just a week before the election — I’ve never seen anything like this.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Guy Marzorati:\u003c/strong> I mean, certainly what we’re seeing in California right now is unprecedented. This probe by the Justice Department into what they allege are noncitizens on the voter rolls, coming just a week before the election — I’ve never seen anything like this.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>We’ll see how it plays out in court and what impact it will have electorally, but I think it’s probably fair to say part of this is political, either sowing doubt or just kind of throwing spaghetti against the wall, given the electoral environment.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>We’ll see how it plays out in court and what impact it will have electorally, but I think it’s probably fair to say part of this is political, either sowing doubt or just kind of throwing spaghetti against the wall, given the electoral environment.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Even though it might not have a huge impact in any specific race, especially given just the numbers here. I mean, just to put it in context, the Department of Justice has brought forward this idea of 20,000 voters across the state who are noncitizens on the voter rolls, not necessarily having voted. So nothing that’s actually going to swing an election.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>Even though it might not have a huge impact in any specific race, especially given just the numbers here. I mean, just to put it in context, the Department of Justice has brought forward this idea of 20,000 voters across the state who are noncitizens on the voter rolls, not necessarily having voted. So nothing that’s actually going to swing an election.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>But I think it’s just part of this kind of unprecedented action we’ve seen around legal activity in the polls.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>But I think it’s just part of this kind of unprecedented action we’ve seen around legal activity in the polls.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Yeah, and of course, speaking of Alaska, right, Erin, basically the DOJ is saying that if the Republican candidate narrowly loses, Alaska should not certify that election.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Yeah, and of course, speaking of Alaska, right, Erin, basically the DOJ is saying that if the Republican candidate narrowly loses, Alaska should not certify that election.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Erin Covey:\u003c/strong> That’s correct. The DOJ has already preemptively filed a lawsuit essentially saying the results are not legitimate if Dan Sullivan, the incumbent, loses.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Erin Covey:\u003c/strong> That’s correct. The DOJ has already preemptively filed a lawsuit essentially saying the results are not legitimate if Dan Sullivan, the incumbent, loses.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Look, I don’t think this is going to hold up in court, but it certainly could lead to a lot of mistrust and conspiracies in those weeks leading up to the Alaska result actually being tabulated.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>Look, I don’t think this is going to hold up in court, but it certainly could lead to a lot of mistrust and conspiracies in those weeks leading up to the Alaska result actually being tabulated.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Well, I really appreciate you coming on to share your analysis, Erin. Thank you so much.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Well, I really appreciate you coming on to share your analysis, Erin. Thank you so much.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Erin Covey:\u003c/strong> Thanks for having me on.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Erin Covey:\u003c/strong> Thanks for having me on.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Again, Erin Covey is editor at The Cook Political Report, and Guy Marzorati is politics correspondent for KQED, covering California politics and beyond. Really appreciate you being on with us as well.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Again, Erin Covey is editor at The Cook Political Report, and Guy Marzorati is politics correspondent for KQED, covering California politics and beyond. Really appreciate you being on with us as well.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Guy Marzorati:\u003c/strong> Thanks, Mina.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Guy Marzorati:\u003c/strong> Thanks, Mina.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> And, as always, to our listeners, thank you for sharing your questions and comments and really showing your engagement in the election process. We appreciate that, too.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> And, as always, to our listeners, thank you for sharing your questions and comments and really showing your engagement in the election process. We appreciate that, too.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>My thanks to Ana de Almeida Amaral for producing today’s segment. You’ve been listening to \u003cem>Forum\u003c/em>. I’m Mina Kim.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>My thanks to Ana de Almeida Amaral for producing today’s segment. You’ve been listening to \u003cem>Forum\u003c/em>. I’m Mina Kim.\u003c/p>\n"
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Announcer:\u003c/strong> Funds for the production of \u003cem>Forum\u003c/em> are provided by the Jenerosity Family Fund and the members of KQED.\u003c/p>\n"
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\n\u003ch2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Airdate: Tuesday, October 27, 2026 at 10 am\u003c/h2>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Next week’s midterm election will decide which party controls Congress for the second half of President Trump’s term. And in the wake of California’s redistricting in favor of Democratic candidates, the state could play an outsized role in shaping the outcome of the midterms. We’ll dig into key races here in California and across the nation, and how issues like inflation and Trump’s approval rating could influence the outcome.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Guests:\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n\u003cli>\u003cstrong>Erin Covey, \u003c/strong>editor covering the U.S. House of Representatives, The Cook Political Report\u003c/li>\n\n\n\n\u003cli>\u003cstrong>Guy Marzorati,\u003c/strong> correspondent, KQED’s California Politics and Government Desk\u003c/li>\n\u003c/ul>\n\n\n\n\u003ch2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Episode Transcript\u003c/h2>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cem>\u003cstrong>This is a computer-generated transcript. While our team has reviewed it, there may be errors.\u003c/strong>\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Welcome to \u003cem>Forum\u003c/em>. I’m Mina Kim. We’re now one week from Election Day, and one thing that’s been clear this midterm cycle is that many voters want change. They want relief from high gas and grocery prices and an end to the war in Iran. Democrats are hoping, and analysts are predicting, that the discontent will translate into a wave of votes for their party and control of Congress. But Democrats are also afraid to get their hopes up after past disappointments. Meantime, Republicans are hoping a last-minute spending blitz, along with the president’s red-state tour, will stave off a Democratic sweep.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">What do you think, listeners? Which House and Senate races here in California and nationwide are grabbing your attention? Tell us by calling 866-733-6786, emailing forum@kqed.org, or finding us on Discord, Bluesky, Facebook, or Instagram at KQED Forum.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Joining me this hour, Guy Marzorati, political correspondent for KQED, covering California politics. Hi, Guy.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Guy Marzorati:\u003c/strong> Hey, good morning.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Good morning to you. Erin Covey is also with us, editor at The Cook Political Report, who covers the U.S. House of Representatives. Erin, really glad to have you with us, too.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Erin Covey:\u003c/strong> Hey, very glad to be on!\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> So before we dig into specific races, I want to talk with you about the overall picture, Erin. I noticed The Cook Political Report Friday, I think, just moved another 19 House races away from the GOP. Tell me what drove that latest round of rating changes.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Erin Covey:\u003c/strong> Look, at this point, we believe that Republicans’ path to holding the House majority has all but evaporated. We’re currently projecting that Democrats will pick up anywhere from 12 to 22 seats in the House. They only need three to hit the magic number, 218, so they should be in a good position to win the majority regardless. It’s really a question of how large their majority will be.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">In the past couple of weeks, what we have seen is that a number of Republican incumbents have found themselves in much more competitive races than they were expecting. These are districts that Trump won by double digits in 2024, so that’s where the bulk of some of the swifter ratings changes have been, because these races have really come online late in the cycle.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">But it goes to show how much of a drag on Republicans Trump is right now, because his approval rating is deeply underwater, largely driven by his handling of economic issues. These Republican incumbents are suddenly having to worry about turning out voters who, you know, were coming out in droves for the president in 2024.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> So this is despite all that last-minute ad spending, or maybe the fact that they have to do this much ad spending is revealing to you, Erin?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Erin Covey:\u003c/strong> Look, I think that the ad spending has certainly kept Republicans competitive in places that may have looked worse for them at this point had they not spent as much as they did. We’ve also seen that the ad spending has been disproportionately good for Republicans in the Senate races.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">In the House races, it’s been a little bit more even than I think you would expect, and that’s because Democratic candidates have been raising quite a bit of money and have been outraising their Republican opponents for the past several quarters.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">And so the money, you know, I think it makes a difference, certainly, if a candidate is able to spend a couple million dollars in the last few weeks of the race. That may keep them from losing their race. But at a certain point, you know, all the money in the world starts to hit diminishing returns, and there’s only so much you can do to change the narrative.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Yeah. Guy, would you agree with Erin’s assessment that essentially Republicans’ path to maintaining control of the House has all but evaporated? And if you do, tell me why you think that is. What are the main issues that are driving voters?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Guy Marzorati:\u003c/strong> Well, I think it goes back to midterm elections being referendums on the president. You need to look no further than a couple of data points here. One is the president’s approval rating, which has been hovering below 40% in a lot of public polling. And two is the cost of living, which has driven as kind of the top issue for voters.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I’ve seen charts that have charted Trump’s approval rating alongside gas prices, and it’s almost a complete correlation. So when you look at the fact that voters going to the polls aren’t judging candidates in these House elections individually, maybe, but looking at it kind of in parliamentary terms — which party do they feel like they’d like to send into control in Washington? — and, look, we can talk about what a victory would mean for Democrats in the House or potentially the Senate, but I think you have to go back to the fundamentals of these House elections being referendums on the president. And that’s a really bad sign for Republicans.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> How have you seen Democrats capitalizing on this to draw votes? What has been some of the core messaging you’ve seen and heard from them, Guy?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Guy Marzorati:\u003c/strong> Well, I mean, one issue I focus on in these California House districts is gas prices, which is surprising in the sense that Democrats have seen this be such a bad issue for the party in California. We’ve had the nation’s highest gas prices for many years, driven largely by state policy pushed by Democrats at the state Capitol.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">And so it’s an issue that, if you look back in the last couple of congressional cycles, Democrats have really taken on the chin, especially in inland working-class areas where folks drive the most.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">That’s changed this year. We’ve seen nationally that Democrats are running more ads talking about gas prices than Republicans. And while Republicans are still campaigning on the issue in California because of some of our idiosyncrasies at a state level, this is an issue that California Democrats are talking about. You see Democratic candidates in swing districts in California filming ads at gas stations, something you would have just never dreamed of a couple of cycles ago.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">It just shows you that, I think — we can talk about this in the course of the show — on Medicaid, on gas prices, on cost of living, so much of the negative impacts of Trump and Republican policies these last couple of years have been concentrated in the very communities that shifted most toward Trump in 2024.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Democrats came into this election cycle in California really feeling on defense. In a lot of these inland areas that moved toward the GOP, both through redistricting and through the fact that the negative impacts of these policies have hit exactly those communities, there’s been a complete turnaround.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Erin, what have you been seeing in ads for House races across the country that Guy may not have touched on? I’m wondering if corruption is a big deal.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Erin Covey:\u003c/strong> We’re definitely seeing corruption pop up in a lot of these House races. And, you know, that’s an issue that members from both parties are vulnerable on. Obviously, Republicans are playing a lot more defense this cycle, and so Republican members are feeling much more of these attacks.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">But we also see Democratic incumbents who are facing attack ads over their history of stock trading or the fact that their wealth has increased during their time in Congress. I think a lot of voters start from the assumption that all politicians are corrupt. And so an attack ad that is going after stock trading and things that may not have been quite an issue even a few years ago for these members of Congress is suddenly a bigger vulnerability for them.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> What is the biggest defense, or the messaging that Republicans have been doing around issues related to the economy and so on, to motivate their base, Erin?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Erin Covey:\u003c/strong> Look, Republicans are talking about the fact that the One Big Beautiful Bill that was passed last summer cut taxes, and that is the one issue that they kind of have going for them economically speaking.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">They’re also trying to, whether explicitly or implicitly, distance themselves from the president’s policies, particularly the war with Iran. We’ve seen a number of Republican members of Congress express disapproval for it at this point and break with Trump in a way that these members haven’t before over the war with Iran, because it is so deeply unpopular with voters from both parties.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">We’ve also seen Republicans try to distance themselves from the president’s tariff policy, which is, of course, a major vulnerability for a lot of these Republicans as well.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">But I would say overall, when we’re looking at ads that are driven largely by cost-of-living issues, the three issues I’m hearing about the most are the war with Iran and its effect on gas and diesel prices, the tariffs, and then the cost of health care and Republicans’ cuts to federal health care funding last year.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Yeah. Still, Guy, despite those things and the lack of popularity of the president, I still hear many Democrats wary of getting their hopes up for a big blue wave. Tell us why.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Guy Marzorati:\u003c/strong> Well, I think that the structural factors are against the Democrats in a number of ways heading into this election, by which I mean most of all redistricting and the natural kind of sorting of seats that we’ve seen.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Democrats — and I can use California as an example — have already won the districts where voters have turned against Trump. Most of the parts of the state where voters had a lot of antipathy toward the president, Democrats won in 2018, 2020, 2022, and 2024.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">So the areas that are left are more on Republican terrain, and that’s kind of true nationwide. There’s just a lower ceiling on the possible gains that Democrats can make, even if we end up in a situation where the national popular vote mirrors a year like 2018, when we saw a huge wave. There just are fewer of those seats to win.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">And then Erin can talk about this specifically in the math, but the redistricting war that played out across the country probably ended up in the Republicans’ favor by a few seats.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">So Democrats came into this election with those structural disadvantages. Also, the money has been on the GOP side. That’s what the wave is running into: a wall of structural factors that favored Republicans going into this, but may, in the end, not be enough to prevent losses.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Yeah. This Bluesky user writes, “I wish we on the left could learn that disappointment with the GOP doesn’t mean votes for Democrats.” So, some of the nerves you’re hearing expressed there.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Erin, some other things that I’ve heard: People are worried that maybe polling is overestimating Democratic support, maybe because it has been overestimated in the past in some Midwestern states. I’m sure not a lot of Democrats would want to remember, but how is the polling this time around, do you think?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Erin Covey:\u003c/strong> Look, it is impossible to predict polling error going into an election. But what we do know is that in the past three presidential election cycles, when Trump has been on the ballot, polling has underestimated Republicans to varying extents. It was a bigger issue in 2020 than in 2024, I would say, when the polling was largely fairly accurate.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">But in midterm cycles in 2018 and 2022, the polling has held up pretty well. I’ll remind listeners that even in 2025, the polling actually underestimated Democratic gains in Virginia and New Jersey.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I think there is certainly recent history that points to polling error that did not favor Democrats, particularly in some of these white Midwestern states. But I do think that the polling I have seen — the public polling, the private polling from both parties — it’s all showing good signs for Democrats to varying extents. And so there really isn’t much of a reason to believe that this cycle isn’t going to be a good night for them.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> And the other big determinant of success is turnout, right? So what are you seeing with regard to that? Because midterms historically, of course, bring out fewer people than presidential elections. And, you know, there are demographics that really need to show up to make this blue wave possible, right?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Erin Covey:\u003c/strong> Yeah, I mean, what we’re seeing across the board in the early voting so far is that Democratic voters are, for the most part, more enthusiastic, turning out at higher levels than Republican voters compared to previous cycles.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">But, you know, this is not going to be even across every part of the country. There’s going to be some places like Texas and North Carolina, I think, where Democrats will do disproportionately well.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> We’re talking with Erin Covey of The Cook Political Report and Guy Marzorati of KQED’s politics team, a correspondent for them. And with you, listeners, we want to know how you’re feeling a week from midterm Election Day. There’s more after the break. Stay with us. This is \u003cem>Forum\u003c/em>.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Welcome back to \u003cem>Forum\u003c/em>. I’m Mina Kim. We’re talking this hour about the key races that will determine the balance of power in Congress, both in California and across the country. We’re talking about it with Guy Marzorati, politics correspondent for KQED, Erin Covey, editor at The Cook Political Report, and with you, our listeners.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">We want to hear your questions and how you’re feeling a week from Election Day. Are you nervous, hopeful, something else? Which House or Senate races here in California or nationwide are grabbing your attention? Are you a voter in a competitive district? How’s that influencing your vote? What are the issues driving your vote?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">866-733-6786 is the number. Email address: forum@kqed.org. Find us on Discord, Bluesky, Facebook, or Instagram at KQED Forum.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">All right, I want to look at the key California races that are truly toss-ups. And, Guy, once again, it’s David Valadao’s seat in the Central Valley. I mean, every time we do a show about elections, it’s always pretty much this one to watch. Tell us about District 22, Guy.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Guy Marzorati:\u003c/strong> Yeah, so the 22nd District is based in Bakersfield, Kern County, in the southern Central Valley. This is a seat that has, as you know, been competitive cycle after cycle. David Valadao has been the kind of rare Republican who’s been able to hold this seat even when the national winds have turned against the party.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">He famously voted for the impeachment of President Trump. He’s been kind of more of a centrist on issues like immigration. He’s been able to survive in really tough elections.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">2024 was a little bit different. This district had the largest swing toward Trump of any district in the country. Valadao won a much more comfortable victory than he had in the past. And so this was one that was still expected to be competitive, but seemed to be moving toward the Republican column.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Now, what really changed here was the Medicaid cuts. This is a district that has a higher percentage of folks on Medi-Cal than any other district in California. So, again, when we talk about GOP policy concentrating its downsides on these kinds of districts, the 22nd is a perfect example of this.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Then redistricting came in California with Proposition 50. This district got a little bit more blue, but it’s still competitive, and really it has remained the most competitive congressional district in the state throughout the whole cycle.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">There was a really competitive primary on the Democratic side. Randy Villegas, a local school board member who’s more progressive, came out of that primary. And this has become the district that outside Republican groups, the national Republican apparatus, have kind of looked at as their Alamo in California. It really remains the one district where they continue to spend heavily in this area. Democrats and outside groups supporting Democrats have also spent heavily.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">So this could end up being really our last competitive seat. I think Cook still has it as the only toss-up left in California, and one in which we’re also seeing a test case on the Democratic side, with Randy Villegas running much more of a kind of populist, progressive campaign than we’ve seen Democrats challenging Valadao with in the past.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">He’s brought Bernie Sanders to the district. He’s brought AOC to the district. And he’s running on much more of a systemic argument that politics writ large is broken, rather than just running against Trump, which has been more the traditional playbook that we’ve seen from Democrats.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Yeah, things like universal child care, Medicare for All, that.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Guy Marzorati:\u003c/strong> Yeah, I mean, a perfect example of this: My colleague Marisa Lagos sat down with Villegas last week in Bakersfield, and she asked, “If you are elected and Democrats win the House, are you interested in holding investigations, looking into potential corruption in the Trump family?”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">And he said, “Yeah, sure, I’m interested in that. But what I’m really interested in is looking at political spending and money in politics from both parties across the whole system and examining that.”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">That is not a DCCC talking point. You know, this is someone who is looking at the entire system as being at fault, rather than just the GOP or just Trump.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">And I think what worried Democrats a little bit heading into this race was, would Villegas kind of be the El-Sayed of California? Someone who is, you know, creating his own news, talking about things other than Trump, kind of taking the focus away from this being a referendum on the president.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">It might end up being that the wave is so large and the opposition to Trump is so great that it doesn’t matter that someone who’s as progressive as Villegas can win. But it’s an interesting test case because he’s running a very different race than the other Democrats in the state. And it may turn out to be a great bet. He might be able to bring out voters in the Bakersfield area who have not participated before and create a different electorate than Democrats have been able to produce in that part of the state.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Erin, I know you’ve been watching this race closely, too. Are there any dynamics that you want to note?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Erin Covey:\u003c/strong> Well, I think it’s just worth remembering that the one race Valadao did lose was in 2018, which was, of course, another election cycle that was defined by health care. So this is really a significant vulnerability for him.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I think Democrats have a better shot at ousting him this cycle than they have in the past several years. We still have this rated as a toss-up, but it would not surprise me if Democrats end up victorious here.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Guy, let’s move on to the 48th. I mean, speaking of redistricting, it feels like it had a big influence here.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Guy Marzorati:\u003c/strong> Yeah, this is maybe the most wildly gerrymandered seat of all the competitive races in California. Down in Southern California, Darrell Issa held this seat in kind of northern and eastern San Diego County. This was completely reworked to loop in Palm Springs, a hotbed of Democratic voters, and move toward some of the more Democratic parts of North County San Diego.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">What you ended up with was a seat where Democrats really liked their chances of winning. Issa decided not to run for reelection, and instead you have Marnie von Wilpert, who’s a San Diego City Council member, running against Jim Desmond, who is a county supervisor in San Diego.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Here you see one of the dynamics that you often have when a party is facing a potential wave, where Desmond has really tried to localize the race. He’s on the Board of Supervisors in San Diego, and he represents most of the folks in this congressional district.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">When I was down there, I really heard his supporters and his campaign talking about the local work that he’s done, his focus on constituent services. That is a signal to me that he doesn’t want to talk about Trump. He doesn’t want to talk about, you know, the national politics, whereas von Wilpert is really running on that platform.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">She’s the candidate I mentioned who filmed commercials at gas stations. I spent some time at gas stations in the area. That definitely was a big topic for folks in that district. They drive a lot.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">And actually, if you zoom out, if you break down the districts based on who drives the most in each congressional district in California, all of the competitive seats in the state are in kind of the top third of heaviest-driving districts.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">So this kind of issue resonates, and Democrats like von Wilpert are able to say, sure, we’ve had the highest gas prices for a while, but this recent spike is because of the war that the president started. And that turns out to have been a pretty effective message.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Yeah, we’re talking about the House races, the key races that will determine the balance of power in Congress in California as well as across the country.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">And listeners, tell us which ones are grabbing your attention, both the House and Senate races, how you’re feeling a week from Election Day, and what questions you have about whether this blue wave will materialize. The email address is forum@kqed.org. Post on our social channels at KQED Forum. Call 866-733-6786.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Brandon in Redwood City is on. Brandon, go ahead.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Brandon:\u003c/strong> Hi, everybody. Good morning. Um, I just want to say I saw Bernie and Jane Kim and Ro Khanna. I even handed a business card to Ro Khanna on the street. I don’t know why he was wandering around out in front of the Curran Theater after everything wrapped up, but I was just inspired.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I’ve already voted. I’ve voted yes on Prop 40 and no on 41 and 42. Those are the two big ones for me. I know it’s probably going to go, but my comment, and I’d like to hear some input, is just more so, I hope that not only, obviously, do we get a blue wave, but I hope the Democrats, you know, now that we finally throw the ball to them, catch it and get across the finish line, and do that by doing what the people want.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I, for one, am not interested in seeing a bunch of attacking Trump. I’d love to see the guy in jail. Don’t get me wrong, but I do think that we need to focus on bringing down prices and really reach a peace accord with everybody who has voted for them.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I don’t want to see retribution, and I just hope that we can do things that the farmers and the truckers and those people on the MAGA side can point to as beneficial for them, you know?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Yeah, thanks. It’s interesting. It’s almost like you’re hearing a little bit of what you were describing, Guy, about Randy Villegas’s approach and what Brandon is saying he wants to see.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Guy Marzorati:\u003c/strong> Yeah, and I think this is an open question for Democrats if they do win back the House and the Senate, what kind of approach they’ll take.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">You’ve heard Democratic leadership in recent weeks kind of dance around the question of whether their top priority would be pursuing an impeachment of the president. I think that’s an issue where Democrats feel cross-pressured from both the base, who would like to see hearings, investigations, and an acknowledgment that, look, the political impact of that might not be so great, and what voters are asking for as their top priority, which is addressing the cost of living.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">So that’ll be fascinating to watch. And I also think the margin really matters for Democrats. If it’s just a handful-of-seats majority that they’re able to hold, that creates a really difficult, interesting dynamic for the next potential speaker, probably Hakeem Jeffries.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">You’re going to be dealing with members, many of them newly elected and more progressive, who might have a different agenda and want to take the party in different directions. If the margin they’re able to gain on election night becomes larger, that gives more room to operate for whoever the next Democratic leader is.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Erin, do you think Brandon’s feelings align with what you’re hearing nationwide?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Erin Covey:\u003c/strong> I think so. I think that voters are frustrated with the system writ large right now. And I think Democrats are bearing the brunt of that criticism right now from some of their voters because they view them as not willing to fight back against the Trump administration as much as they would like.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">But, of course, fighting back looks different to different voters, whether or not it means widespread health care legislation or investigations into the president and members of his Cabinet. There is a lot of disagreement, both within the base and within party leadership, I think.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">And so it remains to be seen the direction that Democrats will take policy-wise, assuming they win the majority in the House. But what I will say is that Trump is still going to be president at the end of the day, even if Democrats have a majority in the Senate as well. It will not be filibuster-proof, and so there is very little that can actually get done legislatively.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Actually, Erin, while we’re on state-level races, I do want to just ask you quickly about a statewide race that has gotten a lot of national attention recently, and that’s the Ohio governor’s race, where the Republican candidate, of course, Vivek Ramaswamy, posted a malicious ad featuring Democratic candidate Amy Acton and essentially weaponizing her mother’s betrayal of Acton when she was sexually assaulted as a child.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">There has been so much criticism and condemnation of this ad. I’m just curious if Cook has seen that translate into any notable shift away from the Republican candidate.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Erin Covey:\u003c/strong> Yeah, so the answer is yes. We did recently move this race from toss-up to Lean Democrat, in part as a result of the backlash to that ad that Ramaswamy ran.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">But I think even before that, there was a sense that Acton was developing a bit of a clear edge here. And, look, I think the attacks in this race have been very personal all cycle. Sometimes when you have a candidate who is just so enmeshed in that, it can cause them to do things that are, you know, politically unwise.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">This ad clearly was going to backfire on Republicans. We’ve seen that it did. And there were a lot of Republicans who were critical of it after it was released. So it is not a surprise that it has given Acton further momentum in the final stretch of this race.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Guy Marzorati:\u003c/strong> And that just didn’t seem like an ad you would run if you felt like you were up by five points. You know, I think you roll the dice and hope that the impression voters get is the one that’s presented through the ad, but we saw a huge amount of media coverage of the ad as a story. So voters were getting the full information about the context of that, and clearly it backfired.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Yeah. Well, staying with California for one more toss-up race, this is one where there is a lot of spending, ad spending, and this is the 13th. Guy, remind us about this district, the race that Adam Gray won to claim it a couple of years ago, and why Republicans are spending so big here.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Guy Marzorati:\u003c/strong> Yeah, the nail-biter district. This was, I believe, the closest congressional election in the country in 2024. Adam Gray won this seat by 187 votes after losing it very narrowly in 2022.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">This was another district where the lines were moved because of Proposition 50. It’s in the Central Valley, centered around Merced and Modesto, but it also added parts of Stockton, which brought in more Democratic voters.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">And this is one where Gray is, as he’s been known, a Valley Democrat. He’s really run his career as a centrist, both in his time in the state legislature and in Congress. He’s really focused his messaging on the gains he’s been able to bring back to the district through the budget.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The Republicans have focused their attacks on Gray’s vote in support of the gas tax while he was in the state legislature, which ended up funding transportation and road repair.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">This is one where I think it’s so interesting. You look across these districts in California, and as much ground as Republicans have lost here in the last 10 years on the congressional level, I think they’ve actually been pretty good at candidate recruitment. I don’t think they necessarily lost because they put forward folks who just can’t find a way to win.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">In this case, the Republicans put forward Kevin Lincoln, who is the mayor of Stockton. I mentioned Democrats added a lot of blue voters in Stockton. Well, Kevin Lincoln has won in Stockton as mayor. Yet again, we go back to this national environment and these national headwinds that Lincoln is running against. I think it’s why you saw Cook shift this race toward Democrats in recent days.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Yeah, so what is Lincoln trying to attack Gray on for the most part, Guy?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Guy Marzorati:\u003c/strong> I mean, it’s focused on this 2017 vote that Gray took when he was a member of the state Assembly to increase the gas tax. He’s defended it. He’s said, you know, the state went a number of years before that without increasing the gas tax, which funds road repair in the state.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">But the gas tax is a big reason — you could say the number one reason — for the price differential between California gas and gas elsewhere in the country. So it’s become a real target issue for Republicans.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">It passed the Legislature. Voters approved it two years later when there was a repeal effort. So, you know, Gray might feel comfortable sticking by his vote, but certainly in a district like that, where the cost of living is the top issue and voters do drive a lot, that is something Republicans have keyed in on as they’ve attacked Gray.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Erin, do you have any insight into why Cook moved the race from toss-up to Lean Democrat? It was a while back, actually, so — so I actually moved it to Likely Democrat recently.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Erin Covey:\u003c/strong> Yeah, I was going to say, look, I think that both parties’ super PACs have stopped a lot of their spending here because they’re increasingly seeing this seat as out of reach for Republicans this cycle.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">You know, I don’t think it’s over, certainly. I think Kevin Lincoln — I agree that he’s a good candidate who could certainly make this race closer than it should be. But the polling has pretty consistently shown Gray with an edge.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I’ll remind folks that this district shifted six points to the left after redistricting. This obviously was an incredibly close race in 2024, when Trump was winning the district by about five and a half points. This is now a seat that Harris won narrowly.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">So it is different, and the environment is a lot different for Democrats as well, of course, nationally speaking. Even if Gray is vulnerable on his record in Sacramento before he went to Washington, I don’t think it’s going to be enough for Lincoln to close the gap here this cycle.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> So, Erin, how would you overall assess the success of redistricting efforts by both Democrats and Republicans midway through?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Erin Covey:\u003c/strong> Look, I think it’s basically a wash. Republicans came out slightly on top. We are projecting that they will be able to net around three seats due to redistricting alone, but that is not by the wide margin they were hoping for.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">That’s because a lot of the maps that Republicans redrew in the past year were predicated on the fact that Republicans would be able to match Trump’s margin in a lot of these parts of the country. What we have seen is that his approval rating has dropped off so much that they’re probably not going to be able to do so.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Guy Marzorati:\u003c/strong> I mean, one question I’ve been thinking about this last week is, given this national environment, do Democrats need to gerrymander in California? Could they have won two, three, four seats under the previous maps, given where things stand?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> I think they certainly could have. Well, but, right, these maps will be in play in ’28 and ’30, right, Guy? Maybe they’ll pay some dividends there for Democrats, at least.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Guy Marzorati:\u003c/strong> Yeah, and there’s a whole messaging component to this that we can talk about.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Yeah, we’re talking with Guy Marzorati, politics correspondent for KQED, and Erin Covey, editor at The Cook Political Report. And with you, our listeners, we’ll talk Senate after the break. Stay with us. This is \u003cem>Forum\u003c/em>.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> You’re listening to \u003cem>Forum\u003c/em>. I’m Mina Kim. The key House races in California and Senate races nationwide that will decide control of Congress for the rest of President Trump’s term — that’s the topic of our conversation this hour with Erin Covey, editor at The Cook Political Report, who specializes in the House of Representatives, and Guy Marzorati, politics correspondent for KQED, covering California politics with always an eye on the nation.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Listeners, how are you feeling a week from Election Day? Nervous, hopeful? What questions do you have about the strength of this so-called blue wave materializing? Which House and Senate races here in California and nationwide are grabbing your attention, and what are the issues driving your vote?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Email forum@kqed.org, find us on Discord, Bluesky, Facebook, or Instagram at KQED Forum. Call 866-733-6786, 866-733-6786 as well, to get your voice heard.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Before I go to calls, really quick, Erin, tell me where Cook has the Senate picture right now for Democrats and Republicans.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Erin Covey:\u003c/strong> Right now, we believe that control of the Senate is a pure toss-up. We’re projecting that Democrats will flip anywhere from two to six Senate seats. Now, they only need four for the majority, so that is now well within their reach, which is a very different picture from what we saw at the beginning of 2025, when it looked like Republicans were the overwhelming favorites to hold the Senate majority.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Yeah, so four to get to 51, right, to overcome the vice president’s tie-breaking vote?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Erin Covey:\u003c/strong> Correct.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> All right. Well, I think we have a question from listener Colin in San Francisco. Hi, Colin. Thanks for waiting.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Colin:\u003c/strong> Good morning. I’ve been following the campaign of Abdul El-Sayed for the open Senate seat in Michigan with great interest. Understanding Israel-Palestine isn’t the first issue that most voters base their decisions on, the University of Southern California’s Democracy Lab just ran a poll in Nancy Pelosi’s congressional district in which 72% of respondents answered that they have a very unfavorable opinion of the Israeli government, with an additional 15% answering that they had a somewhat unfavorable opinion.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Does this indicate that, at least until very recently within the Democratic Party, there’s a large gap between where most of the elected representatives are on Israel-Palestine and where their own voters are?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Colin, thanks. Erin, do you want to take that first, and then we can get into the dynamics of this particular race as well?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Erin Covey:\u003c/strong> Yeah, look, public opinion on Israel has shifted dramatically over the past couple of years. I believe that, according to Pew, only older Republicans now have a favorable view of Israel if you’re looking at various age groups divided by party.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">And so this is really an issue where increasingly there are a number of elected Democrats who are out of step with their base. It has been very difficult for them to navigate.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">And, of course, there are parts of the country with larger Jewish populations that have a more nuanced view of Israel. We’ve seen this play out in a number of House races. Of course, it’s been a factor in the Michigan Senate race as well.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I think, ultimately, there are other issues that are driving voters’ behavior more, largely the cost of living. But this is certainly an issue that could impact some voters’ decisions.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Where does Cook have this Senate race?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Erin Covey:\u003c/strong> We have it rated—\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> —as a pure toss-up. Pure toss-up. Okay, so not leaning down at all. But interestingly, people have been pointing out that El-Sayed’s — you know, the way that he’s been resonating with voters — was not predicted. What do you think is causing that?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Erin Covey:\u003c/strong> Look, I think this is a really interesting matchup. We’re seeing both candidates campaign in parts of the state that are unexpected.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Mike Rogers, the Republican, is campaigning down in Detroit, hoping to make some inroads with Black voters there who preferred Haley Stevens over El-Sayed in the Senate Democratic primary.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">At the same time, you’re seeing El-Sayed campaigning up in the Upper Peninsula, which is a historically very Republican part of the state. But I think his message on affordability and the way that he has clearly separated himself from the Democratic establishment has been compelling to a lot of voters in the state.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Yeah, interesting. He’s not a socialist himself, but has received a lot of support from democratic socialists and those to the left of the party. I’m just curious if you think that says something about where national Democrats could go, or whether they’re watching it to see if that’s where they’ll go, Erin.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Erin Covey:\u003c/strong> Yeah, I mean, I think that is the big question this cycle. Can we see these candidates who either are democratic socialists or have been tied heavily to the democratic socialist wing of the party? Can they still be successful in these swing seats, where historically moderates have done better?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Look, I do think that if they do end up winning in a lot of these places, that is largely going to be a result of the political environment, in which Trump is so unpopular that voters would rather vote for someone they might think is a socialist over a Republican who is going to be a rubber stamp for Trump.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">But that is the reason that this race, I think, is still quite close. The polling we’ve seen shows that El-Sayed has the edge, but it’s not by a wide enough margin to say that it’s really a Lean Democrat race at this point.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> I see. Anything you would add about this race, Guy?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Guy Marzorati:\u003c/strong> I mean, I think just looking across the polling in these Senate races, I don’t think people should be surprised one way or another with these results. There’s a lot of conversation about polling errors, but if you look at RealClearPolling, all of these races — whether you’re talking about Texas, Michigan, Iowa, Maine, or Alaska — are within three points.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">That going one way or another does not indicate a massive polling error. So I do think the Senate, as Erin says, really is in that kind of toss-up state.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Well, another seat that has gotten so much attention, Erin, of course, is the one in Texas: Republican Ken Paxton and Democrat James Talarico. Tell us about this race and what it might highlight in terms of an opportunity for Democrats in Texas.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Erin Covey:\u003c/strong> This is a really remarkable race. I mean, when we’re talking about the issue of corruption, it is a bigger issue here than in any other race in the country.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">And that is because the Republican nominee, State Attorney General Ken Paxton, who ousted the sitting Republican Senator John Cornyn in the primary earlier this year, has a litany of corruption allegations against him. He’s been indicted.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">There are a number of Republicans who are not going to vote for him. They’re not going to vote for the Democrat, James Talarico, either. But if enough of those Republicans decide not to vote in the Senate race at all, that is how Talarico gets to victory here.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">And we do see this race as a toss-up as well. Again, polling has also shown Talarico with a pretty consistent edge. Some polls show it’s shrunk a little bit in recent weeks, which makes sense. This is a state that voted for Trump by double digits in 2024, and so we really should not see a Democrat doing as well here as Talarico is.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">But I do think that Democrats are in a better position this cycle to flip the seat than they were even in 2018, when Beto O’Rourke got quite close.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Yeah, Democrats are definitely wary of that 2018 loss to Ted Cruz, pretty decisively, by Beto O’Rourke. And so I imagine they are very worried about having their hopes dashed. But why do you think Talarico has resonated so much with Texas to make it as close as it is, besides just the national headwinds against Republicans?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Erin Covey:\u003c/strong> I mean, look, I’ll say the big difference between 2018 and this cycle is that Paxton is not Ted Cruz. Cruz, of course, is a polarizing figure, but he was running a strong campaign. He was raising money, and he did not have this massive baggage that Paxton has, which is too far of a line for some Republican voters in Texas to cross. Even some prominent leaders in the state have mentioned recently that they are not going to be voting for Paxton.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">And so that is really the main issue driving things here.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Talarico, I think, has also run a really strong campaign and has been very successful at messaging voters in new ways. He’s really taken advantage of social media in a way that I think a lot of candidates have not done in recent years. So he has really been able to energize support on the ground.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">He’s also a seminarian and talks about his faith in a way that is unique for a Democratic candidate. I think that could help him make inroads with some Republican voters. Of course, he’s quite a bit more liberal than a lot of these voters, but if he’s seen as an upstanding religious man, that provides quite a contrast with Paxton.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> I want to hear, Guy, what you find interesting about the dynamics of this race, but I’d also love to ask a little bit more about the Latino vote in this case. Kind of like California, right? It’s an interesting bellwether.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Guy Marzorati:\u003c/strong> Yeah. I mean, on this statewide Senate race, keep an eye on races like this in Texas, where there’s more than two candidates on the ballot in the general election. Life is a lot easier for Democrats if their candidate doesn’t actually have to get over 50% to win. Talarico is in that position, and some of the other states are in that position as well.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">On the Latino vote in Texas, look, this was a huge factor in the gerrymandering that took place in the state, where Republicans in Texas used 2024 as the baseline for how they were drawing these districts. That baseline was Latino voters, especially along the border, shifting toward Trump.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">So if that’s your baseline and that vote completely changes between 2024 and 2026, suddenly that gerrymander is no longer in such a confident state. And so I think that’s what Republicans are dealing with.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">In California, of course, the gerrymandering was the other way. Democrats drew these districts to make them more advantageous to unseat Republicans. But it’s something we’re certainly also watching here in places like the Central Valley, where the Adam Gray seat, the 13th District, and the 22nd District are both majority-Latino seats that went toward Donald Trump in 2024 and could go back the other way in 2026.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Yeah, so Erin, what are you seeing? Are you seeing potentially a shift from 2024 to 2026, with Latinos moving away from Trump and the Republicans?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Erin Covey:\u003c/strong> Yes, we’re seeing a major shift both in polling and in special-election and off-year election results. We have seen significant reversion among Hispanic voters away from Republicans.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">And I think it’s important to remember that before 2024, a lot of Democratic Party leaders were taking Hispanic voters’ support for them for granted. Republicans were able to make significant inroads, and Trump was able to make significant inroads by talking a lot about economic issues and promising that he was going to improve these voters’ prospects.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">But, of course, the past two years have done the opposite of that for many of these voters, who are not Republican voters. They are more independent voters who liked Trump in 2024 but are much more willing to swing back toward a Democrat than a tried-and-true Republican voter in some of these other parts of the country.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">That’s why we’re seeing such a dramatic shift left in a lot of these South Texas seats in particular, which are majority Hispanic.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Yeah, it’s been really interesting to watch. Erin Covey is editor at The Cook Political Report, and Guy Marzorati is politics correspondent for KQED.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">And let me remind listeners, you are listening to \u003cem>Forum\u003c/em>. I’m Mina Kim. We’ve got a lot of people who are actually asking questions and focused on what happens after the Democrats take the House.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Barbara in Sunnyvale has a slightly different take from Brandon, who writes, “Unless we want more corruption, Dems need to vigorously investigate it if they take the House. Dems won’t have much power to legislate since their legislation will likely be vetoed by Trump.”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Well, that’s, of course, if they can get it through the Senate. Let me go to Dan in Santa Clara. Dan, go ahead. You’re on.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Dan:\u003c/strong> Well, good morning. Thanks for taking my call. Erin, you earlier mentioned the Senate not having a supermajority to be able to overcome a filibuster. I’m fairly active in the Democratic community, and there’s a lot of talk about doing specific carve-outs for specific votes. I was wondering, is that just idle chat, or is that a possibility?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Erin Covey:\u003c/strong> Yeah, no, I think it’s a possibility. But again, I think that actually getting any legislation signed into law is going to be close to impossible over the next two years, at least.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">But, of course, if Democrats enter the 2028 presidential cycle with majorities in the House and the Senate, if they even have maybe a 52- or 53-seat majority in the Senate, that puts them in a position in 2029. So we’ll see what happens there.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">But yes, I think, to the previous commenter’s point, there is still a lot of disagreement, both among Democratic voters and among Democratic Party leaders, about how to focus their efforts over the next two years with Trump still in office.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Guy Marzorati:\u003c/strong> And I think if it’s 51 votes, we have to talk about the Fetterman factor. You know, where does John Fetterman in Pennsylvania position himself? If he suddenly becomes the only thing standing between a potential Republican majority, how does he caucus? How does he vote?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Well, Alan in Benicia writes, “I hear folks saying that if the Democrats can’t win both houses now under these conditions, they will never win. But sadly, I can think of another scenario. After two more years of screwed-up policies, the backlash to Republicans could be even more pronounced.”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Guy, how soon do you think we’ll know the balance of power in Congress? How soon could these tight races in California, for example, be called? What do you think people should be prepared for?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Guy Marzorati:\u003c/strong> I mean, if history is any guide, a close congressional race in California is going to take probably more than a week to decipher. Now, it’ll depend on how close the margin is, but we’ve seen some of these races, especially in the Central Valley, where some of the counties have been on the slower end of vote counting, drag deep into November before we know the winner.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">In previous years, that’s been really key to the actual majority in the House. That might not be the case this year. We might know whether Democrats hold the majority before we know, for example, who’s won in the 22nd District in California.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">And, look, maybe some of the recent changes to speed up the vote count here, with more funding for counties to do that, will have an impact. But I’m certainly not expecting to know, for example, the result of that race on election night.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Yeah. Nationally, Erin, what should people expect? What should they be prepared for?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Erin Covey:\u003c/strong> Look, it’s going to take a while to count all these votes. I think that if we’re talking about which party is going to have a majority in the House, we’ll know that relatively quickly. I wouldn’t be surprised if we get a call on that within the first day.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">That’s because we expect Democrats to win by a wide enough majority that they won’t need to know the results of California’s 22nd District, for example, in order to get to that magic number. Hopefully, for all of our sakes, that is not the case.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">But in the Senate, things could take a while. In Alaska, there is a very competitive toss-up Senate race that is not going to be tabulated until two weeks after the election because it’s conducted using ranked-choice voting.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">So I would encourage folks to be patient and to remember that this is just the process playing out. Some states have to take longer than other states to count their votes.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Right, that’s, of course, Democrat Mary Peltola challenging Senator Dan Sullivan. And there’s been a lot of activity in that race, but that is too much to get into at the moment.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">But sort of related, Steve writes, “I’m particularly frightened that the post-election period will be violently divisive, as Trump already incites all kinds of thuggery. And the Trump administration has continued to be brazen in making threats about their plans to illegally subvert their predicted election losses into fake wins.”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">So what’s the plan to resist that? Either of you want to try to take that on?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Guy Marzorati:\u003c/strong> I mean, certainly what we’re seeing in California right now is unprecedented. This probe by the Justice Department into what they allege are noncitizens on the voter rolls, coming just a week before the election — I’ve never seen anything like this.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">We’ll see how it plays out in court and what impact it will have electorally, but I think it’s probably fair to say part of this is political, either sowing doubt or just kind of throwing spaghetti against the wall, given the electoral environment.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Even though it might not have a huge impact in any specific race, especially given just the numbers here. I mean, just to put it in context, the Department of Justice has brought forward this idea of 20,000 voters across the state who are noncitizens on the voter rolls, not necessarily having voted. So nothing that’s actually going to swing an election.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">But I think it’s just part of this kind of unprecedented action we’ve seen around legal activity in the polls.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Yeah, and of course, speaking of Alaska, right, Erin, basically the DOJ is saying that if the Republican candidate narrowly loses, Alaska should not certify that election.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Erin Covey:\u003c/strong> That’s correct. The DOJ has already preemptively filed a lawsuit essentially saying the results are not legitimate if Dan Sullivan, the incumbent, loses.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Look, I don’t think this is going to hold up in court, but it certainly could lead to a lot of mistrust and conspiracies in those weeks leading up to the Alaska result actually being tabulated.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Well, I really appreciate you coming on to share your analysis, Erin. Thank you so much.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Erin Covey:\u003c/strong> Thanks for having me on.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Again, Erin Covey is editor at The Cook Political Report, and Guy Marzorati is politics correspondent for KQED, covering California politics and beyond. Really appreciate you being on with us as well.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Guy Marzorati:\u003c/strong> Thanks, Mina.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> And, as always, to our listeners, thank you for sharing your questions and comments and really showing your engagement in the election process. We appreciate that, too.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">My thanks to Ana de Almeida Amaral for producing today’s segment. You’ve been listening to \u003cem>Forum\u003c/em>. I’m Mina Kim.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Announcer:\u003c/strong> Funds for the production of \u003cem>Forum\u003c/em> are provided by the Jenerosity Family Fund and the members of KQED.\u003c/p>\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"slug": "immigrants-are-dying-in-ice-detention-centers-can-california-hold-dhs-accountable",
"title": "Immigrants are Dying in ICE Detention Centers. Can California Hold DHS Accountable?",
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"headTitle": "Immigrants are Dying in ICE Detention Centers. Can California Hold DHS Accountable? | KQED",
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"content": "\n\u003ch2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Airdate: Tuesday, October 10, 2026 at 10 AM\u003c/h2>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>The Adelanto ICE Processing Center, an immigration detention facility located northeast of Los Angeles, has been riddled with allegations of abuse, unsafe drinking water and detainees being denied medical care. In 2025, a detainee at Adelanto, Ismael Ayala Uribe, died in ICE custody after repeatedly requesting medical attention. What is happening behind the locked doors of ICE detention centers in California? What power does the state have to hold DHS accountable? Join us as we speak with journalists investigating California detention facilities and the creators of the new Al Jazeera documentary, “Dying in Detention.”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Guests:\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n\u003cli>\u003cstrong>Jeremy Young,\u003c/strong> senior producer for Fault Lines, Al Jazeera English\u003c/li>\n\n\n\n\u003cli>\u003cstrong>Andrea Castillo,\u003c/strong> staff writer covering immigration, LA Times\u003c/li>\n\u003c/ul>\n\n\n\n\u003ch2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Episode Transcript\u003c/h2>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cem>\u003cstrong>This is a computer-generated transcript. While our team has reviewed it, there may be errors.\u003c/strong>\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Welcome to \u003cem>Forum\u003c/em>. I’m Mina Kim. The Department of Homeland Security bought two more ICE detention facilities in California this month, adding to the two it bought in July in San Diego and Kern counties. This time, the purchases were of facilities in Adelanto, known for being the deadliest in the state. Four people have died there since last year, with their families alleging inadequate medical care in each case. It’s the focus of a new documentary from Al Jazeera English’s \u003cem>Fault Lines\u003c/em> series called \u003cem>Dying in Detention\u003c/em>.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Joining me now is Jeremy Young, senior producer on \u003cem>Fault Lines\u003c/em> from Al Jazeera English and part of the team behind \u003cem>Dying in Detention\u003c/em>. Jeremy, welcome to \u003cem>Forum\u003c/em>.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jeremy Young:\u003c/strong> Thank you for having me, Mina.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> So, in this film, you focused on Adelanto’s ICE processing center. What can you tell us about Adelanto and the people being held there?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jeremy Young:\u003c/strong> Sure. So, the Adelanto ICE Processing Center is one of the larger detention facilities in the country, and it’s located several hours outside of Los Angeles, at the edge of the desert. And it’s had a troubled past. It’s had all kinds of different state and federal investigations, different types of allegations of abuse and medical neglect against it. At one point, there had been so much litigation and oversight that it was down to less than 10 detainees at the facility.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>This, of course, changed when President Trump came into office for his second term, ramped up the crackdown, and now there’s almost 2,000 people who are detained at Adelanto today.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> And how long are detainees typically there? If it’s an ICE processing center, the name sort of suggests a transitional place.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jeremy Young:\u003c/strong> Well, I mean, a lot of the vocabulary that’s used around immigration detention is puzzling, so don’t get too caught up on it. People are there who are fighting for their right to stay in this country. And it’s not clear exactly why people are deported at certain times, why people are moved around as much as they are.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>But the people that we spoke to said — one detainee in particular who had children who are 9 and 11 — he said, “I’m gonna make sure my children know that I never give up and that I’m always gonna have fought to be here till the end to be with them.” So there are people in there who are really fighting to stay close to their families.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> So your film focused on the death of 39-year-old Ismael Ayala Uribe at Adelanto. Tell us about him.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jeremy Young:\u003c/strong> Ismael was a 39-year-old gentleman who came to the United States at age five. He had achieved DACA status and had some protections, which he then lost, actually, when he had a conviction for a DUI. But he worked at a local car wash in Southern California for 15 years, rising through the ranks to become the right-hand man to the owner.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And most importantly, he was a son and an uncle and a brother. And we got to know his family really well and really understand how much they’re hurting and how much they miss him.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Yeah, we actually have a clip of his nephew from your documentary. Let’s hear it.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Ismael’s Nephew:\u003c/strong> He was a good uncle. The kids needed something, he would always go get it. Get them school clothes, supplies, or whatever they needed, you know?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jeremy Young:\u003c/strong> I know they do miss him.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> So, Jeremy, what happened to Ismael after he arrived? What made him sick?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jeremy Young:\u003c/strong> So, you know, he basically developed an infection that went untreated, and he complained for weeks about having severe pain in his buttocks, which he rated as 10 out of 10 on a pain scale. And as far as we could tell, he was really only given Tylenol. He was supposed to be checked on twice a day, and we learned that they didn’t check on him at all.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Eventually, this infection just got worse and worse and spread into his bloodstream. He was rushed to the hospital in the middle of the night, and they were able to revive him when he arrived at the hospital. When he arrived at the hospital, he lost his pulse and needed to be intubated and revived in the emergency room. So he was in a really, really rough state when he arrived at the hospital, and he only survived for another 24 hours before he passed away.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> I understand it was an infected skin abscess. What does it take to treat a skin abscess?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jeremy Young:\u003c/strong> It’s actually very treatable. We interviewed Physicians for Human Rights’ Dr. Nicholas Cunio for the documentary, and he reviewed the medical documents with us. It really takes some antibiotics and then a small incision to remove the abscess. And it’s a very, very basic procedure. And, you know, according to Physicians for Human Rights, his death was absolutely avoidable.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Let’s also hear a clip from the physician.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Dr. Nicholas Cunio:\u003c/strong> If you’re arriving and, within just a few minutes, losing your pulse, that suggests that you were extremely sick and it was not adequately recognized in time to be treated effectively. It could have been purposefully obfuscating the clinical reality. I believe Ismael’s death could have fully been prevented by timely care.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> What is the physician saying there, Jeremy, about it possibly having been purposefully obfuscated?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jeremy Young:\u003c/strong> Yeah, so this is really interesting to us, Mina, because, you know, this particular case had been covered quite a bit. And when we looked at the medical examiner’s investigation into his death, it included information that ICE did not include in its public report. And he was in such a severe state when he arrived at the hospital. Within minutes, he lost his pulse, and ICE did not include that information in its public report.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>We’ve subsequently learned more information about what happened to Ismael, but I think one of the big takeaways is that the public reports that ICE puts out on detainee deaths omit serious information and are really problematic.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> We actually reached out to DHS for a comment and reaction to your documentary, and this is what they said. They said, “Allegations of subprime conditions at the Adelanto facility are false. Being in detention is a choice. We encourage all illegal aliens to take control of their departure with the CBP Home app. The U.S. is offering illegal aliens $3,000 and a free flight to self-deport now. We encourage every person here illegally to take advantage of this offer and reserve the chance to come back to the U.S. the right way to live the American dream.”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>What’s your response to that?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jeremy Young:\u003c/strong> Well, that’s quite a comment, Mina. I will say one of the important things to remind your listeners is that the overwhelming majority of people in immigration detention, more than 70%, have no criminal conviction at all. And the people that we spoke to have families. They have loved ones who live here. They have communities that rely on them. And they don’t want to get on a plane and fly away. They want to go back to being with their loved ones and being back in these communities where they mean so much and where they’ve really provided the fabric.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> So I want to invite listeners into the conversation. Listeners, what questions do you have about the conditions at the ICE facility in Adelanto? What are your questions? Do you have any direct experience with them? Have you had a relative inside, and have they told you about conditions inside as well?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>You can join the conversation at the email address, forum@kqed.org. You can find us on Discord, Bluesky, Facebook, or Instagram at KQED Forum, and you can give us a call at 866-733-6786, 866-733-6786.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>So, Jeremy, as I noted in the introduction, there have been four deaths in Adelanto. Do they share similarities with Ismael’s?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jeremy Young:\u003c/strong> They absolutely do. I mean, we interviewed the attorney general of California, Rob Bonta, for this story because the attorney general’s office has unique oversight capabilities in the state of California. And one of the things that they found was that they were not paying outside providers for medical care, and people were not being taken outside the facility to see specialists.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And so the pattern that we’ve seen has been consistently that people are denied complex medical care and, you know, have died as a result. And it’s just — I just have to remind you, Mina, the idea that someone would go to an immigration detention facility and ultimately die, I mean, I think every single death that I’ve looked at has been preventable and avoidable. And it is just an unacceptable outcome that someone expires while they’re in an immigration detention facility.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> In Ismael’s case, it was in a matter of five weeks. I want to bring into the conversation now Andrea Castillo, a staff writer at the \u003cem>Los Angeles Times\u003c/em> who covers immigration. Andrea, thanks so much for being with us.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Andrea Castillo:\u003c/strong> Thanks for having me.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> You also have looked at recent court-ordered reports that documented some really harsh conditions in Adelanto. What can you tell us about the broader conditions in this facility?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Andrea Castillo:\u003c/strong> Yeah, that’s right. Immigrant rights groups filed this federal class-action lawsuit against DHS this year. They alleged poor drinking water and food, sanitation and medical care issues at the facility. A federal judge had ordered the facility to make improvements.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>In August, there was a video that went viral appearing to show worm-like creatures in a bottle of water. The family of a detainee had recorded the video. And, as you noted, four people have died at that facility since last year, so the conditions do not appear to have improved.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>An independent court monitor this month actually found mold and gnat larvae in the shower rooms. They found cracked and worn-out mattresses, delayed visitations, and an inadequate system to track disability accommodations. A second independent monitor, who was assigned to inspect medical conditions at the facility, told the court that he was actually prevented from accessing the facility and its medical records, so he was unable to provide an update.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> And Jeremy mentioned, you know, some of the issues with Adelanto have been ongoing. There was a lawsuit settlement, I understand, related to something that happened during the pandemic with COVID. What happened?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Andrea Castillo:\u003c/strong> Yeah, so I recently wrote about this settlement regarding the application of a chemical disinfectant called HDQ Neutral. The allegation was that detainees, during the early period of the pandemic, the first several months of 2020, were indiscriminately sprayed with this chemical.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Many times, you know, they were sprayed with an overly concentrated amount of the chemical. So, you know, it was supposed to be watered down, and that wasn’t happening, and nobody was given the instructions on how to actually properly use this chemical. They were spraying it directly into the air.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>A whistleblower who had formerly worked at the facility ended up saying in a declaration in court that he was told to spray it like Lysol.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> And what health impacts did that have on people there?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Andrea Castillo:\u003c/strong> Very severe health impacts: blistering, nosebleeds, chemical burns. People would show what looked like actual burns on their arms and their extremities, anywhere that was exposed to the chemical. It was sprayed in their food, and they could taste it. Vomiting. Some people ended up with permanent eye damage and respiratory issues.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>One person that I spoke to said that he has to sleep propped up by pillows now, six years after he was released from the facility, because if he doesn’t, he ends up gasping for air. He used to work as a long-haul truck driver, but he can’t pass the physical assessment now, and so he has turned to making his money through online resale.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> This is happening in California, at a California facility. Listeners, we’re talking about the conditions in California’s deadliest ICE facility in Adelanto, and we’ll have more with our guests and with you after the break. This is \u003cem>Forum\u003c/em>. I’m Mina Kim.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Welcome back to \u003cem>Forum\u003c/em>. I’m Mina Kim. We’re talking this hour about the conditions inside a California ICE processing center in Adelanto, where four people have died since Trump took office.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>We’re talking about it with Jeremy Young, part of the team behind the documentary that looked deeply at Adelanto and the death of Ismael Ayala Uribe, in a film called \u003cem>Dying in Detention\u003c/em>, part of \u003cem>Fault Lines\u003c/em>, the series for Al Jazeera English. Andrea Castillo is also with us, a staff writer at the \u003cem>Los Angeles Times\u003c/em> who covers immigration.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And listeners, what are your questions about conditions at ICE facilities in California, at the jail in Adelanto? What are your questions about what happens now that the federal government has purchased the Adelanto facility? Do you have any direct experience with ICE centers? Have you had anyone that you know inside one, and what have they told you about the conditions?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>You can call us at 866-733-6786, 866-733-6786. You can email forum@kqed.org and post on our social channels on Discord, Bluesky, Facebook, or Instagram. We’re at KQED Forum.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Jeremy, one of the things that you noted, in addition to the broader conditions we were hearing about from you and Andrea in Adelanto, is that detainees were telling you about quite a bit of physical abuse, that some are being beaten.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jeremy Young:\u003c/strong> That’s right. As at other detention facilities across the country, detainees came together as part of a hunger strike and refused to eat the food that was provided by the facility. And the individuals who we spoke to allege that they were beaten for participating in the hunger strike.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>They said that they were thrown into solitary confinement to be made an example of for participating in the hunger strike. And others were fast-tracked for deportation out of the country for participating in the hunger strike and raising awareness about the conditions.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> So, Andrea, all of this happened while the facility was being owned by GEO Group. What can you tell us about GEO Group?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Andrea Castillo:\u003c/strong> GEO Group is one of the top private prison operators in the country, along with another company called CoreCivic. They own and operate the majority of detention space in the country. At the start of this administration, almost 90% of the detention space across the country was owned and operated by these types of companies.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>But now, though, that has started to change. The federal government is starting to buy up some of these facilities, although they will continue being managed by these private prison companies, which, in addition to operating detention facilities for immigration purposes, also operate prisons across the country.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> So, given the fact that GEO Group will continue to operate the detention center, it sounds like conditions are not expected to change much there, at least from what we’ve seen so far. Is that correct? How much did GEO Group sell this to DHS for?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Andrea Castillo:\u003c/strong> Well, these facilities are worth millions of dollars. The sales are made possible by this infusion last year of $45 billion in tax dollars for immigration detention from President Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act. And so far, DHS has spent more than $2 billion on six of these detention centers, including four in California. And so…\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Could it be possible that the harsh conditions could worsen? And I only ask this because it sounds like the federal government felt a need to buy these to be able to run them however they wished.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Andrea Castillo:\u003c/strong> I think that’s a possibility. One of the reasons for these purchases is as a way to push back on state and local oversight laws. California, of course, has some of the strongest oversight laws over these detention facilities in the country. The governor signed more than 20 bills just last month that are aimed at continuing to push back against the Trump administration’s immigration agenda.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And so, you know, they have been very clear — and when I say they, I mean DHS and the owners and operators of these detention facilities — about wanting protection from what they call “unwarranted litigation.” That’s a direct quote from George Zoley, who’s the CEO of the GEO Group. You know, they have these quarterly calls with shareholders, and earlier this year, that was what he told them: that they want to protect against these lawsuits around medical care and other detention conditions.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jeremy Young:\u003c/strong> And, Mina, I’ll add, it’s a real concern because the law that allows the attorney general to investigate these private prison facilities — you know, it was a law that was passed by the state legislature in California, and changing these to being federally owned facilities potentially could change their ability to do oversight and to investigate. So it’s a major concern.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Let me go to caller Crawford in Oakland. Crawford, go ahead. You’re on.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Crawford:\u003c/strong> Hey, I’m an emergency medical technician, and I was listening just a few minutes ago when you mentioned that an individual, after being exposed to a chemical, now has to sleep propped up on pillows. And I’m not a physician, but to me, that sounds most similar to a condition called pulmonary edema, which is when the small sacs that exchange oxygen in your lungs can actually fill with — in a lot of cases, it’s a type of interstitial fluid, or it could even be, you know, blood, to be blunt.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And I can only imagine even more people exposed to that industrial chemical could develop that symptom over time. It’s a condition that generally takes a while to actually manifest. And I can also imagine that if more people are being exposed to these kinds of harsh industrial chemicals, pulmonary edema is generally a common side effect of being exposed to the substance.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>So I wanted people to understand that that’s not just sleeping propped up on pillows because it’s comfortable. Sleeping propped up on pillows is because if you don’t, you can choke. Your body won’t be able to exchange oxygen, and you can die. So that’s a very serious complication, and I’m shocked, honestly. I’m on my way to work right now.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Well, Crawford, thank you for sharing what you know about this. And Andrea, I mean, as we said, this was something that was sued over because it was used on people during COVID, and I’m wondering, do you know if that means that it’s definitely no longer being used as a disinfectant?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Andrea Castillo:\u003c/strong> Yeah, it is not being used anymore as a disinfectant. They believe that around 2,700 people who were detained at Adelanto were exposed to that chemical.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And so one of the provisions of the settlement is that, you know, there have been monetary damages for — sorry, the settlement has resulted in money being given to the named plaintiffs. But for the people who are not among the six named plaintiffs, the rest of those 2,700 people may be able to bring their own lawsuits. And under the terms of the settlement, they now have this sort of precedent.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Well, Discord user Ben writes, “Note that the DHS statement talked aggressively about self-deportation. Their hope is that if enough horror stories exist, people will voluntarily self-deport out of fear, and they can actually manage to get most of the 14 million illegal immigrants out of the country. The cruelty is the point.”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Jeremy, what do you think about this with regard to explaining the kinds of conditions that we have seen at the facilities that you have covered in your documentary and in the statement that we got from ICE?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jeremy Young:\u003c/strong> It’s a great observation, and it’s something that we came across a lot while we were doing the reporting for the project. The Homeland Security secretary, Markwayne Mullin, had famously said, “This is not a Holiday Inn,” which is a bite that we included in our documentary. And a lot of people really do feel that they want the conditions in these facilities to be very difficult for people to navigate so that they leave the country.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And we heard it from family members, we heard from people who were detained there, we heard from attorneys, we heard from politicians. So it’s definitely an interesting perspective. And there are definitely people who haven’t been able to stay.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>We did a story last year about families that were separated under Trump. And one of the families, the mother, who had six children who were born here in the United States, was at this facility. And she just couldn’t take it anymore and decided that she would move back to Mexico and take four of her daughters with her. And, you know, not everyone’s able to survive in the circumstances inside these facilities.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Andrea Castillo:\u003c/strong> One thing I’ll add to that is just that we’ve seen an explosion in the number of people who are willing to accept voluntary departure. So instead of seeing their deportation process all the way through and fighting it up until the end, they are accepting deportation essentially early so that they can get out of these facilities.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Let me go to caller Chuck in Nevada, who I think has some pushback. Chuck, go ahead.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Chuck:\u003c/strong> Yeah, the question is, I’m an immigrant myself, but I’m talking about these people. They took chances. They break the law. No matter what your guest is saying, they want to go back to their families or they have worked here, they don’t want to leave their families, but they know what they were doing.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Do you mean what my guest is saying? I think the question really is whether or not people should die in detention, in U.S. custody. Jeremy, your reaction?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jeremy Young:\u003c/strong> Well, again, we mentioned this earlier, but the overwhelming majority of people who are in immigration detention are people who do not have a criminal conviction. And ICE has targeted — I mean, we worked on car washes in this particular episode because Ismael worked at a car wash, but car washes were targeted not because they thought that it would be chock-full of people who are doing human trafficking and selling drugs. They knew it would be an easy way to round up people who were undocumented and didn’t have status.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>So it’s very easy to go by Home Depot and pick up people who are waiting for work. It’s much more difficult to actually seek out criminals. And so that’s part of the dynamic that’s playing out here.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> And even if they have a criminal conviction, I guess is what I’m saying, nobody should die in U.S. custody under the circumstances that you’re describing, right?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jeremy Young:\u003c/strong> Of course. I said earlier, I feel like all of these deaths are avoidable. I mean, we’ve also had the highest rate of suicide in immigration detention facilities under President Trump in the second term. Those are very preventable when you do assessments, when people come in, you assess their mental health, you get them treatment. I think all of those deaths should be totally avoidable and, unfortunately, will be a stain on our conscience for some time.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Andrea Castillo:\u003c/strong> Can I add?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Yeah, go ahead, Andrea.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Andrea Castillo:\u003c/strong> You know, beyond all of that, these detention facilities operate under federal laws. You know, they are — people who are detained are under the care of the federal government, and the federal government is mandated to provide minimum standards of care.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>So whenever somebody is dying in a way that could have been prevented, that is a violation of federal law and what they are, you know, supposed to do.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jeremy Young:\u003c/strong> Not even to mention the impact that incarceration in these facilities has on people’s physical and mental health.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> So, Jeremy, has the news of the sale been shared with the families or the sources you’ve spoken with? Because people inside Adelanto have shared so much with you. I’m just curious what their families think now that ownership has changed to the federal government.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jeremy Young:\u003c/strong> Well, I mean, there have been local organizations that have been part of a Shut Down Adelanto campaign for some time. You know, they’ve been fighting this battle for a long time. And so, you know, for them, it’s probably another twist, another turn, another effort to avoid oversight.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And the truth is, are the conditions going to change at the facility? Are people going to have access to medical care? It still remains to be seen.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> In the documentary, you talk to the attorney general, Rob Bonta, about trying to push back against federal immigration enforcement. What did he tell you about the ability of the state of California to hold DHS accountable, what he’s seen?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jeremy Young:\u003c/strong> Well, they are actually permitted to go in and look at documents. They’re permitted to do interviews. They do have to give some heads-up before they do their visits, but they certainly have greater visibility into the conditions inside the facility than anyone else.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And I think one of the things that the attorney general pointed out about this model of having private companies operate prisons is that it’s flawed from the get-go. There is a total… You know, effort to minimize the amount of costs, because it comes out of your profits, and it’s just — it’s a very straightforward, and it is a problem from the get-go.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Yeah, well, let’s hear a clip of your host and correspondent for \u003cem>Fault Lines\u003c/em>, Natasha Del Toro, talking with Rob Bonta about what ICE is saying about its facilities and about the death of Ayala Uribe.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Natasha Del Toro:\u003c/strong> ICE issued a statement saying comprehensive medical care is provided from the moment individuals arrive. At no time during detention is a detained illegal alien denied emergent care. Not true.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Attorney General Rob Bonta:\u003c/strong> That’s a talking point. If what the ICE spokesperson said was true, Mr. Ayala Uribe would be with us today. And who knows what’s happening on the ground? We do, because we’ve been there. We’ve gone to these facilities. We’ve gotten into Adelanto. We have done our own physical inspections. We’ve looked at documents. We’ve talked to staff. And we found the exact opposite of what that ICE spokesperson just said.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> So, hearing that, listener Sharon’s point, I think, is appropriate here. Sharon wants to know: If Rob Bonta and the state of California have special powers, why is it that we can’t do more? Why can’t they go in there and make criminal charges or shut it down? I’m so disheartened by constantly hearing the same thing about people being mistreated and dying.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Jeremy, you first, and then I’ll go to Andrea on that.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Andrea Castillo:\u003c/strong> I-I-I can take this one. Okay.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Okay, thanks.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Andrea Castillo:\u003c/strong> Yeah. You know, these facilities operate under federal control, so there’s only so much that states can do that falls under their control. But, you know, the existence and operation of these facilities is a federal matter. Immigration enforcement is a federal matter. It’s under federal law.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>So while the states have power to oversee any violations of the conditions, while they have some amount of oversight power, you know, the real emphasis here is on the federal government.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Well, listener Lisa writes, “I don’t understand how Congress or other officials cannot put an end to ICE and detention center torture.” Do you want to respond to Lisa, Andrea?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Andrea Castillo:\u003c/strong> Yeah. Well, Congress has had its own troubles getting into these facilities since the start of this administration. Members of Congress have found themselves kept out of the detention centers. There have been many iterations at this point of rules that DHS has put into place that make it more difficult for members of Congress to conduct their own oversight.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>You know, at some point, they were asking members of Congress for several days’ notice. Recently, they have been asking members of Congress to provide written confirmation and a signature from any detainee that they want to speak with. Otherwise, when they go and do an unannounced inspection of a detention facility, they’re not allowed to speak with any of the detainees there.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Let me go to caller Judith in Oakland next. Hi, Judith. Join us. You’re on.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Judith:\u003c/strong> Yeah, I was just making a comment that I wish the press and the people talking today would continue to inform the public of the differences between documented and undocumented people who are going to these facilities. Documented people going through the court system that they’re picking up are not, quote, criminals. They’re not illegal, and nobody’s making the distinction.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>I just went to an event involving a mother, three U.S. citizens, a U.S. husband, in court, picked up a nurse who now is in a different African country and went through deplorable conditions. So I wish to help inform the public, because the one commenter who just talked about how they all committed crimes — they didn’t commit crimes.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> I really appreciate you saying that, and we’re just coming up on the break here. But I did want to just have Andrea and Jeremy respond to the fact that, yes, and we have covered this, there are a lot of people who have legal status who are being picked up and put into these places, and even without charges, right, Andrea?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Andrea Castillo:\u003c/strong> That’s right. There are a lot of people, you know, more than a million people who, at the start of this administration, had some sort of provisional legal status. They had the ability to work legally, and the administration has been cutting those statuses away and leaving people undocumented and more vulnerable to being picked up and deported.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> And even people whose status they haven’t taken away, but who were, you know, appearing in court or had some kind of temporary status, right?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Right. Well, we’re talking with Andrea Castillo of the \u003cem>Los Angeles Times\u003c/em> and Jeremy Young, senior producer on \u003cem>Fault Lines\u003c/em> from Al Jazeera English, with the new documentary \u003cem>Dying in Detention\u003c/em>.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Stay with us. You’re listening to \u003cem>Forum\u003c/em>. I’m Mina Kim. We’re talking this hour about conditions inside the Adelanto ICE Processing Center, where four people have died since Trump took office, and also the impact of DHS now owning California detention centers. In fact, they own several of them now.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Andrea Castillo is a staff writer at the \u003cem>Los Angeles Times\u003c/em> who covers immigration, and Jeremy Young is a senior producer on \u003cem>Fault Lines\u003c/em> from Al Jazeera English who is part of the team behind a new documentary called \u003cem>Dying in Detention\u003c/em>, which looks at the case of Ismael Ayala Uribe, who died while in custody at Adelanto.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And listeners, we’re asking you what questions you have about conditions at ICE facilities in California, the jail in Adelanto, and whether or not you’ve had any direct experience with them. Also, your questions about the sale of ICE facilities to the federal government and what impact you’re wondering that will have.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>The phone number is 866-733-6786, 866-733-6786. The email address is forum@kqed.org, and you can find us on Discord, Bluesky, Facebook, or Instagram at KQED Forum.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>So, Andrea, help us understand: How many facilities in California does the federal government own, and are there plans to own more?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Andrea Castillo:\u003c/strong> The federal government now owns four facilities in California. That’s half of the facilities in the state, and there are plans to own more. George Zoley, the CEO of the GEO Group, said in a recent call with investors that DHS had talked about purchasing 10 facilities and that that number could increase.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Hmm, 10 facilities, but probably across the country, because there are eight total in California. Is that right? And you said some are owned by CoreCivic.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Andrea Castillo:\u003c/strong> Others are owned by CoreCivic. There’s a smattering of other companies that own different facilities as well.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> All right, so the federal government now has Otay Mesa and the California City Detention Facility, as well as these other two by the GEO Group that are in Adelanto.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Sue in Petaluma writes, “I see that Adelanto was established in 2015. How do the present conditions in this facility differ from conditions in the previous administration? Have these conditions persisted over the last 11 years, or have they worsened under this administration?” Andrea?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Andrea Castillo:\u003c/strong> Yeah, the conditions absolutely persist. I am reminded of a report from many years ago where investigators found nooses in Adelanto Detention Center that were possibly being used for attempted suicides. So that’s just one of the things that sticks out that I remember all of these years later.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>But certainly, the conditions — you know, there have been many lawsuits and allegations going back multiple administrations, alleging the same types of things.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jeremy Young:\u003c/strong> And, Mina, remember, there were almost zero people left in the facility relatively recently, until Trump came back into office.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> I used to — 10 were, yeah, it had gotten down to very few, single digits. I remember at some point there were two people.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>So when Trump came back into office, how — what are some of the ways DHS operational oversight changed? Do you mention that it’s harder to get information out from DHS in your reporting now?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jeremy Young:\u003c/strong> Well, yeah, I mean, that’s always been a problem. I mean, I think one of the changes that’s happened significantly, and it’s interesting as we approach the midterm elections, you know, there was a real visible change in the approach that this administration took to its crackdown when they switched from Kristi Noem and brought in Markwayne Mullin.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And they actually detained more people under Markwayne Mullin, but it wasn’t done in the same visible way, where they were trying to, you know, spread fear and livestream these raids. They decided to take an approach.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And, you know, that’s been really interesting because I think what it reveals to me is seeing whether the politics behind this crackdown and the treatment of immigrants in these detention facilities is popular in the United States and whether it’s going to have an impact on how people vote in the midterm elections, which I still think is an open question, but a very interesting one.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Is there an internal monitor of ICE, Andrea, or something like that?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Andrea Castillo:\u003c/strong> Um, there were, um, you know, oversight mechanisms within ICE, and on the federal side, yeah, there was the CRCL, Civil Rights and Civil Liberties Office. There was also the immigrant detention ombudsman. Well, the ombudsman no longer exists, and Civil Rights and Civil Liberties is extremely reduced. So their ability to actually investigate the conditions in these facilities has drastically changed.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jeremy Young:\u003c/strong> And, Mina, just so you know what the ombudsman’s role was, they would receive complaints directly from detainees at facilities and they would aim to address those, whether someone’s not able to get their medicine, whether they’re not able to communicate with their — whatever the issue was, that was the purpose of the ombudsman office, and President Trump gutted that.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Let me go to caller Tony in Oakland next. Tony, go ahead.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Tony:\u003c/strong> It seems to be the root cause of this issue with the federal government purchasing prisons is the privatization of prisons. When are we going to do something to ban that and take state control of our penal system?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Well, Tony, thanks for sharing your thoughts on that. Let me go to Andrea.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Andrea Castillo:\u003c/strong> Thank you. Well, California tried it, and it didn’t work. California, years ago, tried to ban private prisons. That was struck down in court, so the state lost on that one. And that, I think, set into place all this big effort now to increase the oversight of these facilities, because that is what they can do.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jeremy Young:\u003c/strong> And to Tony’s point, one of the things that we did in the documentary on Capitol Hill was interview Jim Jordan, who has an extremely powerful role overseeing the House Judiciary Committee. And a super PAC aligned with him, according to the Project on Government Oversight, received a $250,000 donation from the GEO Group. And when we asked him whether that was problematic or a conflict of interest, he said, “No, not really,” and laughed it off.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> I should note that we also reached out to GEO Group for a reaction to your documentary, Jeremy, and they did not respond to our request for comment.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jeremy Young:\u003c/strong> For comment. That’s a shame, Mina.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> This listener in the East Bay writes, “How do family members stay in contact with their relatives inside facilities like Adelanto? Are they able to visit or make phone calls?” Jeremy?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jeremy Young:\u003c/strong> That’s a really good question, because one of the biggest challenges for families is keeping track of their loved ones, making sure they have what they need, communicating with them, and people often are at a loss.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>I mean, Ismael’s family found out that he was dead when the police came and knocked on their door at 5:30 in the morning on a Monday morning. They didn’t know that he had been rushed to the hospital. They hadn’t been given any information about it.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>It’s really challenging and also expensive to communicate, and not very reliable. And it’s really one of the things that, when you think about being able to be safe and be healthy while you’re incarcerated in these facilities, the ability to communicate with your family, to speak with loved ones, to hear your children’s voices — sometimes it’s all that can kind of carry you through the day. So it’s real important.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Andrea Castillo:\u003c/strong> Can I just add to that?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Yeah, go ahead, Andrea.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Andrea Castillo:\u003c/strong> These calls are expensive. They have to pay to speak with their family members. And families that I have talked to recently have said that, specifically when going to Adelanto, they are waiting for hours with other families in order to get time to visit in person. There are lines now because there are significantly more people detained.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> But they must be, though, a key source of information for you, Andrea, and also for you, Jeremy, given what you’ve been saying about how hard it is to get accurate information about what’s really going on.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Andrea Castillo:\u003c/strong> Yeah, it’s become much more difficult as a journalist to actually see the inside of these detention facilities. One of the main ways now is if you’re going to immigration court and there is an immigration court in a detention facility. It’s not like that for every single one, but Adelanto does have an immigration court inside the facility. But obviously, I’m not able to see the housing units or anything like that.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jeremy Young:\u003c/strong> We spent a day outside of Adelanto during visiting hours and met with family members who were either coming in or coming out, and it was like 100-degree heat. And it was really interesting to have people stop and speak with us and share their experiences.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>These two sisters that we interviewed — their brother, you know, and they were young, they were in their twenties, and their brother was young — had been taken into Adelanto about a week before. And she said to me, she’s like, “They had him shackled. He was handcuffed, and he was shackled by his feet. Why would they do that?” She said, “My brother’s not a criminal.”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And it was just really interesting to see her perspective and knowing who her brother is and loving her brother and not understanding why he’s being treated like a criminal. It was really heartbreaking.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Well, Bluesky user MJ writes, “Remind me why politicians oppose detention centers in the Bay Area within easy reach of hospitals and physicians, immigration lawyers, friends and family are nearby, but we’d rather keep them in places like Adelanto.” Do you think there’s some truth to what MJ is saying?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jeremy Young:\u003c/strong> I do, and I think that if you look at what happened at Delaney Hall this summer in New Jersey, where people showed up for protests and state police came in on horseback, it really was in the zeitgeist, with a lot of attention. And that facility is not located as far away from the center of town as places like Adelanto or Irwin County Detention Center.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>A lot of these facilities are in the middle of nowhere, and it’s really hard for people to get to. But a facility like Delaney Hall that was easier for people to get to was more visible. It’s near New York, it’s near Washington, D.C. Politicians are able to go. And so you do see the more visibility, the more sunlight, the more attention there is to the conditions inside.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Andrea Castillo:\u003c/strong> One of ICE’s talking points during the course of California trying to rid the state of these privately run detention centers was that if the state no longer had any detention facilities, people would have to travel farther and farther away to see their loved ones and for people to get access to their attorneys.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And, you know, that was a point that they made that has validity. If people are far away, the situation is more opaque.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Again, we’re talking with Andrea Castillo, a staff writer at the \u003cem>Los Angeles Times\u003c/em>, covering immigration, and Jeremy Young, part of the team behind the new documentary that we’re covering today, \u003cem>Dying in Detention\u003c/em>, senior producer on \u003cem>Fault Lines\u003c/em> from Al Jazeera English.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And let me remind listeners, you are listening to \u003cem>Forum\u003c/em>. I’m Mina Kim.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>So, with everything you’re saying, what power do detainees have to hold DHS accountable? Jeremy, is Ismael’s family trying to get some kind of justice through the courts?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jeremy Young:\u003c/strong> Yeah, I mean, families can sue for wrongful death, and that is going to take a lot of time. I think, you know, just not to be all negative about the impact that the detainees have had on their situation, for Adelanto, Andrea had mentioned that a judge ruled in their favor earlier this summer in order to get, you know, fresh water, adequate food, adequate medical care.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And so I think some people did feel like their voice was heard. You know, they engaged in this hunger strike to raise awareness because there’s not much else that they can do. And I think this did make it into the news. It did make it into people’s consciousness.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And I will say that I think advocating for themselves, there is a glimmer of hope that they could improve the conditions. It’s not easy, and no one would want to go through that experience. But I will say that they’ve been effective in getting their voice heard. This reminds me — Andrea, you’d agree.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Andrea Castillo:\u003c/strong> Yeah, this reminds me of a story that I covered a few months back. This wasn’t at Adelanto, but detainees at the California City facility and at Mesa Verde had initiated a boycott of commissary because they felt that the prices had increased so significantly that things were just unaffordable. And they weren’t getting, particularly for detainees who had, you know, sensitivities or conditions like diabetes, where they needed to eat food other than what was provided to them. Their only way to get that food was through commissary and their families, you know, providing them money to pay for that.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>But it had become so burdensome that their families were spending multiple hundreds of dollars every month for these detainees to eat. And so they initiated a boycott of commissaries, and they felt it worked. The facility, California City, decided to, from what I understand, reduce some of those prices.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Matt in Oakland writes, “How much could things actually change if Democrats retake Congress in the midterms? Do they realistically have enough oversight or legislative power to change what’s happening at these facilities and more broadly within the Trump administration and the Department of Homeland Security?” What do you think?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jeremy Young:\u003c/strong> Well, I think what would be significant is if there was a change in the approach to the crackdown and immigration detention and the massive number of people who are being incarcerated in these facilities. I mean, it’s undoubtable that one of the reasons why people aren’t able to get adequate medical care is because there are too many people in these facilities, and they are not staffed up to handle the number of people who are in them.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>So if we took an alternative approach to what we’re doing, then things might change.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Let me go to caller Omar in San Francisco. Omar, go ahead.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Omar:\u003c/strong> Good morning, Mina. So, Andrea and Jeremy, I think that you guys need to do a story in regards to where is the money going? You’re talking about massive numbers of people being dehumanized and treated like animals, but the real problem is that this is all just a big business, and that it is driving back to some of the highest offices in this land. They all are invested in these corporations.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And you said that the GEO Group and the other group, you know, have these shareholder meetings where they’re like, “Oh, they’re going to spend more money.” These are people being turned into dollars, and that is all it is about. None of them are criminals. They have no reason to be in there. This whole thing has been the worst nightmare that this country has ever faced, and there needs to be some justice behind it.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Thanks. I can hear how passionately you feel about this. And, yes, Jeremy, you touched on this with regard to Jim Jordan and so on.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jeremy Young:\u003c/strong> Yeah, and the amount of money that the private prison companies have put in the coffers for President Trump has been extraordinary. The other thing in this context — it was a great comment, by the way, by your caller — a lot of the people who are incarcerated in these facilities are the primary breadwinner for their family, or at least one of the breadwinners of their family.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>So we’re talking about having to manage commissary expenses and phone calls, but they’re also not making the money that their loved one was making when they were not incarcerated in a detention facility. And so children are stepping up. We’re seeing children working to try and help support families. It’s really a dire situation for these people.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> And Andrea, you said billions of dollars, right, for these facilities. And so essentially, the company continues to keep running them. So they get paid for the facility and for the ongoing contracts of running them.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Andrea Castillo:\u003c/strong> That’s right. Yeah, I mean, this is $45 billion of U.S. taxpayer money, so we’re all—\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> So we’re all paying for it.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Andrea Castillo:\u003c/strong> We are all paying for it, and that’s correct. I mean, the CEO of GEO Group, George Zoley, on one of these calls mentioned that, for him, they are in this sort of dual business of owning the facilities, but then also operating the facilities.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>But he said outright that, for him, the most important of those two is continued long-term operation of the detention centers. So essentially, he’s saying it’s okay for the federal government to buy these facilities as long as we can still keep these more lucrative, long-term contracts in which we are running the show.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jeremy Young:\u003c/strong> And, Mina, a former senior executive from GEO Group is now running ICE. So you can see what the problems are with the revolving-door system that we have.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Right, and your documentary, of course, shows us what running the facilities actually looks like.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Andrea, in your reporting, you said that Governor Gavin Newsom signed more than 20 bills aimed at pushing back against the Trump administration’s immigration agenda. Do these state-level laws have any potential to change things?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Andrea Castillo:\u003c/strong> They absolutely do. I mean, one of the laws that I’m particularly interested in as a journalist is one that requires the release of public records related to 911 calls at these facilities. So that one certainly will have an impact, with the public able to more freely see what’s going on when 911 gets involved, when something happens in these facilities.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Other of these laws are now embroiled in litigation already. GEO Group already sued over one of the laws, so we’ll see what happens with that.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Well, Andrea, thank you so much for your reporting. I really appreciate it. Thank you. Andrea Castillo, a staff writer at the \u003cem>Los Angeles Times\u003c/em>. Jeremy Young, a senior producer on \u003cem>Fault Lines\u003c/em> from Al Jazeera English, which has just put out the new documentary \u003cem>Dying in Detention\u003c/em>. My thanks to you as well, Jeremy.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jeremy Young:\u003c/strong> Thank you, Mina, for having us on and for putting some attention on this issue.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> My thanks to our listeners for their questions and comments, and to Ana De Almeida Amaral for producing this segment. You’ve been listening to \u003cem>Forum\u003c/em>. I’m Mina Kim.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Announcer:\u003c/strong> Funds for the production of \u003cem>Forum\u003c/em> are provided by the Jenerosity Family Fund and the members of KQED.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>The Adelanto ICE Processing Center, an immigration detention facility located northeast of Los Angeles, has been riddled with allegations of abuse, unsafe drinking water and detainees being denied medical care. In 2025, a detainee at Adelanto, Ismael Ayala Uribe, died in ICE custody after repeatedly requesting medical attention. What is happening behind the locked doors of ICE detention centers in California? What power does the state have to hold DHS accountable? Join us as we speak with journalists investigating California detention facilities and the creators of the new Al Jazeera documentary, “Dying in Detention.”\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Welcome to \u003cem>Forum\u003c/em>. I’m Mina Kim. The Department of Homeland Security bought two more ICE detention facilities in California this month, adding to the two it bought in July in San Diego and Kern counties. This time, the purchases were of facilities in Adelanto, known for being the deadliest in the state. Four people have died there since last year, with their families alleging inadequate medical care in each case. It’s the focus of a new documentary from Al Jazeera English’s \u003cem>Fault Lines\u003c/em> series called \u003cem>Dying in Detention\u003c/em>.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Welcome to \u003cem>Forum\u003c/em>. I’m Mina Kim. The Department of Homeland Security bought two more ICE detention facilities in California this month, adding to the two it bought in July in San Diego and Kern counties. This time, the purchases were of facilities in Adelanto, known for being the deadliest in the state. Four people have died there since last year, with their families alleging inadequate medical care in each case. It’s the focus of a new documentary from Al Jazeera English’s \u003cem>Fault Lines\u003c/em> series called \u003cem>Dying in Detention\u003c/em>.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Joining me now is Jeremy Young, senior producer on \u003cem>Fault Lines\u003c/em> from Al Jazeera English and part of the team behind \u003cem>Dying in Detention\u003c/em>. Jeremy, welcome to \u003cem>Forum\u003c/em>.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>Joining me now is Jeremy Young, senior producer on \u003cem>Fault Lines\u003c/em> from Al Jazeera English and part of the team behind \u003cem>Dying in Detention\u003c/em>. Jeremy, welcome to \u003cem>Forum\u003c/em>.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jeremy Young:\u003c/strong> Thank you for having me, Mina.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> So, in this film, you focused on Adelanto’s ICE processing center. What can you tell us about Adelanto and the people being held there?\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jeremy Young:\u003c/strong> Sure. So, the Adelanto ICE Processing Center is one of the larger detention facilities in the country, and it’s located several hours outside of Los Angeles, at the edge of the desert. And it’s had a troubled past. It’s had all kinds of different state and federal investigations, different types of allegations of abuse and medical neglect against it. At one point, there had been so much litigation and oversight that it was down to less than 10 detainees at the facility.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jeremy Young:\u003c/strong> Sure. So, the Adelanto ICE Processing Center is one of the larger detention facilities in the country, and it’s located several hours outside of Los Angeles, at the edge of the desert. And it’s had a troubled past. It’s had all kinds of different state and federal investigations, different types of allegations of abuse and medical neglect against it. At one point, there had been so much litigation and oversight that it was down to less than 10 detainees at the facility.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>This, of course, changed when President Trump came into office for his second term, ramped up the crackdown, and now there’s almost 2,000 people who are detained at Adelanto today.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> And how long are detainees typically there? If it’s an ICE processing center, the name sort of suggests a transitional place.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jeremy Young:\u003c/strong> Well, I mean, a lot of the vocabulary that’s used around immigration detention is puzzling, so don’t get too caught up on it. People are there who are fighting for their right to stay in this country. And it’s not clear exactly why people are deported at certain times, why people are moved around as much as they are.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>But the people that we spoke to said — one detainee in particular who had children who are 9 and 11 — he said, “I’m gonna make sure my children know that I never give up and that I’m always gonna have fought to be here till the end to be with them.” So there are people in there who are really fighting to stay close to their families.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> So your film focused on the death of 39-year-old Ismael Ayala Uribe at Adelanto. Tell us about him.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> So your film focused on the death of 39-year-old Ismael Ayala Uribe at Adelanto. Tell us about him.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jeremy Young:\u003c/strong> Ismael was a 39-year-old gentleman who came to the United States at age five. He had achieved DACA status and had some protections, which he then lost, actually, when he had a conviction for a DUI. But he worked at a local car wash in Southern California for 15 years, rising through the ranks to become the right-hand man to the owner.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jeremy Young:\u003c/strong> Ismael was a 39-year-old gentleman who came to the United States at age five. He had achieved DACA status and had some protections, which he then lost, actually, when he had a conviction for a DUI. But he worked at a local car wash in Southern California for 15 years, rising through the ranks to become the right-hand man to the owner.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>And most importantly, he was a son and an uncle and a brother. And we got to know his family really well and really understand how much they’re hurting and how much they miss him.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Yeah, we actually have a clip of his nephew from your documentary. Let’s hear it.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Ismael’s Nephew:\u003c/strong> He was a good uncle. The kids needed something, he would always go get it. Get them school clothes, supplies, or whatever they needed, you know?\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Ismael’s Nephew:\u003c/strong> He was a good uncle. The kids needed something, he would always go get it. Get them school clothes, supplies, or whatever they needed, you know?\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jeremy Young:\u003c/strong> I know they do miss him.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> So, Jeremy, what happened to Ismael after he arrived? What made him sick?\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> So, Jeremy, what happened to Ismael after he arrived? What made him sick?\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jeremy Young:\u003c/strong> So, you know, he basically developed an infection that went untreated, and he complained for weeks about having severe pain in his buttocks, which he rated as 10 out of 10 on a pain scale. And as far as we could tell, he was really only given Tylenol. He was supposed to be checked on twice a day, and we learned that they didn’t check on him at all.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jeremy Young:\u003c/strong> So, you know, he basically developed an infection that went untreated, and he complained for weeks about having severe pain in his buttocks, which he rated as 10 out of 10 on a pain scale. And as far as we could tell, he was really only given Tylenol. He was supposed to be checked on twice a day, and we learned that they didn’t check on him at all.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Eventually, this infection just got worse and worse and spread into his bloodstream. He was rushed to the hospital in the middle of the night, and they were able to revive him when he arrived at the hospital. When he arrived at the hospital, he lost his pulse and needed to be intubated and revived in the emergency room. So he was in a really, really rough state when he arrived at the hospital, and he only survived for another 24 hours before he passed away.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>Eventually, this infection just got worse and worse and spread into his bloodstream. He was rushed to the hospital in the middle of the night, and they were able to revive him when he arrived at the hospital. When he arrived at the hospital, he lost his pulse and needed to be intubated and revived in the emergency room. So he was in a really, really rough state when he arrived at the hospital, and he only survived for another 24 hours before he passed away.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> I understand it was an infected skin abscess. What does it take to treat a skin abscess?\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> I understand it was an infected skin abscess. What does it take to treat a skin abscess?\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jeremy Young:\u003c/strong> It’s actually very treatable. We interviewed Physicians for Human Rights’ Dr. Nicholas Cunio for the documentary, and he reviewed the medical documents with us. It really takes some antibiotics and then a small incision to remove the abscess. And it’s a very, very basic procedure. And, you know, according to Physicians for Human Rights, his death was absolutely avoidable.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jeremy Young:\u003c/strong> It’s actually very treatable. We interviewed Physicians for Human Rights’ Dr. Nicholas Cunio for the documentary, and he reviewed the medical documents with us. It really takes some antibiotics and then a small incision to remove the abscess. And it’s a very, very basic procedure. And, you know, according to Physicians for Human Rights, his death was absolutely avoidable.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Let’s also hear a clip from the physician.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Dr. Nicholas Cunio:\u003c/strong> If you’re arriving and, within just a few minutes, losing your pulse, that suggests that you were extremely sick and it was not adequately recognized in time to be treated effectively. It could have been purposefully obfuscating the clinical reality. I believe Ismael’s death could have fully been prevented by timely care.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Dr. Nicholas Cunio:\u003c/strong> If you’re arriving and, within just a few minutes, losing your pulse, that suggests that you were extremely sick and it was not adequately recognized in time to be treated effectively. It could have been purposefully obfuscating the clinical reality. I believe Ismael’s death could have fully been prevented by timely care.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> What is the physician saying there, Jeremy, about it possibly having been purposefully obfuscated?\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jeremy Young:\u003c/strong> Yeah, so this is really interesting to us, Mina, because, you know, this particular case had been covered quite a bit. And when we looked at the medical examiner’s investigation into his death, it included information that ICE did not include in its public report. And he was in such a severe state when he arrived at the hospital. Within minutes, he lost his pulse, and ICE did not include that information in its public report.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jeremy Young:\u003c/strong> Yeah, so this is really interesting to us, Mina, because, you know, this particular case had been covered quite a bit. And when we looked at the medical examiner’s investigation into his death, it included information that ICE did not include in its public report. And he was in such a severe state when he arrived at the hospital. Within minutes, he lost his pulse, and ICE did not include that information in its public report.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>We’ve subsequently learned more information about what happened to Ismael, but I think one of the big takeaways is that the public reports that ICE puts out on detainee deaths omit serious information and are really problematic.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>We’ve subsequently learned more information about what happened to Ismael, but I think one of the big takeaways is that the public reports that ICE puts out on detainee deaths omit serious information and are really problematic.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> We actually reached out to DHS for a comment and reaction to your documentary, and this is what they said. They said, “Allegations of subprime conditions at the Adelanto facility are false. Being in detention is a choice. We encourage all illegal aliens to take control of their departure with the CBP Home app. The U.S. is offering illegal aliens $3,000 and a free flight to self-deport now. We encourage every person here illegally to take advantage of this offer and reserve the chance to come back to the U.S. the right way to live the American dream.”\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> We actually reached out to DHS for a comment and reaction to your documentary, and this is what they said. They said, “Allegations of subprime conditions at the Adelanto facility are false. Being in detention is a choice. We encourage all illegal aliens to take control of their departure with the CBP Home app. The U.S. is offering illegal aliens $3,000 and a free flight to self-deport now. We encourage every person here illegally to take advantage of this offer and reserve the chance to come back to the U.S. the right way to live the American dream.”\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>What’s your response to that?\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>What’s your response to that?\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jeremy Young:\u003c/strong> Well, that’s quite a comment, Mina. I will say one of the important things to remind your listeners is that the overwhelming majority of people in immigration detention, more than 70%, have no criminal conviction at all. And the people that we spoke to have families. They have loved ones who live here. They have communities that rely on them. And they don’t want to get on a plane and fly away. They want to go back to being with their loved ones and being back in these communities where they mean so much and where they’ve really provided the fabric.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jeremy Young:\u003c/strong> Well, that’s quite a comment, Mina. I will say one of the important things to remind your listeners is that the overwhelming majority of people in immigration detention, more than 70%, have no criminal conviction at all. And the people that we spoke to have families. They have loved ones who live here. They have communities that rely on them. And they don’t want to get on a plane and fly away. They want to go back to being with their loved ones and being back in these communities where they mean so much and where they’ve really provided the fabric.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> So I want to invite listeners into the conversation. Listeners, what questions do you have about the conditions at the ICE facility in Adelanto? What are your questions? Do you have any direct experience with them? Have you had a relative inside, and have they told you about conditions inside as well?\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> So I want to invite listeners into the conversation. Listeners, what questions do you have about the conditions at the ICE facility in Adelanto? What are your questions? Do you have any direct experience with them? Have you had a relative inside, and have they told you about conditions inside as well?\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>You can join the conversation at the email address, forum@kqed.org. You can find us on Discord, Bluesky, Facebook, or Instagram at KQED Forum, and you can give us a call at 866-733-6786, 866-733-6786.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>You can join the conversation at the email address, forum@kqed.org. You can find us on Discord, Bluesky, Facebook, or Instagram at KQED Forum, and you can give us a call at 866-733-6786, 866-733-6786.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>So, Jeremy, as I noted in the introduction, there have been four deaths in Adelanto. Do they share similarities with Ismael’s?\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>So, Jeremy, as I noted in the introduction, there have been four deaths in Adelanto. Do they share similarities with Ismael’s?\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jeremy Young:\u003c/strong> They absolutely do. I mean, we interviewed the attorney general of California, Rob Bonta, for this story because the attorney general’s office has unique oversight capabilities in the state of California. And one of the things that they found was that they were not paying outside providers for medical care, and people were not being taken outside the facility to see specialists.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jeremy Young:\u003c/strong> They absolutely do. I mean, we interviewed the attorney general of California, Rob Bonta, for this story because the attorney general’s office has unique oversight capabilities in the state of California. And one of the things that they found was that they were not paying outside providers for medical care, and people were not being taken outside the facility to see specialists.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>And so the pattern that we’ve seen has been consistently that people are denied complex medical care and, you know, have died as a result. And it’s just — I just have to remind you, Mina, the idea that someone would go to an immigration detention facility and ultimately die, I mean, I think every single death that I’ve looked at has been preventable and avoidable. And it is just an unacceptable outcome that someone expires while they’re in an immigration detention facility.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>And so the pattern that we’ve seen has been consistently that people are denied complex medical care and, you know, have died as a result. And it’s just — I just have to remind you, Mina, the idea that someone would go to an immigration detention facility and ultimately die, I mean, I think every single death that I’ve looked at has been preventable and avoidable. And it is just an unacceptable outcome that someone expires while they’re in an immigration detention facility.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> In Ismael’s case, it was in a matter of five weeks. I want to bring into the conversation now Andrea Castillo, a staff writer at the \u003cem>Los Angeles Times\u003c/em> who covers immigration. Andrea, thanks so much for being with us.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> In Ismael’s case, it was in a matter of five weeks. I want to bring into the conversation now Andrea Castillo, a staff writer at the \u003cem>Los Angeles Times\u003c/em> who covers immigration. Andrea, thanks so much for being with us.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Andrea Castillo:\u003c/strong> Thanks for having me.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Andrea Castillo:\u003c/strong> Thanks for having me.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> You also have looked at recent court-ordered reports that documented some really harsh conditions in Adelanto. What can you tell us about the broader conditions in this facility?\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> You also have looked at recent court-ordered reports that documented some really harsh conditions in Adelanto. What can you tell us about the broader conditions in this facility?\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Andrea Castillo:\u003c/strong> Yeah, that’s right. Immigrant rights groups filed this federal class-action lawsuit against DHS this year. They alleged poor drinking water and food, sanitation and medical care issues at the facility. A federal judge had ordered the facility to make improvements.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Andrea Castillo:\u003c/strong> Yeah, that’s right. Immigrant rights groups filed this federal class-action lawsuit against DHS this year. They alleged poor drinking water and food, sanitation and medical care issues at the facility. A federal judge had ordered the facility to make improvements.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>In August, there was a video that went viral appearing to show worm-like creatures in a bottle of water. The family of a detainee had recorded the video. And, as you noted, four people have died at that facility since last year, so the conditions do not appear to have improved.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>In August, there was a video that went viral appearing to show worm-like creatures in a bottle of water. The family of a detainee had recorded the video. And, as you noted, four people have died at that facility since last year, so the conditions do not appear to have improved.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>An independent court monitor this month actually found mold and gnat larvae in the shower rooms. They found cracked and worn-out mattresses, delayed visitations, and an inadequate system to track disability accommodations. A second independent monitor, who was assigned to inspect medical conditions at the facility, told the court that he was actually prevented from accessing the facility and its medical records, so he was unable to provide an update.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>An independent court monitor this month actually found mold and gnat larvae in the shower rooms. They found cracked and worn-out mattresses, delayed visitations, and an inadequate system to track disability accommodations. A second independent monitor, who was assigned to inspect medical conditions at the facility, told the court that he was actually prevented from accessing the facility and its medical records, so he was unable to provide an update.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> And Jeremy mentioned, you know, some of the issues with Adelanto have been ongoing. There was a lawsuit settlement, I understand, related to something that happened during the pandemic with COVID. What happened?\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> And Jeremy mentioned, you know, some of the issues with Adelanto have been ongoing. There was a lawsuit settlement, I understand, related to something that happened during the pandemic with COVID. What happened?\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Andrea Castillo:\u003c/strong> Yeah, so I recently wrote about this settlement regarding the application of a chemical disinfectant called HDQ Neutral. The allegation was that detainees, during the early period of the pandemic, the first several months of 2020, were indiscriminately sprayed with this chemical.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Andrea Castillo:\u003c/strong> Yeah, so I recently wrote about this settlement regarding the application of a chemical disinfectant called HDQ Neutral. The allegation was that detainees, during the early period of the pandemic, the first several months of 2020, were indiscriminately sprayed with this chemical.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Many times, you know, they were sprayed with an overly concentrated amount of the chemical. So, you know, it was supposed to be watered down, and that wasn’t happening, and nobody was given the instructions on how to actually properly use this chemical. They were spraying it directly into the air.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>Many times, you know, they were sprayed with an overly concentrated amount of the chemical. So, you know, it was supposed to be watered down, and that wasn’t happening, and nobody was given the instructions on how to actually properly use this chemical. They were spraying it directly into the air.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>A whistleblower who had formerly worked at the facility ended up saying in a declaration in court that he was told to spray it like Lysol.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>A whistleblower who had formerly worked at the facility ended up saying in a declaration in court that he was told to spray it like Lysol.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> And what health impacts did that have on people there?\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> And what health impacts did that have on people there?\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Andrea Castillo:\u003c/strong> Very severe health impacts: blistering, nosebleeds, chemical burns. People would show what looked like actual burns on their arms and their extremities, anywhere that was exposed to the chemical. It was sprayed in their food, and they could taste it. Vomiting. Some people ended up with permanent eye damage and respiratory issues.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Andrea Castillo:\u003c/strong> Very severe health impacts: blistering, nosebleeds, chemical burns. People would show what looked like actual burns on their arms and their extremities, anywhere that was exposed to the chemical. It was sprayed in their food, and they could taste it. Vomiting. Some people ended up with permanent eye damage and respiratory issues.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>One person that I spoke to said that he has to sleep propped up by pillows now, six years after he was released from the facility, because if he doesn’t, he ends up gasping for air. He used to work as a long-haul truck driver, but he can’t pass the physical assessment now, and so he has turned to making his money through online resale.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>One person that I spoke to said that he has to sleep propped up by pillows now, six years after he was released from the facility, because if he doesn’t, he ends up gasping for air. He used to work as a long-haul truck driver, but he can’t pass the physical assessment now, and so he has turned to making his money through online resale.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> This is happening in California, at a California facility. Listeners, we’re talking about the conditions in California’s deadliest ICE facility in Adelanto, and we’ll have more with our guests and with you after the break. This is \u003cem>Forum\u003c/em>. I’m Mina Kim.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> This is happening in California, at a California facility. Listeners, we’re talking about the conditions in California’s deadliest ICE facility in Adelanto, and we’ll have more with our guests and with you after the break. This is \u003cem>Forum\u003c/em>. I’m Mina Kim.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Welcome back to \u003cem>Forum\u003c/em>. I’m Mina Kim. We’re talking this hour about the conditions inside a California ICE processing center in Adelanto, where four people have died since Trump took office.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>Welcome back to \u003cem>Forum\u003c/em>. I’m Mina Kim. We’re talking this hour about the conditions inside a California ICE processing center in Adelanto, where four people have died since Trump took office.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>We’re talking about it with Jeremy Young, part of the team behind the documentary that looked deeply at Adelanto and the death of Ismael Ayala Uribe, in a film called \u003cem>Dying in Detention\u003c/em>, part of \u003cem>Fault Lines\u003c/em>, the series for Al Jazeera English. Andrea Castillo is also with us, a staff writer at the \u003cem>Los Angeles Times\u003c/em> who covers immigration.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>We’re talking about it with Jeremy Young, part of the team behind the documentary that looked deeply at Adelanto and the death of Ismael Ayala Uribe, in a film called \u003cem>Dying in Detention\u003c/em>, part of \u003cem>Fault Lines\u003c/em>, the series for Al Jazeera English. Andrea Castillo is also with us, a staff writer at the \u003cem>Los Angeles Times\u003c/em> who covers immigration.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>And listeners, what are your questions about conditions at ICE facilities in California, at the jail in Adelanto? What are your questions about what happens now that the federal government has purchased the Adelanto facility? Do you have any direct experience with ICE centers? Have you had anyone that you know inside one, and what have they told you about the conditions?\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>And listeners, what are your questions about conditions at ICE facilities in California, at the jail in Adelanto? What are your questions about what happens now that the federal government has purchased the Adelanto facility? Do you have any direct experience with ICE centers? Have you had anyone that you know inside one, and what have they told you about the conditions?\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>You can call us at 866-733-6786, 866-733-6786. You can email forum@kqed.org and post on our social channels on Discord, Bluesky, Facebook, or Instagram. We’re at KQED Forum.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>You can call us at 866-733-6786, 866-733-6786. You can email forum@kqed.org and post on our social channels on Discord, Bluesky, Facebook, or Instagram. We’re at KQED Forum.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Jeremy, one of the things that you noted, in addition to the broader conditions we were hearing about from you and Andrea in Adelanto, is that detainees were telling you about quite a bit of physical abuse, that some are being beaten.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>Jeremy, one of the things that you noted, in addition to the broader conditions we were hearing about from you and Andrea in Adelanto, is that detainees were telling you about quite a bit of physical abuse, that some are being beaten.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jeremy Young:\u003c/strong> That’s right. As at other detention facilities across the country, detainees came together as part of a hunger strike and refused to eat the food that was provided by the facility. And the individuals who we spoke to allege that they were beaten for participating in the hunger strike.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jeremy Young:\u003c/strong> That’s right. As at other detention facilities across the country, detainees came together as part of a hunger strike and refused to eat the food that was provided by the facility. And the individuals who we spoke to allege that they were beaten for participating in the hunger strike.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>They said that they were thrown into solitary confinement to be made an example of for participating in the hunger strike. And others were fast-tracked for deportation out of the country for participating in the hunger strike and raising awareness about the conditions.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>They said that they were thrown into solitary confinement to be made an example of for participating in the hunger strike. And others were fast-tracked for deportation out of the country for participating in the hunger strike and raising awareness about the conditions.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> So, Andrea, all of this happened while the facility was being owned by GEO Group. What can you tell us about GEO Group?\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> So, Andrea, all of this happened while the facility was being owned by GEO Group. What can you tell us about GEO Group?\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Andrea Castillo:\u003c/strong> GEO Group is one of the top private prison operators in the country, along with another company called CoreCivic. They own and operate the majority of detention space in the country. At the start of this administration, almost 90% of the detention space across the country was owned and operated by these types of companies.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Andrea Castillo:\u003c/strong> GEO Group is one of the top private prison operators in the country, along with another company called CoreCivic. They own and operate the majority of detention space in the country. At the start of this administration, almost 90% of the detention space across the country was owned and operated by these types of companies.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>But now, though, that has started to change. The federal government is starting to buy up some of these facilities, although they will continue being managed by these private prison companies, which, in addition to operating detention facilities for immigration purposes, also operate prisons across the country.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>But now, though, that has started to change. The federal government is starting to buy up some of these facilities, although they will continue being managed by these private prison companies, which, in addition to operating detention facilities for immigration purposes, also operate prisons across the country.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> So, given the fact that GEO Group will continue to operate the detention center, it sounds like conditions are not expected to change much there, at least from what we’ve seen so far. Is that correct? How much did GEO Group sell this to DHS for?\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> So, given the fact that GEO Group will continue to operate the detention center, it sounds like conditions are not expected to change much there, at least from what we’ve seen so far. Is that correct? How much did GEO Group sell this to DHS for?\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Andrea Castillo:\u003c/strong> Well, these facilities are worth millions of dollars. The sales are made possible by this infusion last year of $45 billion in tax dollars for immigration detention from President Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act. And so far, DHS has spent more than $2 billion on six of these detention centers, including four in California. And so…\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Andrea Castillo:\u003c/strong> Well, these facilities are worth millions of dollars. The sales are made possible by this infusion last year of $45 billion in tax dollars for immigration detention from President Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act. And so far, DHS has spent more than $2 billion on six of these detention centers, including four in California. And so…\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Could it be possible that the harsh conditions could worsen? And I only ask this because it sounds like the federal government felt a need to buy these to be able to run them however they wished.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Could it be possible that the harsh conditions could worsen? And I only ask this because it sounds like the federal government felt a need to buy these to be able to run them however they wished.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Andrea Castillo:\u003c/strong> I think that’s a possibility. One of the reasons for these purchases is as a way to push back on state and local oversight laws. California, of course, has some of the strongest oversight laws over these detention facilities in the country. The governor signed more than 20 bills just last month that are aimed at continuing to push back against the Trump administration’s immigration agenda.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Andrea Castillo:\u003c/strong> I think that’s a possibility. One of the reasons for these purchases is as a way to push back on state and local oversight laws. California, of course, has some of the strongest oversight laws over these detention facilities in the country. The governor signed more than 20 bills just last month that are aimed at continuing to push back against the Trump administration’s immigration agenda.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>And so, you know, they have been very clear — and when I say they, I mean DHS and the owners and operators of these detention facilities — about wanting protection from what they call “unwarranted litigation.” That’s a direct quote from George Zoley, who’s the CEO of the GEO Group. You know, they have these quarterly calls with shareholders, and earlier this year, that was what he told them: that they want to protect against these lawsuits around medical care and other detention conditions.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>And so, you know, they have been very clear — and when I say they, I mean DHS and the owners and operators of these detention facilities — about wanting protection from what they call “unwarranted litigation.” That’s a direct quote from George Zoley, who’s the CEO of the GEO Group. You know, they have these quarterly calls with shareholders, and earlier this year, that was what he told them: that they want to protect against these lawsuits around medical care and other detention conditions.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jeremy Young:\u003c/strong> And, Mina, I’ll add, it’s a real concern because the law that allows the attorney general to investigate these private prison facilities — you know, it was a law that was passed by the state legislature in California, and changing these to being federally owned facilities potentially could change their ability to do oversight and to investigate. So it’s a major concern.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jeremy Young:\u003c/strong> And, Mina, I’ll add, it’s a real concern because the law that allows the attorney general to investigate these private prison facilities — you know, it was a law that was passed by the state legislature in California, and changing these to being federally owned facilities potentially could change their ability to do oversight and to investigate. So it’s a major concern.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Let me go to caller Crawford in Oakland. Crawford, go ahead. You’re on.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Let me go to caller Crawford in Oakland. Crawford, go ahead. You’re on.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Crawford:\u003c/strong> Hey, I’m an emergency medical technician, and I was listening just a few minutes ago when you mentioned that an individual, after being exposed to a chemical, now has to sleep propped up on pillows. And I’m not a physician, but to me, that sounds most similar to a condition called pulmonary edema, which is when the small sacs that exchange oxygen in your lungs can actually fill with — in a lot of cases, it’s a type of interstitial fluid, or it could even be, you know, blood, to be blunt.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Crawford:\u003c/strong> Hey, I’m an emergency medical technician, and I was listening just a few minutes ago when you mentioned that an individual, after being exposed to a chemical, now has to sleep propped up on pillows. And I’m not a physician, but to me, that sounds most similar to a condition called pulmonary edema, which is when the small sacs that exchange oxygen in your lungs can actually fill with — in a lot of cases, it’s a type of interstitial fluid, or it could even be, you know, blood, to be blunt.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>And I can only imagine even more people exposed to that industrial chemical could develop that symptom over time. It’s a condition that generally takes a while to actually manifest. And I can also imagine that if more people are being exposed to these kinds of harsh industrial chemicals, pulmonary edema is generally a common side effect of being exposed to the substance.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>And I can only imagine even more people exposed to that industrial chemical could develop that symptom over time. It’s a condition that generally takes a while to actually manifest. And I can also imagine that if more people are being exposed to these kinds of harsh industrial chemicals, pulmonary edema is generally a common side effect of being exposed to the substance.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>So I wanted people to understand that that’s not just sleeping propped up on pillows because it’s comfortable. Sleeping propped up on pillows is because if you don’t, you can choke. Your body won’t be able to exchange oxygen, and you can die. So that’s a very serious complication, and I’m shocked, honestly. I’m on my way to work right now.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>So I wanted people to understand that that’s not just sleeping propped up on pillows because it’s comfortable. Sleeping propped up on pillows is because if you don’t, you can choke. Your body won’t be able to exchange oxygen, and you can die. So that’s a very serious complication, and I’m shocked, honestly. I’m on my way to work right now.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Well, Crawford, thank you for sharing what you know about this. And Andrea, I mean, as we said, this was something that was sued over because it was used on people during COVID, and I’m wondering, do you know if that means that it’s definitely no longer being used as a disinfectant?\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Well, Crawford, thank you for sharing what you know about this. And Andrea, I mean, as we said, this was something that was sued over because it was used on people during COVID, and I’m wondering, do you know if that means that it’s definitely no longer being used as a disinfectant?\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Andrea Castillo:\u003c/strong> Yeah, it is not being used anymore as a disinfectant. They believe that around 2,700 people who were detained at Adelanto were exposed to that chemical.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Andrea Castillo:\u003c/strong> Yeah, it is not being used anymore as a disinfectant. They believe that around 2,700 people who were detained at Adelanto were exposed to that chemical.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>And so one of the provisions of the settlement is that, you know, there have been monetary damages for — sorry, the settlement has resulted in money being given to the named plaintiffs. But for the people who are not among the six named plaintiffs, the rest of those 2,700 people may be able to bring their own lawsuits. And under the terms of the settlement, they now have this sort of precedent.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>And so one of the provisions of the settlement is that, you know, there have been monetary damages for — sorry, the settlement has resulted in money being given to the named plaintiffs. But for the people who are not among the six named plaintiffs, the rest of those 2,700 people may be able to bring their own lawsuits. And under the terms of the settlement, they now have this sort of precedent.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Well, Discord user Ben writes, “Note that the DHS statement talked aggressively about self-deportation. Their hope is that if enough horror stories exist, people will voluntarily self-deport out of fear, and they can actually manage to get most of the 14 million illegal immigrants out of the country. The cruelty is the point.”\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Well, Discord user Ben writes, “Note that the DHS statement talked aggressively about self-deportation. Their hope is that if enough horror stories exist, people will voluntarily self-deport out of fear, and they can actually manage to get most of the 14 million illegal immigrants out of the country. The cruelty is the point.”\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Jeremy, what do you think about this with regard to explaining the kinds of conditions that we have seen at the facilities that you have covered in your documentary and in the statement that we got from ICE?\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>Jeremy, what do you think about this with regard to explaining the kinds of conditions that we have seen at the facilities that you have covered in your documentary and in the statement that we got from ICE?\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jeremy Young:\u003c/strong> It’s a great observation, and it’s something that we came across a lot while we were doing the reporting for the project. The Homeland Security secretary, Markwayne Mullin, had famously said, “This is not a Holiday Inn,” which is a bite that we included in our documentary. And a lot of people really do feel that they want the conditions in these facilities to be very difficult for people to navigate so that they leave the country.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jeremy Young:\u003c/strong> It’s a great observation, and it’s something that we came across a lot while we were doing the reporting for the project. The Homeland Security secretary, Markwayne Mullin, had famously said, “This is not a Holiday Inn,” which is a bite that we included in our documentary. And a lot of people really do feel that they want the conditions in these facilities to be very difficult for people to navigate so that they leave the country.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>And we heard it from family members, we heard from people who were detained there, we heard from attorneys, we heard from politicians. So it’s definitely an interesting perspective. And there are definitely people who haven’t been able to stay.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>And we heard it from family members, we heard from people who were detained there, we heard from attorneys, we heard from politicians. So it’s definitely an interesting perspective. And there are definitely people who haven’t been able to stay.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>We did a story last year about families that were separated under Trump. And one of the families, the mother, who had six children who were born here in the United States, was at this facility. And she just couldn’t take it anymore and decided that she would move back to Mexico and take four of her daughters with her. And, you know, not everyone’s able to survive in the circumstances inside these facilities.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>We did a story last year about families that were separated under Trump. And one of the families, the mother, who had six children who were born here in the United States, was at this facility. And she just couldn’t take it anymore and decided that she would move back to Mexico and take four of her daughters with her. And, you know, not everyone’s able to survive in the circumstances inside these facilities.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Andrea Castillo:\u003c/strong> One thing I’ll add to that is just that we’ve seen an explosion in the number of people who are willing to accept voluntary departure. So instead of seeing their deportation process all the way through and fighting it up until the end, they are accepting deportation essentially early so that they can get out of these facilities.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Andrea Castillo:\u003c/strong> One thing I’ll add to that is just that we’ve seen an explosion in the number of people who are willing to accept voluntary departure. So instead of seeing their deportation process all the way through and fighting it up until the end, they are accepting deportation essentially early so that they can get out of these facilities.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Let me go to caller Chuck in Nevada, who I think has some pushback. Chuck, go ahead.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Let me go to caller Chuck in Nevada, who I think has some pushback. Chuck, go ahead.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Chuck:\u003c/strong> Yeah, the question is, I’m an immigrant myself, but I’m talking about these people. They took chances. They break the law. No matter what your guest is saying, they want to go back to their families or they have worked here, they don’t want to leave their families, but they know what they were doing.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Chuck:\u003c/strong> Yeah, the question is, I’m an immigrant myself, but I’m talking about these people. They took chances. They break the law. No matter what your guest is saying, they want to go back to their families or they have worked here, they don’t want to leave their families, but they know what they were doing.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Do you mean what my guest is saying? I think the question really is whether or not people should die in detention, in U.S. custody. Jeremy, your reaction?\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Do you mean what my guest is saying? I think the question really is whether or not people should die in detention, in U.S. custody. Jeremy, your reaction?\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jeremy Young:\u003c/strong> Well, again, we mentioned this earlier, but the overwhelming majority of people who are in immigration detention are people who do not have a criminal conviction. And ICE has targeted — I mean, we worked on car washes in this particular episode because Ismael worked at a car wash, but car washes were targeted not because they thought that it would be chock-full of people who are doing human trafficking and selling drugs. They knew it would be an easy way to round up people who were undocumented and didn’t have status.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jeremy Young:\u003c/strong> Well, again, we mentioned this earlier, but the overwhelming majority of people who are in immigration detention are people who do not have a criminal conviction. And ICE has targeted — I mean, we worked on car washes in this particular episode because Ismael worked at a car wash, but car washes were targeted not because they thought that it would be chock-full of people who are doing human trafficking and selling drugs. They knew it would be an easy way to round up people who were undocumented and didn’t have status.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>So it’s very easy to go by Home Depot and pick up people who are waiting for work. It’s much more difficult to actually seek out criminals. And so that’s part of the dynamic that’s playing out here.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>So it’s very easy to go by Home Depot and pick up people who are waiting for work. It’s much more difficult to actually seek out criminals. And so that’s part of the dynamic that’s playing out here.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> And even if they have a criminal conviction, I guess is what I’m saying, nobody should die in U.S. custody under the circumstances that you’re describing, right?\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> And even if they have a criminal conviction, I guess is what I’m saying, nobody should die in U.S. custody under the circumstances that you’re describing, right?\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jeremy Young:\u003c/strong> Of course. I said earlier, I feel like all of these deaths are avoidable. I mean, we’ve also had the highest rate of suicide in immigration detention facilities under President Trump in the second term. Those are very preventable when you do assessments, when people come in, you assess their mental health, you get them treatment. I think all of those deaths should be totally avoidable and, unfortunately, will be a stain on our conscience for some time.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jeremy Young:\u003c/strong> Of course. I said earlier, I feel like all of these deaths are avoidable. I mean, we’ve also had the highest rate of suicide in immigration detention facilities under President Trump in the second term. Those are very preventable when you do assessments, when people come in, you assess their mental health, you get them treatment. I think all of those deaths should be totally avoidable and, unfortunately, will be a stain on our conscience for some time.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Andrea Castillo:\u003c/strong> Can I add?\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Andrea Castillo:\u003c/strong> Can I add?\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Yeah, go ahead, Andrea.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Yeah, go ahead, Andrea.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Andrea Castillo:\u003c/strong> You know, beyond all of that, these detention facilities operate under federal laws. You know, they are — people who are detained are under the care of the federal government, and the federal government is mandated to provide minimum standards of care.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Andrea Castillo:\u003c/strong> You know, beyond all of that, these detention facilities operate under federal laws. You know, they are — people who are detained are under the care of the federal government, and the federal government is mandated to provide minimum standards of care.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>So whenever somebody is dying in a way that could have been prevented, that is a violation of federal law and what they are, you know, supposed to do.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>So whenever somebody is dying in a way that could have been prevented, that is a violation of federal law and what they are, you know, supposed to do.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jeremy Young:\u003c/strong> Not even to mention the impact that incarceration in these facilities has on people’s physical and mental health.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jeremy Young:\u003c/strong> Not even to mention the impact that incarceration in these facilities has on people’s physical and mental health.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> So, Jeremy, has the news of the sale been shared with the families or the sources you’ve spoken with? Because people inside Adelanto have shared so much with you. I’m just curious what their families think now that ownership has changed to the federal government.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> So, Jeremy, has the news of the sale been shared with the families or the sources you’ve spoken with? Because people inside Adelanto have shared so much with you. I’m just curious what their families think now that ownership has changed to the federal government.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jeremy Young:\u003c/strong> Well, I mean, there have been local organizations that have been part of a Shut Down Adelanto campaign for some time. You know, they’ve been fighting this battle for a long time. And so, you know, for them, it’s probably another twist, another turn, another effort to avoid oversight.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jeremy Young:\u003c/strong> Well, I mean, there have been local organizations that have been part of a Shut Down Adelanto campaign for some time. You know, they’ve been fighting this battle for a long time. And so, you know, for them, it’s probably another twist, another turn, another effort to avoid oversight.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>And the truth is, are the conditions going to change at the facility? Are people going to have access to medical care? It still remains to be seen.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>And the truth is, are the conditions going to change at the facility? Are people going to have access to medical care? It still remains to be seen.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> In the documentary, you talk to the attorney general, Rob Bonta, about trying to push back against federal immigration enforcement. What did he tell you about the ability of the state of California to hold DHS accountable, what he’s seen?\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> In the documentary, you talk to the attorney general, Rob Bonta, about trying to push back against federal immigration enforcement. What did he tell you about the ability of the state of California to hold DHS accountable, what he’s seen?\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jeremy Young:\u003c/strong> Well, they are actually permitted to go in and look at documents. They’re permitted to do interviews. They do have to give some heads-up before they do their visits, but they certainly have greater visibility into the conditions inside the facility than anyone else.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jeremy Young:\u003c/strong> Well, they are actually permitted to go in and look at documents. They’re permitted to do interviews. They do have to give some heads-up before they do their visits, but they certainly have greater visibility into the conditions inside the facility than anyone else.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>And I think one of the things that the attorney general pointed out about this model of having private companies operate prisons is that it’s flawed from the get-go. There is a total… You know, effort to minimize the amount of costs, because it comes out of your profits, and it’s just — it’s a very straightforward, and it is a problem from the get-go.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>And I think one of the things that the attorney general pointed out about this model of having private companies operate prisons is that it’s flawed from the get-go. There is a total… You know, effort to minimize the amount of costs, because it comes out of your profits, and it’s just — it’s a very straightforward, and it is a problem from the get-go.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Yeah, well, let’s hear a clip of your host and correspondent for \u003cem>Fault Lines\u003c/em>, Natasha Del Toro, talking with Rob Bonta about what ICE is saying about its facilities and about the death of Ayala Uribe.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Yeah, well, let’s hear a clip of your host and correspondent for \u003cem>Fault Lines\u003c/em>, Natasha Del Toro, talking with Rob Bonta about what ICE is saying about its facilities and about the death of Ayala Uribe.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Natasha Del Toro:\u003c/strong> ICE issued a statement saying comprehensive medical care is provided from the moment individuals arrive. At no time during detention is a detained illegal alien denied emergent care. Not true.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Natasha Del Toro:\u003c/strong> ICE issued a statement saying comprehensive medical care is provided from the moment individuals arrive. At no time during detention is a detained illegal alien denied emergent care. Not true.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Attorney General Rob Bonta:\u003c/strong> That’s a talking point. If what the ICE spokesperson said was true, Mr. Ayala Uribe would be with us today. And who knows what’s happening on the ground? We do, because we’ve been there. We’ve gone to these facilities. We’ve gotten into Adelanto. We have done our own physical inspections. We’ve looked at documents. We’ve talked to staff. And we found the exact opposite of what that ICE spokesperson just said.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Attorney General Rob Bonta:\u003c/strong> That’s a talking point. If what the ICE spokesperson said was true, Mr. Ayala Uribe would be with us today. And who knows what’s happening on the ground? We do, because we’ve been there. We’ve gone to these facilities. We’ve gotten into Adelanto. We have done our own physical inspections. We’ve looked at documents. We’ve talked to staff. And we found the exact opposite of what that ICE spokesperson just said.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> So, hearing that, listener Sharon’s point, I think, is appropriate here. Sharon wants to know: If Rob Bonta and the state of California have special powers, why is it that we can’t do more? Why can’t they go in there and make criminal charges or shut it down? I’m so disheartened by constantly hearing the same thing about people being mistreated and dying.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> So, hearing that, listener Sharon’s point, I think, is appropriate here. Sharon wants to know: If Rob Bonta and the state of California have special powers, why is it that we can’t do more? Why can’t they go in there and make criminal charges or shut it down? I’m so disheartened by constantly hearing the same thing about people being mistreated and dying.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Jeremy, you first, and then I’ll go to Andrea on that.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>Jeremy, you first, and then I’ll go to Andrea on that.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Andrea Castillo:\u003c/strong> I-I-I can take this one. Okay.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Andrea Castillo:\u003c/strong> I-I-I can take this one. Okay.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Okay, thanks.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Okay, thanks.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Andrea Castillo:\u003c/strong> Yeah. You know, these facilities operate under federal control, so there’s only so much that states can do that falls under their control. But, you know, the existence and operation of these facilities is a federal matter. Immigration enforcement is a federal matter. It’s under federal law.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Andrea Castillo:\u003c/strong> Yeah. You know, these facilities operate under federal control, so there’s only so much that states can do that falls under their control. But, you know, the existence and operation of these facilities is a federal matter. Immigration enforcement is a federal matter. It’s under federal law.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>So while the states have power to oversee any violations of the conditions, while they have some amount of oversight power, you know, the real emphasis here is on the federal government.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>So while the states have power to oversee any violations of the conditions, while they have some amount of oversight power, you know, the real emphasis here is on the federal government.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Well, listener Lisa writes, “I don’t understand how Congress or other officials cannot put an end to ICE and detention center torture.” Do you want to respond to Lisa, Andrea?\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Well, listener Lisa writes, “I don’t understand how Congress or other officials cannot put an end to ICE and detention center torture.” Do you want to respond to Lisa, Andrea?\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Andrea Castillo:\u003c/strong> Yeah. Well, Congress has had its own troubles getting into these facilities since the start of this administration. Members of Congress have found themselves kept out of the detention centers. There have been many iterations at this point of rules that DHS has put into place that make it more difficult for members of Congress to conduct their own oversight.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Andrea Castillo:\u003c/strong> Yeah. Well, Congress has had its own troubles getting into these facilities since the start of this administration. Members of Congress have found themselves kept out of the detention centers. There have been many iterations at this point of rules that DHS has put into place that make it more difficult for members of Congress to conduct their own oversight.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>You know, at some point, they were asking members of Congress for several days’ notice. Recently, they have been asking members of Congress to provide written confirmation and a signature from any detainee that they want to speak with. Otherwise, when they go and do an unannounced inspection of a detention facility, they’re not allowed to speak with any of the detainees there.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>You know, at some point, they were asking members of Congress for several days’ notice. Recently, they have been asking members of Congress to provide written confirmation and a signature from any detainee that they want to speak with. Otherwise, when they go and do an unannounced inspection of a detention facility, they’re not allowed to speak with any of the detainees there.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Let me go to caller Judith in Oakland next. Hi, Judith. Join us. You’re on.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Let me go to caller Judith in Oakland next. Hi, Judith. Join us. You’re on.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Judith:\u003c/strong> Yeah, I was just making a comment that I wish the press and the people talking today would continue to inform the public of the differences between documented and undocumented people who are going to these facilities. Documented people going through the court system that they’re picking up are not, quote, criminals. They’re not illegal, and nobody’s making the distinction.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Judith:\u003c/strong> Yeah, I was just making a comment that I wish the press and the people talking today would continue to inform the public of the differences between documented and undocumented people who are going to these facilities. Documented people going through the court system that they’re picking up are not, quote, criminals. They’re not illegal, and nobody’s making the distinction.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>I just went to an event involving a mother, three U.S. citizens, a U.S. husband, in court, picked up a nurse who now is in a different African country and went through deplorable conditions. So I wish to help inform the public, because the one commenter who just talked about how they all committed crimes — they didn’t commit crimes.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>I just went to an event involving a mother, three U.S. citizens, a U.S. husband, in court, picked up a nurse who now is in a different African country and went through deplorable conditions. So I wish to help inform the public, because the one commenter who just talked about how they all committed crimes — they didn’t commit crimes.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> I really appreciate you saying that, and we’re just coming up on the break here. But I did want to just have Andrea and Jeremy respond to the fact that, yes, and we have covered this, there are a lot of people who have legal status who are being picked up and put into these places, and even without charges, right, Andrea?\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> I really appreciate you saying that, and we’re just coming up on the break here. But I did want to just have Andrea and Jeremy respond to the fact that, yes, and we have covered this, there are a lot of people who have legal status who are being picked up and put into these places, and even without charges, right, Andrea?\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Andrea Castillo:\u003c/strong> That’s right. There are a lot of people, you know, more than a million people who, at the start of this administration, had some sort of provisional legal status. They had the ability to work legally, and the administration has been cutting those statuses away and leaving people undocumented and more vulnerable to being picked up and deported.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Andrea Castillo:\u003c/strong> That’s right. There are a lot of people, you know, more than a million people who, at the start of this administration, had some sort of provisional legal status. They had the ability to work legally, and the administration has been cutting those statuses away and leaving people undocumented and more vulnerable to being picked up and deported.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> And even people whose status they haven’t taken away, but who were, you know, appearing in court or had some kind of temporary status, right?\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> And even people whose status they haven’t taken away, but who were, you know, appearing in court or had some kind of temporary status, right?\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Right. Well, we’re talking with Andrea Castillo of the \u003cem>Los Angeles Times\u003c/em> and Jeremy Young, senior producer on \u003cem>Fault Lines\u003c/em> from Al Jazeera English, with the new documentary \u003cem>Dying in Detention\u003c/em>.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>Right. Well, we’re talking with Andrea Castillo of the \u003cem>Los Angeles Times\u003c/em> and Jeremy Young, senior producer on \u003cem>Fault Lines\u003c/em> from Al Jazeera English, with the new documentary \u003cem>Dying in Detention\u003c/em>.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Stay with us. You’re listening to \u003cem>Forum\u003c/em>. I’m Mina Kim. We’re talking this hour about conditions inside the Adelanto ICE Processing Center, where four people have died since Trump took office, and also the impact of DHS now owning California detention centers. In fact, they own several of them now.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>Stay with us. You’re listening to \u003cem>Forum\u003c/em>. I’m Mina Kim. We’re talking this hour about conditions inside the Adelanto ICE Processing Center, where four people have died since Trump took office, and also the impact of DHS now owning California detention centers. In fact, they own several of them now.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Andrea Castillo is a staff writer at the \u003cem>Los Angeles Times\u003c/em> who covers immigration, and Jeremy Young is a senior producer on \u003cem>Fault Lines\u003c/em> from Al Jazeera English who is part of the team behind a new documentary called \u003cem>Dying in Detention\u003c/em>, which looks at the case of Ismael Ayala Uribe, who died while in custody at Adelanto.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>Andrea Castillo is a staff writer at the \u003cem>Los Angeles Times\u003c/em> who covers immigration, and Jeremy Young is a senior producer on \u003cem>Fault Lines\u003c/em> from Al Jazeera English who is part of the team behind a new documentary called \u003cem>Dying in Detention\u003c/em>, which looks at the case of Ismael Ayala Uribe, who died while in custody at Adelanto.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>And listeners, we’re asking you what questions you have about conditions at ICE facilities in California, the jail in Adelanto, and whether or not you’ve had any direct experience with them. Also, your questions about the sale of ICE facilities to the federal government and what impact you’re wondering that will have.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>And listeners, we’re asking you what questions you have about conditions at ICE facilities in California, the jail in Adelanto, and whether or not you’ve had any direct experience with them. Also, your questions about the sale of ICE facilities to the federal government and what impact you’re wondering that will have.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>The phone number is 866-733-6786, 866-733-6786. The email address is forum@kqed.org, and you can find us on Discord, Bluesky, Facebook, or Instagram at KQED Forum.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>The phone number is 866-733-6786, 866-733-6786. The email address is forum@kqed.org, and you can find us on Discord, Bluesky, Facebook, or Instagram at KQED Forum.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>So, Andrea, help us understand: How many facilities in California does the federal government own, and are there plans to own more?\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>So, Andrea, help us understand: How many facilities in California does the federal government own, and are there plans to own more?\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Andrea Castillo:\u003c/strong> The federal government now owns four facilities in California. That’s half of the facilities in the state, and there are plans to own more. George Zoley, the CEO of the GEO Group, said in a recent call with investors that DHS had talked about purchasing 10 facilities and that that number could increase.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Andrea Castillo:\u003c/strong> The federal government now owns four facilities in California. That’s half of the facilities in the state, and there are plans to own more. George Zoley, the CEO of the GEO Group, said in a recent call with investors that DHS had talked about purchasing 10 facilities and that that number could increase.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Hmm, 10 facilities, but probably across the country, because there are eight total in California. Is that right? And you said some are owned by CoreCivic.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Hmm, 10 facilities, but probably across the country, because there are eight total in California. Is that right? And you said some are owned by CoreCivic.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Andrea Castillo:\u003c/strong> Others are owned by CoreCivic. There’s a smattering of other companies that own different facilities as well.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Andrea Castillo:\u003c/strong> Others are owned by CoreCivic. There’s a smattering of other companies that own different facilities as well.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> All right, so the federal government now has Otay Mesa and the California City Detention Facility, as well as these other two by the GEO Group that are in Adelanto.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> All right, so the federal government now has Otay Mesa and the California City Detention Facility, as well as these other two by the GEO Group that are in Adelanto.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Sue in Petaluma writes, “I see that Adelanto was established in 2015. How do the present conditions in this facility differ from conditions in the previous administration? Have these conditions persisted over the last 11 years, or have they worsened under this administration?” Andrea?\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>Sue in Petaluma writes, “I see that Adelanto was established in 2015. How do the present conditions in this facility differ from conditions in the previous administration? Have these conditions persisted over the last 11 years, or have they worsened under this administration?” Andrea?\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Andrea Castillo:\u003c/strong> Yeah, the conditions absolutely persist. I am reminded of a report from many years ago where investigators found nooses in Adelanto Detention Center that were possibly being used for attempted suicides. So that’s just one of the things that sticks out that I remember all of these years later.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Andrea Castillo:\u003c/strong> Yeah, the conditions absolutely persist. I am reminded of a report from many years ago where investigators found nooses in Adelanto Detention Center that were possibly being used for attempted suicides. So that’s just one of the things that sticks out that I remember all of these years later.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>But certainly, the conditions — you know, there have been many lawsuits and allegations going back multiple administrations, alleging the same types of things.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>But certainly, the conditions — you know, there have been many lawsuits and allegations going back multiple administrations, alleging the same types of things.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jeremy Young:\u003c/strong> And, Mina, remember, there were almost zero people left in the facility relatively recently, until Trump came back into office.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jeremy Young:\u003c/strong> And, Mina, remember, there were almost zero people left in the facility relatively recently, until Trump came back into office.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> I used to — 10 were, yeah, it had gotten down to very few, single digits. I remember at some point there were two people.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> I used to — 10 were, yeah, it had gotten down to very few, single digits. I remember at some point there were two people.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>So when Trump came back into office, how — what are some of the ways DHS operational oversight changed? Do you mention that it’s harder to get information out from DHS in your reporting now?\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>So when Trump came back into office, how — what are some of the ways DHS operational oversight changed? Do you mention that it’s harder to get information out from DHS in your reporting now?\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jeremy Young:\u003c/strong> Well, yeah, I mean, that’s always been a problem. I mean, I think one of the changes that’s happened significantly, and it’s interesting as we approach the midterm elections, you know, there was a real visible change in the approach that this administration took to its crackdown when they switched from Kristi Noem and brought in Markwayne Mullin.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jeremy Young:\u003c/strong> Well, yeah, I mean, that’s always been a problem. I mean, I think one of the changes that’s happened significantly, and it’s interesting as we approach the midterm elections, you know, there was a real visible change in the approach that this administration took to its crackdown when they switched from Kristi Noem and brought in Markwayne Mullin.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>And they actually detained more people under Markwayne Mullin, but it wasn’t done in the same visible way, where they were trying to, you know, spread fear and livestream these raids. They decided to take an approach.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>And they actually detained more people under Markwayne Mullin, but it wasn’t done in the same visible way, where they were trying to, you know, spread fear and livestream these raids. They decided to take an approach.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>And, you know, that’s been really interesting because I think what it reveals to me is seeing whether the politics behind this crackdown and the treatment of immigrants in these detention facilities is popular in the United States and whether it’s going to have an impact on how people vote in the midterm elections, which I still think is an open question, but a very interesting one.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>And, you know, that’s been really interesting because I think what it reveals to me is seeing whether the politics behind this crackdown and the treatment of immigrants in these detention facilities is popular in the United States and whether it’s going to have an impact on how people vote in the midterm elections, which I still think is an open question, but a very interesting one.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Is there an internal monitor of ICE, Andrea, or something like that?\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Is there an internal monitor of ICE, Andrea, or something like that?\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Andrea Castillo:\u003c/strong> Um, there were, um, you know, oversight mechanisms within ICE, and on the federal side, yeah, there was the CRCL, Civil Rights and Civil Liberties Office. There was also the immigrant detention ombudsman. Well, the ombudsman no longer exists, and Civil Rights and Civil Liberties is extremely reduced. So their ability to actually investigate the conditions in these facilities has drastically changed.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Andrea Castillo:\u003c/strong> Um, there were, um, you know, oversight mechanisms within ICE, and on the federal side, yeah, there was the CRCL, Civil Rights and Civil Liberties Office. There was also the immigrant detention ombudsman. Well, the ombudsman no longer exists, and Civil Rights and Civil Liberties is extremely reduced. So their ability to actually investigate the conditions in these facilities has drastically changed.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jeremy Young:\u003c/strong> And, Mina, just so you know what the ombudsman’s role was, they would receive complaints directly from detainees at facilities and they would aim to address those, whether someone’s not able to get their medicine, whether they’re not able to communicate with their — whatever the issue was, that was the purpose of the ombudsman office, and President Trump gutted that.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jeremy Young:\u003c/strong> And, Mina, just so you know what the ombudsman’s role was, they would receive complaints directly from detainees at facilities and they would aim to address those, whether someone’s not able to get their medicine, whether they’re not able to communicate with their — whatever the issue was, that was the purpose of the ombudsman office, and President Trump gutted that.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Let me go to caller Tony in Oakland next. Tony, go ahead.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Let me go to caller Tony in Oakland next. Tony, go ahead.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Tony:\u003c/strong> It seems to be the root cause of this issue with the federal government purchasing prisons is the privatization of prisons. When are we going to do something to ban that and take state control of our penal system?\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Tony:\u003c/strong> It seems to be the root cause of this issue with the federal government purchasing prisons is the privatization of prisons. When are we going to do something to ban that and take state control of our penal system?\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Well, Tony, thanks for sharing your thoughts on that. Let me go to Andrea.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Well, Tony, thanks for sharing your thoughts on that. Let me go to Andrea.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Andrea Castillo:\u003c/strong> Thank you. Well, California tried it, and it didn’t work. California, years ago, tried to ban private prisons. That was struck down in court, so the state lost on that one. And that, I think, set into place all this big effort now to increase the oversight of these facilities, because that is what they can do.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Andrea Castillo:\u003c/strong> Thank you. Well, California tried it, and it didn’t work. California, years ago, tried to ban private prisons. That was struck down in court, so the state lost on that one. And that, I think, set into place all this big effort now to increase the oversight of these facilities, because that is what they can do.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jeremy Young:\u003c/strong> And to Tony’s point, one of the things that we did in the documentary on Capitol Hill was interview Jim Jordan, who has an extremely powerful role overseeing the House Judiciary Committee. And a super PAC aligned with him, according to the Project on Government Oversight, received a $250,000 donation from the GEO Group. And when we asked him whether that was problematic or a conflict of interest, he said, “No, not really,” and laughed it off.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jeremy Young:\u003c/strong> And to Tony’s point, one of the things that we did in the documentary on Capitol Hill was interview Jim Jordan, who has an extremely powerful role overseeing the House Judiciary Committee. And a super PAC aligned with him, according to the Project on Government Oversight, received a $250,000 donation from the GEO Group. And when we asked him whether that was problematic or a conflict of interest, he said, “No, not really,” and laughed it off.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> I should note that we also reached out to GEO Group for a reaction to your documentary, Jeremy, and they did not respond to our request for comment.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> I should note that we also reached out to GEO Group for a reaction to your documentary, Jeremy, and they did not respond to our request for comment.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jeremy Young:\u003c/strong> For comment. That’s a shame, Mina.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jeremy Young:\u003c/strong> For comment. That’s a shame, Mina.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> This listener in the East Bay writes, “How do family members stay in contact with their relatives inside facilities like Adelanto? Are they able to visit or make phone calls?” Jeremy?\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> This listener in the East Bay writes, “How do family members stay in contact with their relatives inside facilities like Adelanto? Are they able to visit or make phone calls?” Jeremy?\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jeremy Young:\u003c/strong> That’s a really good question, because one of the biggest challenges for families is keeping track of their loved ones, making sure they have what they need, communicating with them, and people often are at a loss.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jeremy Young:\u003c/strong> That’s a really good question, because one of the biggest challenges for families is keeping track of their loved ones, making sure they have what they need, communicating with them, and people often are at a loss.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>I mean, Ismael’s family found out that he was dead when the police came and knocked on their door at 5:30 in the morning on a Monday morning. They didn’t know that he had been rushed to the hospital. They hadn’t been given any information about it.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>I mean, Ismael’s family found out that he was dead when the police came and knocked on their door at 5:30 in the morning on a Monday morning. They didn’t know that he had been rushed to the hospital. They hadn’t been given any information about it.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>It’s really challenging and also expensive to communicate, and not very reliable. And it’s really one of the things that, when you think about being able to be safe and be healthy while you’re incarcerated in these facilities, the ability to communicate with your family, to speak with loved ones, to hear your children’s voices — sometimes it’s all that can kind of carry you through the day. So it’s real important.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>It’s really challenging and also expensive to communicate, and not very reliable. And it’s really one of the things that, when you think about being able to be safe and be healthy while you’re incarcerated in these facilities, the ability to communicate with your family, to speak with loved ones, to hear your children’s voices — sometimes it’s all that can kind of carry you through the day. So it’s real important.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Andrea Castillo:\u003c/strong> Can I just add to that?\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Andrea Castillo:\u003c/strong> Can I just add to that?\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Yeah, go ahead, Andrea.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Yeah, go ahead, Andrea.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Andrea Castillo:\u003c/strong> These calls are expensive. They have to pay to speak with their family members. And families that I have talked to recently have said that, specifically when going to Adelanto, they are waiting for hours with other families in order to get time to visit in person. There are lines now because there are significantly more people detained.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Andrea Castillo:\u003c/strong> These calls are expensive. They have to pay to speak with their family members. And families that I have talked to recently have said that, specifically when going to Adelanto, they are waiting for hours with other families in order to get time to visit in person. There are lines now because there are significantly more people detained.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> But they must be, though, a key source of information for you, Andrea, and also for you, Jeremy, given what you’ve been saying about how hard it is to get accurate information about what’s really going on.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> But they must be, though, a key source of information for you, Andrea, and also for you, Jeremy, given what you’ve been saying about how hard it is to get accurate information about what’s really going on.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Andrea Castillo:\u003c/strong> Yeah, it’s become much more difficult as a journalist to actually see the inside of these detention facilities. One of the main ways now is if you’re going to immigration court and there is an immigration court in a detention facility. It’s not like that for every single one, but Adelanto does have an immigration court inside the facility. But obviously, I’m not able to see the housing units or anything like that.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Andrea Castillo:\u003c/strong> Yeah, it’s become much more difficult as a journalist to actually see the inside of these detention facilities. One of the main ways now is if you’re going to immigration court and there is an immigration court in a detention facility. It’s not like that for every single one, but Adelanto does have an immigration court inside the facility. But obviously, I’m not able to see the housing units or anything like that.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jeremy Young:\u003c/strong> We spent a day outside of Adelanto during visiting hours and met with family members who were either coming in or coming out, and it was like 100-degree heat. And it was really interesting to have people stop and speak with us and share their experiences.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jeremy Young:\u003c/strong> We spent a day outside of Adelanto during visiting hours and met with family members who were either coming in or coming out, and it was like 100-degree heat. And it was really interesting to have people stop and speak with us and share their experiences.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>These two sisters that we interviewed — their brother, you know, and they were young, they were in their twenties, and their brother was young — had been taken into Adelanto about a week before. And she said to me, she’s like, “They had him shackled. He was handcuffed, and he was shackled by his feet. Why would they do that?” She said, “My brother’s not a criminal.”\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>These two sisters that we interviewed — their brother, you know, and they were young, they were in their twenties, and their brother was young — had been taken into Adelanto about a week before. And she said to me, she’s like, “They had him shackled. He was handcuffed, and he was shackled by his feet. Why would they do that?” She said, “My brother’s not a criminal.”\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>And it was just really interesting to see her perspective and knowing who her brother is and loving her brother and not understanding why he’s being treated like a criminal. It was really heartbreaking.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>And it was just really interesting to see her perspective and knowing who her brother is and loving her brother and not understanding why he’s being treated like a criminal. It was really heartbreaking.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Well, Bluesky user MJ writes, “Remind me why politicians oppose detention centers in the Bay Area within easy reach of hospitals and physicians, immigration lawyers, friends and family are nearby, but we’d rather keep them in places like Adelanto.” Do you think there’s some truth to what MJ is saying?\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Well, Bluesky user MJ writes, “Remind me why politicians oppose detention centers in the Bay Area within easy reach of hospitals and physicians, immigration lawyers, friends and family are nearby, but we’d rather keep them in places like Adelanto.” Do you think there’s some truth to what MJ is saying?\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jeremy Young:\u003c/strong> I do, and I think that if you look at what happened at Delaney Hall this summer in New Jersey, where people showed up for protests and state police came in on horseback, it really was in the zeitgeist, with a lot of attention. And that facility is not located as far away from the center of town as places like Adelanto or Irwin County Detention Center.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jeremy Young:\u003c/strong> I do, and I think that if you look at what happened at Delaney Hall this summer in New Jersey, where people showed up for protests and state police came in on horseback, it really was in the zeitgeist, with a lot of attention. And that facility is not located as far away from the center of town as places like Adelanto or Irwin County Detention Center.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>A lot of these facilities are in the middle of nowhere, and it’s really hard for people to get to. But a facility like Delaney Hall that was easier for people to get to was more visible. It’s near New York, it’s near Washington, D.C. Politicians are able to go. And so you do see the more visibility, the more sunlight, the more attention there is to the conditions inside.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>A lot of these facilities are in the middle of nowhere, and it’s really hard for people to get to. But a facility like Delaney Hall that was easier for people to get to was more visible. It’s near New York, it’s near Washington, D.C. Politicians are able to go. And so you do see the more visibility, the more sunlight, the more attention there is to the conditions inside.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Andrea Castillo:\u003c/strong> One of ICE’s talking points during the course of California trying to rid the state of these privately run detention centers was that if the state no longer had any detention facilities, people would have to travel farther and farther away to see their loved ones and for people to get access to their attorneys.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Andrea Castillo:\u003c/strong> One of ICE’s talking points during the course of California trying to rid the state of these privately run detention centers was that if the state no longer had any detention facilities, people would have to travel farther and farther away to see their loved ones and for people to get access to their attorneys.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>And, you know, that was a point that they made that has validity. If people are far away, the situation is more opaque.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>And, you know, that was a point that they made that has validity. If people are far away, the situation is more opaque.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Again, we’re talking with Andrea Castillo, a staff writer at the \u003cem>Los Angeles Times\u003c/em>, covering immigration, and Jeremy Young, part of the team behind the new documentary that we’re covering today, \u003cem>Dying in Detention\u003c/em>, senior producer on \u003cem>Fault Lines\u003c/em> from Al Jazeera English.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Again, we’re talking with Andrea Castillo, a staff writer at the \u003cem>Los Angeles Times\u003c/em>, covering immigration, and Jeremy Young, part of the team behind the new documentary that we’re covering today, \u003cem>Dying in Detention\u003c/em>, senior producer on \u003cem>Fault Lines\u003c/em> from Al Jazeera English.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>And let me remind listeners, you are listening to \u003cem>Forum\u003c/em>. I’m Mina Kim.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>And let me remind listeners, you are listening to \u003cem>Forum\u003c/em>. I’m Mina Kim.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>So, with everything you’re saying, what power do detainees have to hold DHS accountable? Jeremy, is Ismael’s family trying to get some kind of justice through the courts?\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>So, with everything you’re saying, what power do detainees have to hold DHS accountable? Jeremy, is Ismael’s family trying to get some kind of justice through the courts?\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jeremy Young:\u003c/strong> Yeah, I mean, families can sue for wrongful death, and that is going to take a lot of time. I think, you know, just not to be all negative about the impact that the detainees have had on their situation, for Adelanto, Andrea had mentioned that a judge ruled in their favor earlier this summer in order to get, you know, fresh water, adequate food, adequate medical care.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jeremy Young:\u003c/strong> Yeah, I mean, families can sue for wrongful death, and that is going to take a lot of time. I think, you know, just not to be all negative about the impact that the detainees have had on their situation, for Adelanto, Andrea had mentioned that a judge ruled in their favor earlier this summer in order to get, you know, fresh water, adequate food, adequate medical care.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>And so I think some people did feel like their voice was heard. You know, they engaged in this hunger strike to raise awareness because there’s not much else that they can do. And I think this did make it into the news. It did make it into people’s consciousness.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>And so I think some people did feel like their voice was heard. You know, they engaged in this hunger strike to raise awareness because there’s not much else that they can do. And I think this did make it into the news. It did make it into people’s consciousness.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>And I will say that I think advocating for themselves, there is a glimmer of hope that they could improve the conditions. It’s not easy, and no one would want to go through that experience. But I will say that they’ve been effective in getting their voice heard. This reminds me — Andrea, you’d agree.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>And I will say that I think advocating for themselves, there is a glimmer of hope that they could improve the conditions. It’s not easy, and no one would want to go through that experience. But I will say that they’ve been effective in getting their voice heard. This reminds me — Andrea, you’d agree.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Andrea Castillo:\u003c/strong> Yeah, this reminds me of a story that I covered a few months back. This wasn’t at Adelanto, but detainees at the California City facility and at Mesa Verde had initiated a boycott of commissary because they felt that the prices had increased so significantly that things were just unaffordable. And they weren’t getting, particularly for detainees who had, you know, sensitivities or conditions like diabetes, where they needed to eat food other than what was provided to them. Their only way to get that food was through commissary and their families, you know, providing them money to pay for that.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Andrea Castillo:\u003c/strong> Yeah, this reminds me of a story that I covered a few months back. This wasn’t at Adelanto, but detainees at the California City facility and at Mesa Verde had initiated a boycott of commissary because they felt that the prices had increased so significantly that things were just unaffordable. And they weren’t getting, particularly for detainees who had, you know, sensitivities or conditions like diabetes, where they needed to eat food other than what was provided to them. Their only way to get that food was through commissary and their families, you know, providing them money to pay for that.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>But it had become so burdensome that their families were spending multiple hundreds of dollars every month for these detainees to eat. And so they initiated a boycott of commissaries, and they felt it worked. The facility, California City, decided to, from what I understand, reduce some of those prices.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>But it had become so burdensome that their families were spending multiple hundreds of dollars every month for these detainees to eat. And so they initiated a boycott of commissaries, and they felt it worked. The facility, California City, decided to, from what I understand, reduce some of those prices.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Matt in Oakland writes, “How much could things actually change if Democrats retake Congress in the midterms? Do they realistically have enough oversight or legislative power to change what’s happening at these facilities and more broadly within the Trump administration and the Department of Homeland Security?” What do you think?\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Matt in Oakland writes, “How much could things actually change if Democrats retake Congress in the midterms? Do they realistically have enough oversight or legislative power to change what’s happening at these facilities and more broadly within the Trump administration and the Department of Homeland Security?” What do you think?\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jeremy Young:\u003c/strong> Well, I think what would be significant is if there was a change in the approach to the crackdown and immigration detention and the massive number of people who are being incarcerated in these facilities. I mean, it’s undoubtable that one of the reasons why people aren’t able to get adequate medical care is because there are too many people in these facilities, and they are not staffed up to handle the number of people who are in them.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jeremy Young:\u003c/strong> Well, I think what would be significant is if there was a change in the approach to the crackdown and immigration detention and the massive number of people who are being incarcerated in these facilities. I mean, it’s undoubtable that one of the reasons why people aren’t able to get adequate medical care is because there are too many people in these facilities, and they are not staffed up to handle the number of people who are in them.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>So if we took an alternative approach to what we’re doing, then things might change.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>So if we took an alternative approach to what we’re doing, then things might change.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Let me go to caller Omar in San Francisco. Omar, go ahead.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Let me go to caller Omar in San Francisco. Omar, go ahead.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Omar:\u003c/strong> Good morning, Mina. So, Andrea and Jeremy, I think that you guys need to do a story in regards to where is the money going? You’re talking about massive numbers of people being dehumanized and treated like animals, but the real problem is that this is all just a big business, and that it is driving back to some of the highest offices in this land. They all are invested in these corporations.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Omar:\u003c/strong> Good morning, Mina. So, Andrea and Jeremy, I think that you guys need to do a story in regards to where is the money going? You’re talking about massive numbers of people being dehumanized and treated like animals, but the real problem is that this is all just a big business, and that it is driving back to some of the highest offices in this land. They all are invested in these corporations.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>And you said that the GEO Group and the other group, you know, have these shareholder meetings where they’re like, “Oh, they’re going to spend more money.” These are people being turned into dollars, and that is all it is about. None of them are criminals. They have no reason to be in there. This whole thing has been the worst nightmare that this country has ever faced, and there needs to be some justice behind it.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>And you said that the GEO Group and the other group, you know, have these shareholder meetings where they’re like, “Oh, they’re going to spend more money.” These are people being turned into dollars, and that is all it is about. None of them are criminals. They have no reason to be in there. This whole thing has been the worst nightmare that this country has ever faced, and there needs to be some justice behind it.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Thanks. I can hear how passionately you feel about this. And, yes, Jeremy, you touched on this with regard to Jim Jordan and so on.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Thanks. I can hear how passionately you feel about this. And, yes, Jeremy, you touched on this with regard to Jim Jordan and so on.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jeremy Young:\u003c/strong> Yeah, and the amount of money that the private prison companies have put in the coffers for President Trump has been extraordinary. The other thing in this context — it was a great comment, by the way, by your caller — a lot of the people who are incarcerated in these facilities are the primary breadwinner for their family, or at least one of the breadwinners of their family.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jeremy Young:\u003c/strong> Yeah, and the amount of money that the private prison companies have put in the coffers for President Trump has been extraordinary. The other thing in this context — it was a great comment, by the way, by your caller — a lot of the people who are incarcerated in these facilities are the primary breadwinner for their family, or at least one of the breadwinners of their family.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>So we’re talking about having to manage commissary expenses and phone calls, but they’re also not making the money that their loved one was making when they were not incarcerated in a detention facility. And so children are stepping up. We’re seeing children working to try and help support families. It’s really a dire situation for these people.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>So we’re talking about having to manage commissary expenses and phone calls, but they’re also not making the money that their loved one was making when they were not incarcerated in a detention facility. And so children are stepping up. We’re seeing children working to try and help support families. It’s really a dire situation for these people.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> And Andrea, you said billions of dollars, right, for these facilities. And so essentially, the company continues to keep running them. So they get paid for the facility and for the ongoing contracts of running them.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> And Andrea, you said billions of dollars, right, for these facilities. And so essentially, the company continues to keep running them. So they get paid for the facility and for the ongoing contracts of running them.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Andrea Castillo:\u003c/strong> That’s right. Yeah, I mean, this is $45 billion of U.S. taxpayer money, so we’re all—\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Andrea Castillo:\u003c/strong> That’s right. Yeah, I mean, this is $45 billion of U.S. taxpayer money, so we’re all—\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> So we’re all paying for it.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> So we’re all paying for it.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Andrea Castillo:\u003c/strong> We are all paying for it, and that’s correct. I mean, the CEO of GEO Group, George Zoley, on one of these calls mentioned that, for him, they are in this sort of dual business of owning the facilities, but then also operating the facilities.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Andrea Castillo:\u003c/strong> We are all paying for it, and that’s correct. I mean, the CEO of GEO Group, George Zoley, on one of these calls mentioned that, for him, they are in this sort of dual business of owning the facilities, but then also operating the facilities.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>But he said outright that, for him, the most important of those two is continued long-term operation of the detention centers. So essentially, he’s saying it’s okay for the federal government to buy these facilities as long as we can still keep these more lucrative, long-term contracts in which we are running the show.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>But he said outright that, for him, the most important of those two is continued long-term operation of the detention centers. So essentially, he’s saying it’s okay for the federal government to buy these facilities as long as we can still keep these more lucrative, long-term contracts in which we are running the show.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jeremy Young:\u003c/strong> And, Mina, a former senior executive from GEO Group is now running ICE. So you can see what the problems are with the revolving-door system that we have.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jeremy Young:\u003c/strong> And, Mina, a former senior executive from GEO Group is now running ICE. So you can see what the problems are with the revolving-door system that we have.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Right, and your documentary, of course, shows us what running the facilities actually looks like.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Right, and your documentary, of course, shows us what running the facilities actually looks like.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Andrea, in your reporting, you said that Governor Gavin Newsom signed more than 20 bills aimed at pushing back against the Trump administration’s immigration agenda. Do these state-level laws have any potential to change things?\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>Andrea, in your reporting, you said that Governor Gavin Newsom signed more than 20 bills aimed at pushing back against the Trump administration’s immigration agenda. Do these state-level laws have any potential to change things?\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Andrea Castillo:\u003c/strong> They absolutely do. I mean, one of the laws that I’m particularly interested in as a journalist is one that requires the release of public records related to 911 calls at these facilities. So that one certainly will have an impact, with the public able to more freely see what’s going on when 911 gets involved, when something happens in these facilities.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Andrea Castillo:\u003c/strong> They absolutely do. I mean, one of the laws that I’m particularly interested in as a journalist is one that requires the release of public records related to 911 calls at these facilities. So that one certainly will have an impact, with the public able to more freely see what’s going on when 911 gets involved, when something happens in these facilities.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Other of these laws are now embroiled in litigation already. GEO Group already sued over one of the laws, so we’ll see what happens with that.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>Other of these laws are now embroiled in litigation already. GEO Group already sued over one of the laws, so we’ll see what happens with that.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Well, Andrea, thank you so much for your reporting. I really appreciate it. Thank you. Andrea Castillo, a staff writer at the \u003cem>Los Angeles Times\u003c/em>. Jeremy Young, a senior producer on \u003cem>Fault Lines\u003c/em> from Al Jazeera English, which has just put out the new documentary \u003cem>Dying in Detention\u003c/em>. My thanks to you as well, Jeremy.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Well, Andrea, thank you so much for your reporting. I really appreciate it. Thank you. Andrea Castillo, a staff writer at the \u003cem>Los Angeles Times\u003c/em>. Jeremy Young, a senior producer on \u003cem>Fault Lines\u003c/em> from Al Jazeera English, which has just put out the new documentary \u003cem>Dying in Detention\u003c/em>. My thanks to you as well, Jeremy.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jeremy Young:\u003c/strong> Thank you, Mina, for having us on and for putting some attention on this issue.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jeremy Young:\u003c/strong> Thank you, Mina, for having us on and for putting some attention on this issue.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> My thanks to our listeners for their questions and comments, and to Ana De Almeida Amaral for producing this segment. You’ve been listening to \u003cem>Forum\u003c/em>. I’m Mina Kim.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> My thanks to our listeners for their questions and comments, and to Ana De Almeida Amaral for producing this segment. You’ve been listening to \u003cem>Forum\u003c/em>. I’m Mina Kim.\u003c/p>\n"
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\n\u003ch2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Airdate: Tuesday, October 10, 2026 at 10 AM\u003c/h2>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>The Adelanto ICE Processing Center, an immigration detention facility located northeast of Los Angeles, has been riddled with allegations of abuse, unsafe drinking water and detainees being denied medical care. In 2025, a detainee at Adelanto, Ismael Ayala Uribe, died in ICE custody after repeatedly requesting medical attention. What is happening behind the locked doors of ICE detention centers in California? What power does the state have to hold DHS accountable? Join us as we speak with journalists investigating California detention facilities and the creators of the new Al Jazeera documentary, “Dying in Detention.”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Guests:\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n\u003cli>\u003cstrong>Jeremy Young,\u003c/strong> senior producer for Fault Lines, Al Jazeera English\u003c/li>\n\n\n\n\u003cli>\u003cstrong>Andrea Castillo,\u003c/strong> staff writer covering immigration, LA Times\u003c/li>\n\u003c/ul>\n\n\n\n\u003ch2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Episode Transcript\u003c/h2>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cem>\u003cstrong>This is a computer-generated transcript. While our team has reviewed it, there may be errors.\u003c/strong>\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Welcome to \u003cem>Forum\u003c/em>. I’m Mina Kim. The Department of Homeland Security bought two more ICE detention facilities in California this month, adding to the two it bought in July in San Diego and Kern counties. This time, the purchases were of facilities in Adelanto, known for being the deadliest in the state. Four people have died there since last year, with their families alleging inadequate medical care in each case. It’s the focus of a new documentary from Al Jazeera English’s \u003cem>Fault Lines\u003c/em> series called \u003cem>Dying in Detention\u003c/em>.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Joining me now is Jeremy Young, senior producer on \u003cem>Fault Lines\u003c/em> from Al Jazeera English and part of the team behind \u003cem>Dying in Detention\u003c/em>. Jeremy, welcome to \u003cem>Forum\u003c/em>.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jeremy Young:\u003c/strong> Thank you for having me, Mina.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> So, in this film, you focused on Adelanto’s ICE processing center. What can you tell us about Adelanto and the people being held there?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jeremy Young:\u003c/strong> Sure. So, the Adelanto ICE Processing Center is one of the larger detention facilities in the country, and it’s located several hours outside of Los Angeles, at the edge of the desert. And it’s had a troubled past. It’s had all kinds of different state and federal investigations, different types of allegations of abuse and medical neglect against it. At one point, there had been so much litigation and oversight that it was down to less than 10 detainees at the facility.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>This, of course, changed when President Trump came into office for his second term, ramped up the crackdown, and now there’s almost 2,000 people who are detained at Adelanto today.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> And how long are detainees typically there? If it’s an ICE processing center, the name sort of suggests a transitional place.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jeremy Young:\u003c/strong> Well, I mean, a lot of the vocabulary that’s used around immigration detention is puzzling, so don’t get too caught up on it. People are there who are fighting for their right to stay in this country. And it’s not clear exactly why people are deported at certain times, why people are moved around as much as they are.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>But the people that we spoke to said — one detainee in particular who had children who are 9 and 11 — he said, “I’m gonna make sure my children know that I never give up and that I’m always gonna have fought to be here till the end to be with them.” So there are people in there who are really fighting to stay close to their families.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> So your film focused on the death of 39-year-old Ismael Ayala Uribe at Adelanto. Tell us about him.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jeremy Young:\u003c/strong> Ismael was a 39-year-old gentleman who came to the United States at age five. He had achieved DACA status and had some protections, which he then lost, actually, when he had a conviction for a DUI. But he worked at a local car wash in Southern California for 15 years, rising through the ranks to become the right-hand man to the owner.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And most importantly, he was a son and an uncle and a brother. And we got to know his family really well and really understand how much they’re hurting and how much they miss him.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Yeah, we actually have a clip of his nephew from your documentary. Let’s hear it.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Ismael’s Nephew:\u003c/strong> He was a good uncle. The kids needed something, he would always go get it. Get them school clothes, supplies, or whatever they needed, you know?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jeremy Young:\u003c/strong> I know they do miss him.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> So, Jeremy, what happened to Ismael after he arrived? What made him sick?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jeremy Young:\u003c/strong> So, you know, he basically developed an infection that went untreated, and he complained for weeks about having severe pain in his buttocks, which he rated as 10 out of 10 on a pain scale. And as far as we could tell, he was really only given Tylenol. He was supposed to be checked on twice a day, and we learned that they didn’t check on him at all.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Eventually, this infection just got worse and worse and spread into his bloodstream. He was rushed to the hospital in the middle of the night, and they were able to revive him when he arrived at the hospital. When he arrived at the hospital, he lost his pulse and needed to be intubated and revived in the emergency room. So he was in a really, really rough state when he arrived at the hospital, and he only survived for another 24 hours before he passed away.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> I understand it was an infected skin abscess. What does it take to treat a skin abscess?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jeremy Young:\u003c/strong> It’s actually very treatable. We interviewed Physicians for Human Rights’ Dr. Nicholas Cunio for the documentary, and he reviewed the medical documents with us. It really takes some antibiotics and then a small incision to remove the abscess. And it’s a very, very basic procedure. And, you know, according to Physicians for Human Rights, his death was absolutely avoidable.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Let’s also hear a clip from the physician.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Dr. Nicholas Cunio:\u003c/strong> If you’re arriving and, within just a few minutes, losing your pulse, that suggests that you were extremely sick and it was not adequately recognized in time to be treated effectively. It could have been purposefully obfuscating the clinical reality. I believe Ismael’s death could have fully been prevented by timely care.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> What is the physician saying there, Jeremy, about it possibly having been purposefully obfuscated?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jeremy Young:\u003c/strong> Yeah, so this is really interesting to us, Mina, because, you know, this particular case had been covered quite a bit. And when we looked at the medical examiner’s investigation into his death, it included information that ICE did not include in its public report. And he was in such a severe state when he arrived at the hospital. Within minutes, he lost his pulse, and ICE did not include that information in its public report.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>We’ve subsequently learned more information about what happened to Ismael, but I think one of the big takeaways is that the public reports that ICE puts out on detainee deaths omit serious information and are really problematic.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> We actually reached out to DHS for a comment and reaction to your documentary, and this is what they said. They said, “Allegations of subprime conditions at the Adelanto facility are false. Being in detention is a choice. We encourage all illegal aliens to take control of their departure with the CBP Home app. The U.S. is offering illegal aliens $3,000 and a free flight to self-deport now. We encourage every person here illegally to take advantage of this offer and reserve the chance to come back to the U.S. the right way to live the American dream.”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>What’s your response to that?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jeremy Young:\u003c/strong> Well, that’s quite a comment, Mina. I will say one of the important things to remind your listeners is that the overwhelming majority of people in immigration detention, more than 70%, have no criminal conviction at all. And the people that we spoke to have families. They have loved ones who live here. They have communities that rely on them. And they don’t want to get on a plane and fly away. They want to go back to being with their loved ones and being back in these communities where they mean so much and where they’ve really provided the fabric.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> So I want to invite listeners into the conversation. Listeners, what questions do you have about the conditions at the ICE facility in Adelanto? What are your questions? Do you have any direct experience with them? Have you had a relative inside, and have they told you about conditions inside as well?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>You can join the conversation at the email address, forum@kqed.org. You can find us on Discord, Bluesky, Facebook, or Instagram at KQED Forum, and you can give us a call at 866-733-6786, 866-733-6786.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>So, Jeremy, as I noted in the introduction, there have been four deaths in Adelanto. Do they share similarities with Ismael’s?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jeremy Young:\u003c/strong> They absolutely do. I mean, we interviewed the attorney general of California, Rob Bonta, for this story because the attorney general’s office has unique oversight capabilities in the state of California. And one of the things that they found was that they were not paying outside providers for medical care, and people were not being taken outside the facility to see specialists.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And so the pattern that we’ve seen has been consistently that people are denied complex medical care and, you know, have died as a result. And it’s just — I just have to remind you, Mina, the idea that someone would go to an immigration detention facility and ultimately die, I mean, I think every single death that I’ve looked at has been preventable and avoidable. And it is just an unacceptable outcome that someone expires while they’re in an immigration detention facility.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> In Ismael’s case, it was in a matter of five weeks. I want to bring into the conversation now Andrea Castillo, a staff writer at the \u003cem>Los Angeles Times\u003c/em> who covers immigration. Andrea, thanks so much for being with us.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Andrea Castillo:\u003c/strong> Thanks for having me.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> You also have looked at recent court-ordered reports that documented some really harsh conditions in Adelanto. What can you tell us about the broader conditions in this facility?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Andrea Castillo:\u003c/strong> Yeah, that’s right. Immigrant rights groups filed this federal class-action lawsuit against DHS this year. They alleged poor drinking water and food, sanitation and medical care issues at the facility. A federal judge had ordered the facility to make improvements.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>In August, there was a video that went viral appearing to show worm-like creatures in a bottle of water. The family of a detainee had recorded the video. And, as you noted, four people have died at that facility since last year, so the conditions do not appear to have improved.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>An independent court monitor this month actually found mold and gnat larvae in the shower rooms. They found cracked and worn-out mattresses, delayed visitations, and an inadequate system to track disability accommodations. A second independent monitor, who was assigned to inspect medical conditions at the facility, told the court that he was actually prevented from accessing the facility and its medical records, so he was unable to provide an update.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> And Jeremy mentioned, you know, some of the issues with Adelanto have been ongoing. There was a lawsuit settlement, I understand, related to something that happened during the pandemic with COVID. What happened?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Andrea Castillo:\u003c/strong> Yeah, so I recently wrote about this settlement regarding the application of a chemical disinfectant called HDQ Neutral. The allegation was that detainees, during the early period of the pandemic, the first several months of 2020, were indiscriminately sprayed with this chemical.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Many times, you know, they were sprayed with an overly concentrated amount of the chemical. So, you know, it was supposed to be watered down, and that wasn’t happening, and nobody was given the instructions on how to actually properly use this chemical. They were spraying it directly into the air.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>A whistleblower who had formerly worked at the facility ended up saying in a declaration in court that he was told to spray it like Lysol.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> And what health impacts did that have on people there?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Andrea Castillo:\u003c/strong> Very severe health impacts: blistering, nosebleeds, chemical burns. People would show what looked like actual burns on their arms and their extremities, anywhere that was exposed to the chemical. It was sprayed in their food, and they could taste it. Vomiting. Some people ended up with permanent eye damage and respiratory issues.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>One person that I spoke to said that he has to sleep propped up by pillows now, six years after he was released from the facility, because if he doesn’t, he ends up gasping for air. He used to work as a long-haul truck driver, but he can’t pass the physical assessment now, and so he has turned to making his money through online resale.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> This is happening in California, at a California facility. Listeners, we’re talking about the conditions in California’s deadliest ICE facility in Adelanto, and we’ll have more with our guests and with you after the break. This is \u003cem>Forum\u003c/em>. I’m Mina Kim.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Welcome back to \u003cem>Forum\u003c/em>. I’m Mina Kim. We’re talking this hour about the conditions inside a California ICE processing center in Adelanto, where four people have died since Trump took office.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>We’re talking about it with Jeremy Young, part of the team behind the documentary that looked deeply at Adelanto and the death of Ismael Ayala Uribe, in a film called \u003cem>Dying in Detention\u003c/em>, part of \u003cem>Fault Lines\u003c/em>, the series for Al Jazeera English. Andrea Castillo is also with us, a staff writer at the \u003cem>Los Angeles Times\u003c/em> who covers immigration.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And listeners, what are your questions about conditions at ICE facilities in California, at the jail in Adelanto? What are your questions about what happens now that the federal government has purchased the Adelanto facility? Do you have any direct experience with ICE centers? Have you had anyone that you know inside one, and what have they told you about the conditions?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>You can call us at 866-733-6786, 866-733-6786. You can email forum@kqed.org and post on our social channels on Discord, Bluesky, Facebook, or Instagram. We’re at KQED Forum.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Jeremy, one of the things that you noted, in addition to the broader conditions we were hearing about from you and Andrea in Adelanto, is that detainees were telling you about quite a bit of physical abuse, that some are being beaten.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jeremy Young:\u003c/strong> That’s right. As at other detention facilities across the country, detainees came together as part of a hunger strike and refused to eat the food that was provided by the facility. And the individuals who we spoke to allege that they were beaten for participating in the hunger strike.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>They said that they were thrown into solitary confinement to be made an example of for participating in the hunger strike. And others were fast-tracked for deportation out of the country for participating in the hunger strike and raising awareness about the conditions.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> So, Andrea, all of this happened while the facility was being owned by GEO Group. What can you tell us about GEO Group?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Andrea Castillo:\u003c/strong> GEO Group is one of the top private prison operators in the country, along with another company called CoreCivic. They own and operate the majority of detention space in the country. At the start of this administration, almost 90% of the detention space across the country was owned and operated by these types of companies.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>But now, though, that has started to change. The federal government is starting to buy up some of these facilities, although they will continue being managed by these private prison companies, which, in addition to operating detention facilities for immigration purposes, also operate prisons across the country.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> So, given the fact that GEO Group will continue to operate the detention center, it sounds like conditions are not expected to change much there, at least from what we’ve seen so far. Is that correct? How much did GEO Group sell this to DHS for?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Andrea Castillo:\u003c/strong> Well, these facilities are worth millions of dollars. The sales are made possible by this infusion last year of $45 billion in tax dollars for immigration detention from President Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act. And so far, DHS has spent more than $2 billion on six of these detention centers, including four in California. And so…\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Could it be possible that the harsh conditions could worsen? And I only ask this because it sounds like the federal government felt a need to buy these to be able to run them however they wished.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Andrea Castillo:\u003c/strong> I think that’s a possibility. One of the reasons for these purchases is as a way to push back on state and local oversight laws. California, of course, has some of the strongest oversight laws over these detention facilities in the country. The governor signed more than 20 bills just last month that are aimed at continuing to push back against the Trump administration’s immigration agenda.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And so, you know, they have been very clear — and when I say they, I mean DHS and the owners and operators of these detention facilities — about wanting protection from what they call “unwarranted litigation.” That’s a direct quote from George Zoley, who’s the CEO of the GEO Group. You know, they have these quarterly calls with shareholders, and earlier this year, that was what he told them: that they want to protect against these lawsuits around medical care and other detention conditions.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jeremy Young:\u003c/strong> And, Mina, I’ll add, it’s a real concern because the law that allows the attorney general to investigate these private prison facilities — you know, it was a law that was passed by the state legislature in California, and changing these to being federally owned facilities potentially could change their ability to do oversight and to investigate. So it’s a major concern.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Let me go to caller Crawford in Oakland. Crawford, go ahead. You’re on.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Crawford:\u003c/strong> Hey, I’m an emergency medical technician, and I was listening just a few minutes ago when you mentioned that an individual, after being exposed to a chemical, now has to sleep propped up on pillows. And I’m not a physician, but to me, that sounds most similar to a condition called pulmonary edema, which is when the small sacs that exchange oxygen in your lungs can actually fill with — in a lot of cases, it’s a type of interstitial fluid, or it could even be, you know, blood, to be blunt.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And I can only imagine even more people exposed to that industrial chemical could develop that symptom over time. It’s a condition that generally takes a while to actually manifest. And I can also imagine that if more people are being exposed to these kinds of harsh industrial chemicals, pulmonary edema is generally a common side effect of being exposed to the substance.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>So I wanted people to understand that that’s not just sleeping propped up on pillows because it’s comfortable. Sleeping propped up on pillows is because if you don’t, you can choke. Your body won’t be able to exchange oxygen, and you can die. So that’s a very serious complication, and I’m shocked, honestly. I’m on my way to work right now.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Well, Crawford, thank you for sharing what you know about this. And Andrea, I mean, as we said, this was something that was sued over because it was used on people during COVID, and I’m wondering, do you know if that means that it’s definitely no longer being used as a disinfectant?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Andrea Castillo:\u003c/strong> Yeah, it is not being used anymore as a disinfectant. They believe that around 2,700 people who were detained at Adelanto were exposed to that chemical.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And so one of the provisions of the settlement is that, you know, there have been monetary damages for — sorry, the settlement has resulted in money being given to the named plaintiffs. But for the people who are not among the six named plaintiffs, the rest of those 2,700 people may be able to bring their own lawsuits. And under the terms of the settlement, they now have this sort of precedent.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Well, Discord user Ben writes, “Note that the DHS statement talked aggressively about self-deportation. Their hope is that if enough horror stories exist, people will voluntarily self-deport out of fear, and they can actually manage to get most of the 14 million illegal immigrants out of the country. The cruelty is the point.”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Jeremy, what do you think about this with regard to explaining the kinds of conditions that we have seen at the facilities that you have covered in your documentary and in the statement that we got from ICE?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jeremy Young:\u003c/strong> It’s a great observation, and it’s something that we came across a lot while we were doing the reporting for the project. The Homeland Security secretary, Markwayne Mullin, had famously said, “This is not a Holiday Inn,” which is a bite that we included in our documentary. And a lot of people really do feel that they want the conditions in these facilities to be very difficult for people to navigate so that they leave the country.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And we heard it from family members, we heard from people who were detained there, we heard from attorneys, we heard from politicians. So it’s definitely an interesting perspective. And there are definitely people who haven’t been able to stay.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>We did a story last year about families that were separated under Trump. And one of the families, the mother, who had six children who were born here in the United States, was at this facility. And she just couldn’t take it anymore and decided that she would move back to Mexico and take four of her daughters with her. And, you know, not everyone’s able to survive in the circumstances inside these facilities.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Andrea Castillo:\u003c/strong> One thing I’ll add to that is just that we’ve seen an explosion in the number of people who are willing to accept voluntary departure. So instead of seeing their deportation process all the way through and fighting it up until the end, they are accepting deportation essentially early so that they can get out of these facilities.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Let me go to caller Chuck in Nevada, who I think has some pushback. Chuck, go ahead.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Chuck:\u003c/strong> Yeah, the question is, I’m an immigrant myself, but I’m talking about these people. They took chances. They break the law. No matter what your guest is saying, they want to go back to their families or they have worked here, they don’t want to leave their families, but they know what they were doing.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Do you mean what my guest is saying? I think the question really is whether or not people should die in detention, in U.S. custody. Jeremy, your reaction?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jeremy Young:\u003c/strong> Well, again, we mentioned this earlier, but the overwhelming majority of people who are in immigration detention are people who do not have a criminal conviction. And ICE has targeted — I mean, we worked on car washes in this particular episode because Ismael worked at a car wash, but car washes were targeted not because they thought that it would be chock-full of people who are doing human trafficking and selling drugs. They knew it would be an easy way to round up people who were undocumented and didn’t have status.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>So it’s very easy to go by Home Depot and pick up people who are waiting for work. It’s much more difficult to actually seek out criminals. And so that’s part of the dynamic that’s playing out here.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> And even if they have a criminal conviction, I guess is what I’m saying, nobody should die in U.S. custody under the circumstances that you’re describing, right?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jeremy Young:\u003c/strong> Of course. I said earlier, I feel like all of these deaths are avoidable. I mean, we’ve also had the highest rate of suicide in immigration detention facilities under President Trump in the second term. Those are very preventable when you do assessments, when people come in, you assess their mental health, you get them treatment. I think all of those deaths should be totally avoidable and, unfortunately, will be a stain on our conscience for some time.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Andrea Castillo:\u003c/strong> Can I add?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Yeah, go ahead, Andrea.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Andrea Castillo:\u003c/strong> You know, beyond all of that, these detention facilities operate under federal laws. You know, they are — people who are detained are under the care of the federal government, and the federal government is mandated to provide minimum standards of care.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>So whenever somebody is dying in a way that could have been prevented, that is a violation of federal law and what they are, you know, supposed to do.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jeremy Young:\u003c/strong> Not even to mention the impact that incarceration in these facilities has on people’s physical and mental health.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> So, Jeremy, has the news of the sale been shared with the families or the sources you’ve spoken with? Because people inside Adelanto have shared so much with you. I’m just curious what their families think now that ownership has changed to the federal government.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jeremy Young:\u003c/strong> Well, I mean, there have been local organizations that have been part of a Shut Down Adelanto campaign for some time. You know, they’ve been fighting this battle for a long time. And so, you know, for them, it’s probably another twist, another turn, another effort to avoid oversight.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And the truth is, are the conditions going to change at the facility? Are people going to have access to medical care? It still remains to be seen.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> In the documentary, you talk to the attorney general, Rob Bonta, about trying to push back against federal immigration enforcement. What did he tell you about the ability of the state of California to hold DHS accountable, what he’s seen?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jeremy Young:\u003c/strong> Well, they are actually permitted to go in and look at documents. They’re permitted to do interviews. They do have to give some heads-up before they do their visits, but they certainly have greater visibility into the conditions inside the facility than anyone else.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And I think one of the things that the attorney general pointed out about this model of having private companies operate prisons is that it’s flawed from the get-go. There is a total… You know, effort to minimize the amount of costs, because it comes out of your profits, and it’s just — it’s a very straightforward, and it is a problem from the get-go.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Yeah, well, let’s hear a clip of your host and correspondent for \u003cem>Fault Lines\u003c/em>, Natasha Del Toro, talking with Rob Bonta about what ICE is saying about its facilities and about the death of Ayala Uribe.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Natasha Del Toro:\u003c/strong> ICE issued a statement saying comprehensive medical care is provided from the moment individuals arrive. At no time during detention is a detained illegal alien denied emergent care. Not true.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Attorney General Rob Bonta:\u003c/strong> That’s a talking point. If what the ICE spokesperson said was true, Mr. Ayala Uribe would be with us today. And who knows what’s happening on the ground? We do, because we’ve been there. We’ve gone to these facilities. We’ve gotten into Adelanto. We have done our own physical inspections. We’ve looked at documents. We’ve talked to staff. And we found the exact opposite of what that ICE spokesperson just said.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> So, hearing that, listener Sharon’s point, I think, is appropriate here. Sharon wants to know: If Rob Bonta and the state of California have special powers, why is it that we can’t do more? Why can’t they go in there and make criminal charges or shut it down? I’m so disheartened by constantly hearing the same thing about people being mistreated and dying.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Jeremy, you first, and then I’ll go to Andrea on that.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Andrea Castillo:\u003c/strong> I-I-I can take this one. Okay.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Okay, thanks.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Andrea Castillo:\u003c/strong> Yeah. You know, these facilities operate under federal control, so there’s only so much that states can do that falls under their control. But, you know, the existence and operation of these facilities is a federal matter. Immigration enforcement is a federal matter. It’s under federal law.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>So while the states have power to oversee any violations of the conditions, while they have some amount of oversight power, you know, the real emphasis here is on the federal government.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Well, listener Lisa writes, “I don’t understand how Congress or other officials cannot put an end to ICE and detention center torture.” Do you want to respond to Lisa, Andrea?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Andrea Castillo:\u003c/strong> Yeah. Well, Congress has had its own troubles getting into these facilities since the start of this administration. Members of Congress have found themselves kept out of the detention centers. There have been many iterations at this point of rules that DHS has put into place that make it more difficult for members of Congress to conduct their own oversight.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>You know, at some point, they were asking members of Congress for several days’ notice. Recently, they have been asking members of Congress to provide written confirmation and a signature from any detainee that they want to speak with. Otherwise, when they go and do an unannounced inspection of a detention facility, they’re not allowed to speak with any of the detainees there.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Let me go to caller Judith in Oakland next. Hi, Judith. Join us. You’re on.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Judith:\u003c/strong> Yeah, I was just making a comment that I wish the press and the people talking today would continue to inform the public of the differences between documented and undocumented people who are going to these facilities. Documented people going through the court system that they’re picking up are not, quote, criminals. They’re not illegal, and nobody’s making the distinction.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>I just went to an event involving a mother, three U.S. citizens, a U.S. husband, in court, picked up a nurse who now is in a different African country and went through deplorable conditions. So I wish to help inform the public, because the one commenter who just talked about how they all committed crimes — they didn’t commit crimes.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> I really appreciate you saying that, and we’re just coming up on the break here. But I did want to just have Andrea and Jeremy respond to the fact that, yes, and we have covered this, there are a lot of people who have legal status who are being picked up and put into these places, and even without charges, right, Andrea?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Andrea Castillo:\u003c/strong> That’s right. There are a lot of people, you know, more than a million people who, at the start of this administration, had some sort of provisional legal status. They had the ability to work legally, and the administration has been cutting those statuses away and leaving people undocumented and more vulnerable to being picked up and deported.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> And even people whose status they haven’t taken away, but who were, you know, appearing in court or had some kind of temporary status, right?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Right. Well, we’re talking with Andrea Castillo of the \u003cem>Los Angeles Times\u003c/em> and Jeremy Young, senior producer on \u003cem>Fault Lines\u003c/em> from Al Jazeera English, with the new documentary \u003cem>Dying in Detention\u003c/em>.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Stay with us. You’re listening to \u003cem>Forum\u003c/em>. I’m Mina Kim. We’re talking this hour about conditions inside the Adelanto ICE Processing Center, where four people have died since Trump took office, and also the impact of DHS now owning California detention centers. In fact, they own several of them now.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Andrea Castillo is a staff writer at the \u003cem>Los Angeles Times\u003c/em> who covers immigration, and Jeremy Young is a senior producer on \u003cem>Fault Lines\u003c/em> from Al Jazeera English who is part of the team behind a new documentary called \u003cem>Dying in Detention\u003c/em>, which looks at the case of Ismael Ayala Uribe, who died while in custody at Adelanto.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And listeners, we’re asking you what questions you have about conditions at ICE facilities in California, the jail in Adelanto, and whether or not you’ve had any direct experience with them. Also, your questions about the sale of ICE facilities to the federal government and what impact you’re wondering that will have.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>The phone number is 866-733-6786, 866-733-6786. The email address is forum@kqed.org, and you can find us on Discord, Bluesky, Facebook, or Instagram at KQED Forum.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>So, Andrea, help us understand: How many facilities in California does the federal government own, and are there plans to own more?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Andrea Castillo:\u003c/strong> The federal government now owns four facilities in California. That’s half of the facilities in the state, and there are plans to own more. George Zoley, the CEO of the GEO Group, said in a recent call with investors that DHS had talked about purchasing 10 facilities and that that number could increase.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Hmm, 10 facilities, but probably across the country, because there are eight total in California. Is that right? And you said some are owned by CoreCivic.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Andrea Castillo:\u003c/strong> Others are owned by CoreCivic. There’s a smattering of other companies that own different facilities as well.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> All right, so the federal government now has Otay Mesa and the California City Detention Facility, as well as these other two by the GEO Group that are in Adelanto.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Sue in Petaluma writes, “I see that Adelanto was established in 2015. How do the present conditions in this facility differ from conditions in the previous administration? Have these conditions persisted over the last 11 years, or have they worsened under this administration?” Andrea?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Andrea Castillo:\u003c/strong> Yeah, the conditions absolutely persist. I am reminded of a report from many years ago where investigators found nooses in Adelanto Detention Center that were possibly being used for attempted suicides. So that’s just one of the things that sticks out that I remember all of these years later.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>But certainly, the conditions — you know, there have been many lawsuits and allegations going back multiple administrations, alleging the same types of things.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jeremy Young:\u003c/strong> And, Mina, remember, there were almost zero people left in the facility relatively recently, until Trump came back into office.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> I used to — 10 were, yeah, it had gotten down to very few, single digits. I remember at some point there were two people.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>So when Trump came back into office, how — what are some of the ways DHS operational oversight changed? Do you mention that it’s harder to get information out from DHS in your reporting now?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jeremy Young:\u003c/strong> Well, yeah, I mean, that’s always been a problem. I mean, I think one of the changes that’s happened significantly, and it’s interesting as we approach the midterm elections, you know, there was a real visible change in the approach that this administration took to its crackdown when they switched from Kristi Noem and brought in Markwayne Mullin.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And they actually detained more people under Markwayne Mullin, but it wasn’t done in the same visible way, where they were trying to, you know, spread fear and livestream these raids. They decided to take an approach.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And, you know, that’s been really interesting because I think what it reveals to me is seeing whether the politics behind this crackdown and the treatment of immigrants in these detention facilities is popular in the United States and whether it’s going to have an impact on how people vote in the midterm elections, which I still think is an open question, but a very interesting one.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Is there an internal monitor of ICE, Andrea, or something like that?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Andrea Castillo:\u003c/strong> Um, there were, um, you know, oversight mechanisms within ICE, and on the federal side, yeah, there was the CRCL, Civil Rights and Civil Liberties Office. There was also the immigrant detention ombudsman. Well, the ombudsman no longer exists, and Civil Rights and Civil Liberties is extremely reduced. So their ability to actually investigate the conditions in these facilities has drastically changed.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jeremy Young:\u003c/strong> And, Mina, just so you know what the ombudsman’s role was, they would receive complaints directly from detainees at facilities and they would aim to address those, whether someone’s not able to get their medicine, whether they’re not able to communicate with their — whatever the issue was, that was the purpose of the ombudsman office, and President Trump gutted that.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Let me go to caller Tony in Oakland next. Tony, go ahead.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Tony:\u003c/strong> It seems to be the root cause of this issue with the federal government purchasing prisons is the privatization of prisons. When are we going to do something to ban that and take state control of our penal system?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Well, Tony, thanks for sharing your thoughts on that. Let me go to Andrea.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Andrea Castillo:\u003c/strong> Thank you. Well, California tried it, and it didn’t work. California, years ago, tried to ban private prisons. That was struck down in court, so the state lost on that one. And that, I think, set into place all this big effort now to increase the oversight of these facilities, because that is what they can do.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jeremy Young:\u003c/strong> And to Tony’s point, one of the things that we did in the documentary on Capitol Hill was interview Jim Jordan, who has an extremely powerful role overseeing the House Judiciary Committee. And a super PAC aligned with him, according to the Project on Government Oversight, received a $250,000 donation from the GEO Group. And when we asked him whether that was problematic or a conflict of interest, he said, “No, not really,” and laughed it off.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> I should note that we also reached out to GEO Group for a reaction to your documentary, Jeremy, and they did not respond to our request for comment.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jeremy Young:\u003c/strong> For comment. That’s a shame, Mina.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> This listener in the East Bay writes, “How do family members stay in contact with their relatives inside facilities like Adelanto? Are they able to visit or make phone calls?” Jeremy?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jeremy Young:\u003c/strong> That’s a really good question, because one of the biggest challenges for families is keeping track of their loved ones, making sure they have what they need, communicating with them, and people often are at a loss.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>I mean, Ismael’s family found out that he was dead when the police came and knocked on their door at 5:30 in the morning on a Monday morning. They didn’t know that he had been rushed to the hospital. They hadn’t been given any information about it.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>It’s really challenging and also expensive to communicate, and not very reliable. And it’s really one of the things that, when you think about being able to be safe and be healthy while you’re incarcerated in these facilities, the ability to communicate with your family, to speak with loved ones, to hear your children’s voices — sometimes it’s all that can kind of carry you through the day. So it’s real important.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Andrea Castillo:\u003c/strong> Can I just add to that?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Yeah, go ahead, Andrea.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Andrea Castillo:\u003c/strong> These calls are expensive. They have to pay to speak with their family members. And families that I have talked to recently have said that, specifically when going to Adelanto, they are waiting for hours with other families in order to get time to visit in person. There are lines now because there are significantly more people detained.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> But they must be, though, a key source of information for you, Andrea, and also for you, Jeremy, given what you’ve been saying about how hard it is to get accurate information about what’s really going on.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Andrea Castillo:\u003c/strong> Yeah, it’s become much more difficult as a journalist to actually see the inside of these detention facilities. One of the main ways now is if you’re going to immigration court and there is an immigration court in a detention facility. It’s not like that for every single one, but Adelanto does have an immigration court inside the facility. But obviously, I’m not able to see the housing units or anything like that.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jeremy Young:\u003c/strong> We spent a day outside of Adelanto during visiting hours and met with family members who were either coming in or coming out, and it was like 100-degree heat. And it was really interesting to have people stop and speak with us and share their experiences.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>These two sisters that we interviewed — their brother, you know, and they were young, they were in their twenties, and their brother was young — had been taken into Adelanto about a week before. And she said to me, she’s like, “They had him shackled. He was handcuffed, and he was shackled by his feet. Why would they do that?” She said, “My brother’s not a criminal.”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And it was just really interesting to see her perspective and knowing who her brother is and loving her brother and not understanding why he’s being treated like a criminal. It was really heartbreaking.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Well, Bluesky user MJ writes, “Remind me why politicians oppose detention centers in the Bay Area within easy reach of hospitals and physicians, immigration lawyers, friends and family are nearby, but we’d rather keep them in places like Adelanto.” Do you think there’s some truth to what MJ is saying?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jeremy Young:\u003c/strong> I do, and I think that if you look at what happened at Delaney Hall this summer in New Jersey, where people showed up for protests and state police came in on horseback, it really was in the zeitgeist, with a lot of attention. And that facility is not located as far away from the center of town as places like Adelanto or Irwin County Detention Center.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>A lot of these facilities are in the middle of nowhere, and it’s really hard for people to get to. But a facility like Delaney Hall that was easier for people to get to was more visible. It’s near New York, it’s near Washington, D.C. Politicians are able to go. And so you do see the more visibility, the more sunlight, the more attention there is to the conditions inside.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Andrea Castillo:\u003c/strong> One of ICE’s talking points during the course of California trying to rid the state of these privately run detention centers was that if the state no longer had any detention facilities, people would have to travel farther and farther away to see their loved ones and for people to get access to their attorneys.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And, you know, that was a point that they made that has validity. If people are far away, the situation is more opaque.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Again, we’re talking with Andrea Castillo, a staff writer at the \u003cem>Los Angeles Times\u003c/em>, covering immigration, and Jeremy Young, part of the team behind the new documentary that we’re covering today, \u003cem>Dying in Detention\u003c/em>, senior producer on \u003cem>Fault Lines\u003c/em> from Al Jazeera English.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And let me remind listeners, you are listening to \u003cem>Forum\u003c/em>. I’m Mina Kim.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>So, with everything you’re saying, what power do detainees have to hold DHS accountable? Jeremy, is Ismael’s family trying to get some kind of justice through the courts?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jeremy Young:\u003c/strong> Yeah, I mean, families can sue for wrongful death, and that is going to take a lot of time. I think, you know, just not to be all negative about the impact that the detainees have had on their situation, for Adelanto, Andrea had mentioned that a judge ruled in their favor earlier this summer in order to get, you know, fresh water, adequate food, adequate medical care.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And so I think some people did feel like their voice was heard. You know, they engaged in this hunger strike to raise awareness because there’s not much else that they can do. And I think this did make it into the news. It did make it into people’s consciousness.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And I will say that I think advocating for themselves, there is a glimmer of hope that they could improve the conditions. It’s not easy, and no one would want to go through that experience. But I will say that they’ve been effective in getting their voice heard. This reminds me — Andrea, you’d agree.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Andrea Castillo:\u003c/strong> Yeah, this reminds me of a story that I covered a few months back. This wasn’t at Adelanto, but detainees at the California City facility and at Mesa Verde had initiated a boycott of commissary because they felt that the prices had increased so significantly that things were just unaffordable. And they weren’t getting, particularly for detainees who had, you know, sensitivities or conditions like diabetes, where they needed to eat food other than what was provided to them. Their only way to get that food was through commissary and their families, you know, providing them money to pay for that.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>But it had become so burdensome that their families were spending multiple hundreds of dollars every month for these detainees to eat. And so they initiated a boycott of commissaries, and they felt it worked. The facility, California City, decided to, from what I understand, reduce some of those prices.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Matt in Oakland writes, “How much could things actually change if Democrats retake Congress in the midterms? Do they realistically have enough oversight or legislative power to change what’s happening at these facilities and more broadly within the Trump administration and the Department of Homeland Security?” What do you think?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jeremy Young:\u003c/strong> Well, I think what would be significant is if there was a change in the approach to the crackdown and immigration detention and the massive number of people who are being incarcerated in these facilities. I mean, it’s undoubtable that one of the reasons why people aren’t able to get adequate medical care is because there are too many people in these facilities, and they are not staffed up to handle the number of people who are in them.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>So if we took an alternative approach to what we’re doing, then things might change.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Let me go to caller Omar in San Francisco. Omar, go ahead.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Omar:\u003c/strong> Good morning, Mina. So, Andrea and Jeremy, I think that you guys need to do a story in regards to where is the money going? You’re talking about massive numbers of people being dehumanized and treated like animals, but the real problem is that this is all just a big business, and that it is driving back to some of the highest offices in this land. They all are invested in these corporations.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And you said that the GEO Group and the other group, you know, have these shareholder meetings where they’re like, “Oh, they’re going to spend more money.” These are people being turned into dollars, and that is all it is about. None of them are criminals. They have no reason to be in there. This whole thing has been the worst nightmare that this country has ever faced, and there needs to be some justice behind it.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Thanks. I can hear how passionately you feel about this. And, yes, Jeremy, you touched on this with regard to Jim Jordan and so on.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jeremy Young:\u003c/strong> Yeah, and the amount of money that the private prison companies have put in the coffers for President Trump has been extraordinary. The other thing in this context — it was a great comment, by the way, by your caller — a lot of the people who are incarcerated in these facilities are the primary breadwinner for their family, or at least one of the breadwinners of their family.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>So we’re talking about having to manage commissary expenses and phone calls, but they’re also not making the money that their loved one was making when they were not incarcerated in a detention facility. And so children are stepping up. We’re seeing children working to try and help support families. It’s really a dire situation for these people.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> And Andrea, you said billions of dollars, right, for these facilities. And so essentially, the company continues to keep running them. So they get paid for the facility and for the ongoing contracts of running them.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Andrea Castillo:\u003c/strong> That’s right. Yeah, I mean, this is $45 billion of U.S. taxpayer money, so we’re all—\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> So we’re all paying for it.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Andrea Castillo:\u003c/strong> We are all paying for it, and that’s correct. I mean, the CEO of GEO Group, George Zoley, on one of these calls mentioned that, for him, they are in this sort of dual business of owning the facilities, but then also operating the facilities.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>But he said outright that, for him, the most important of those two is continued long-term operation of the detention centers. So essentially, he’s saying it’s okay for the federal government to buy these facilities as long as we can still keep these more lucrative, long-term contracts in which we are running the show.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jeremy Young:\u003c/strong> And, Mina, a former senior executive from GEO Group is now running ICE. So you can see what the problems are with the revolving-door system that we have.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Right, and your documentary, of course, shows us what running the facilities actually looks like.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Andrea, in your reporting, you said that Governor Gavin Newsom signed more than 20 bills aimed at pushing back against the Trump administration’s immigration agenda. Do these state-level laws have any potential to change things?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Andrea Castillo:\u003c/strong> They absolutely do. I mean, one of the laws that I’m particularly interested in as a journalist is one that requires the release of public records related to 911 calls at these facilities. So that one certainly will have an impact, with the public able to more freely see what’s going on when 911 gets involved, when something happens in these facilities.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Other of these laws are now embroiled in litigation already. GEO Group already sued over one of the laws, so we’ll see what happens with that.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Well, Andrea, thank you so much for your reporting. I really appreciate it. Thank you. Andrea Castillo, a staff writer at the \u003cem>Los Angeles Times\u003c/em>. Jeremy Young, a senior producer on \u003cem>Fault Lines\u003c/em> from Al Jazeera English, which has just put out the new documentary \u003cem>Dying in Detention\u003c/em>. My thanks to you as well, Jeremy.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jeremy Young:\u003c/strong> Thank you, Mina, for having us on and for putting some attention on this issue.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> My thanks to our listeners for their questions and comments, and to Ana De Almeida Amaral for producing this segment. You’ve been listening to \u003cem>Forum\u003c/em>. I’m Mina Kim.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Announcer:\u003c/strong> Funds for the production of \u003cem>Forum\u003c/em> are provided by the Jenerosity Family Fund and the members of KQED.\u003c/p>\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"content": "\n\u003ch2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Airdate: Wednesday, October 14, 2026 at 10 AM\u003c/h2>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>This November, Californians will vote on Proposition 40, a measure that would impose a one-time 5% tax on those whose net worth exceeded $1 billion at the beginning of 2026. While advocates argue it is time for the ultrawealthy to pay a larger share of taxes, opponents argue that Prop. 40 could drive billionaires out of the state and decrease future tax revenue. In this hour we’ll speak with KQED’s political correspondents about Prop. 40 — and the efforts to nullify it through propositions 41 and 42.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Guests:\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n\u003cli>\u003cstrong>Marisa Lagos, \u003c/strong>politics correspondent, KQED; co-host of KQED’s Political Breakdown\u003c/li>\n\n\n\n\u003cli>\u003cstrong>Guy Marzorati, \u003c/strong>Correspondent, KQED’s California Politics and Government Desk\u003c/li>\n\u003c/ul>\n\n\n\n\u003ch2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Episode Transcript\u003c/h2>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cem>\u003cstrong>This is a computer-generated transcript. While our team has reviewed it, there may be errors.\u003c/strong>\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Welcome to \u003cem>Forum\u003c/em>. I’m Mina Kim. Voters are weighing in on what’s been one of the most divisive ballot measures, mainly for Democrats, and that’s Proposition 40, better known as the billionaire tax. The one-time 5% tax on billionaires to fund mainly health care in California may sound simple on its face, but it’s complicated. It’s ignited heated debate and counter-ballot measures, Props 41 and 42, that would nullify the billionaire tax even if it passes. We break it all down this hour with KQED’s political correspondents, Marisa Lagos and Guy Marzorati. Hey, you two.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Guy Marzorati:\u003c/strong> Hey, good morning.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> So let’s first review the nuts and bolts of this. Guy, what does Prop 40 do?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Guy Marzorati:\u003c/strong> So, yeah, a one-time 5% tax on the wealth of billionaires in California, with 90% of the money going toward health care, which could potentially backfill some of the federal cuts to Medicaid, and then 10% going to a mix of education and food assistance. There’s a lot of leeway, if this passes, for the state legislature to decide exactly how that money would get spent.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> So how many billionaires do we have, Guy?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Guy Marzorati:\u003c/strong> Over 200 in California, and that is an argument you’ve heard proponents make as to why this tax could potentially be easy to administer, because you’re working within a limited universe of people to whom this would actually apply, even though that limited universe is made up of folks with lots of money to hire lots of lawyers and potentially drag out enforcement, even if it were to pass.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> And based on where their net worth was on January 1st of this year, right, Marisa?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Marisa Lagos:\u003c/strong> Yeah. So, I mean, this is sort of part of the idea of structuring this by the backers, to avoid some of the pushback they knew would come. One of them was the idea that you could just avoid the tax by moving out of state. So they wrote into this that if you were a resident of California as of January 1st of this year, you are subject to this tax, regardless of whether you’ve moved since then.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Guy Marzorati:\u003c/strong> So if you’re reading it, it’s too late.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Marisa Lagos:\u003c/strong> Exactly. And also, the one-time nature. Now, that will be litigated if it’s passed, because as this was getting on the ballot in December and it was clear that they were moving forward with this, you did see some folks, including Sergey Brin, who’s been, I believe, the biggest single donor to the No on 40 effort, the Google co-founder. He claims that he moved his residency to Reno, Nevada, prior to that January 1st deadline. I would bet that will be litigated by the courts, because the state will say, “No, actually, you still live here.” And there’s been a lot of reporting that he is still in Mountain View every day, working on AI at Google. So, I don’t know. We’ll see. A lot of this might be litigated if it passes. Well, the other question —\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Can be a little confusing — what counts toward this net worth calculation of a billion dollars, Marisa? I mean, the —\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Marisa Lagos:\u003c/strong> The bulk of it is going to be stocks, bonds, assets that are traded in the financial markets and are visible, essentially, because they have to be declared because they’re publicly traded. It also does include artwork, not most real estate, but properties, things like yachts. So, you know, our tax system broadly relies on people to essentially declare what they have — what they made, what they have. Obviously, there’s some, you know, your W-2 is a way the government can check that. But it is the honor system, and this would be no different. Essentially, when you file your taxes next year, there’s going to be a little question: Are you a billionaire? If you check yes, then you need to essentially file an affidavit attached to it, listing your assets. And so that is going to be at least the initial mechanism to sort of decide what the level is at which you would have to pay this tax if you are indeed a billionaire. I think most of us won’t have to worry about anything after checking that no box.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Well, Guy, you mentioned how the money will be allocated. Talk about why so much of it will go to health care. It was really born out of the impacts of Trump’s so-called big, beautiful bill, right?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Guy Marzorati:\u003c/strong> Yeah. So proponents — and this was put on the ballot through a signature campaign by a health care union — have argued that the money is needed to backfill these cuts to Medi-Cal, which is our system of Medicaid in California. You hear two kinds of arguments in support of Proposition 40. One is specifically about what this would fund. So, this idea that Trump and Republicans in Congress passed a bill cutting taxes on many wealthy Americans and cutting Medicaid, the health care safety net, at the same time. The argument is that, by going after the wealth of billionaires, you’d be able to backfill some of these cuts.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>There’s another, I think, broader argument being made in support of Proposition 40, which is that fundamentally, our tax system in California, even as it’s a progressive one, is progressive as it relates to the income tax. So there’s all this wealth that Marisa mentioned in the stock market and privately owned companies that is not being captured through our progressive income tax system. And so you hear both of those arguments being made in support of Prop 40.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Right. Marisa, you actually sat down and spoke with an author of the bill, Dave Regan, head of SEIU-UHW, right? What did he tell you about why SEIU went for the overall wealth tax, and what do we need to understand about the way many billionaires can avoid paying the taxes the rest of us pay?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Marisa Lagos:\u003c/strong> Yeah, I mean, this has been really fascinating to dig into. And, you know, I want to say at the outset that there are very differing views among economists about this tax and basically everything in economics. But what Dave Regan is saying — Regan, excuse me — is that the wealth of billionaires has grown so quickly over, you know, really even just the past 10 years. They actually put out something recently showing that since this campaign started, or in the last few months, these billionaires’ wealth has grown far more than the taxes they would need to pay under this measure.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>What Regan and the economist at UC Berkeley who helped him craft this measure say is that wealthy people, and billionaires especially — because I do think we need to make a distinction between being a millionaire and a billionaire. It is a big difference, right? — structure their wealth in ways that help them avoid taxes. Of course, all of us pay income taxes on the salary we make. UC Berkeley economists point out that Larry Page and Sergey Brin, co-founders of Google, had a three-year period over the last six years or so when they took $1 in income. So they were literally not paying any taxes on income in that way.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Most of them don’t sell their stocks and bonds in order to, say, buy a house, like you or I might need to if we had money in the market and needed to pull it out for something new. They just borrow against those assets, and they essentially qualify for low- or no-interest loans against their own wealth.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And so, yes, I want to be clear: Billionaires still pay a lot of taxes. There’s still money that they have to pay taxes on. Compared to the percentage that normal Americans, even people we would consider pretty wealthy millionaires who work at a lot of these tech companies and do take normal salaries, pay, it just pales in comparison on a percentage level.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And so, you know, Regan and backers of this say, look, inequality has grown hugely. The Trump administration paid for tax cuts for millionaires and billionaires by cutting health care for the poorest Americans. This is just a way to staunch the flow from those health care cuts temporarily while we figure out how, in their argument, to get a Democrat back in the White House, Democrats back in Congress, and reverse these cuts. So it’s really, you know, I think, to them, an argument of fairness. And we can get into what the other side thinks about that, because they have their own fairness arguments, for sure.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Yeah, we definitely will get into that. First, let me remind listeners: We’re talking about Prop 40, California’s so-called billionaire tax, a one-time 5% tax on billionaires’ assets. We’re hearing from Marisa Lagos why it’s on overall wealth versus income, and also from Guy Marzorati. They’re both correspondents on KQED’s politics desk. Marisa’s also co-host of KQED’s podcast, \u003cem>Political Breakdown\u003c/em>.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And you, our listeners, join the conversation. What questions do you have about Prop 40? Or how are you planning to vote on it, and why? Email \u003ca href=\"mailto:forum@kqed.org\">forum@kqed.org\u003c/a>. Find us on Discord, Bluesky, Facebook, or Instagram at KQED Forum. Call us at 866-733-6786, 866-733-6786.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Sharon writes, “There’s so much misinformation out there. It’s hard to know what’s true. I just read yesterday that Prop 40 is not a one-time tax and that it could happen over again, including to non-billionaires. Is this true?” Marisa, you talked to Dave Regan about that. Tell me, how would you answer Sharon’s question?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Marisa Lagos:\u003c/strong> Look, the voters could always go back and approve more taxes, right? And so, like, yes, there’s always the chance that that happens. I think what Sharon’s talking about is really this argument we’re hearing on the No on 40 side, and it relates to some other ballot measures, Props 41 and 42, in particular 42. They’re essentially raising the idea that if this is allowed by voters, you could assess taxes on people’s financial assets before they cash them out.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>So right now we have capital gains, right? If you have a stock and you sell it, you have to pay taxes based on the amount that it increased since you got the stock — what you made off of it. They’re saying that this sort of blows up that system and creates one where you can just tax those assets before they’re really realized. And then, if they can do it to billionaires, that’s going to happen again. I don’t think they’re saying that’s going to happen per se. Again, I think the slippery-slope argument is essentially what they’re making.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>There is some language in there that does allow the legislature, like Guy said, to decide how this money is spent. And when I talk to folks who oppose Prop 40 and support Prop 42, which is one of two competing measures the billionaires put on the ballot in order to invalidate Prop 40 if all of them pass, I think that’s really important. Props 41 and 42 are really aimed at essentially making Prop 40 unenforceable if they pass with more votes than it.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Prop 42 is a strict ban on any taxes on these types of financial assets before they’re cashed out. And so that is why it’s being framed as something to protect your retirement. The 42 folks will say, well, there have been some proposals in the legislature in recent years to potentially tax some retirement accounts, things like that. I’ve never seen a serious conversation about this, and I’ve certainly never seen it move forward. And I don’t think, just in terms of the intentions of the people who wrote Prop 40, that that’s their intention in any way, shape, or form. They’re really focused on trying to save health care, and on doing so by taxing the richest folks in California.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Guy Marzorati:\u003c/strong> I would just quickly say, though, the flip side of that would be history. In so many cases, taxes that are billed as one-time or emergency, or just for this purpose — well, if we get five years down the line and the federal government has not restored its funding for Medi-Cal, then what? I think history would suggest that proponents of this would probably go back for an extension, as proponents of higher income taxes have done in California and are doing this year.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Marisa Lagos:\u003c/strong> For billionaires, likely, right? Yeah.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Guy Marzorati:\u003c/strong> Yeah, as proponents of higher income taxes have done in California and are doing this year.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Right, they are doing that this year. But at the same time, and also on the other side of this, Marisa, there are people — and we are coming up on a break, so just set this idea out there — who have also wondered why it would have to be a one-time tax, or why SEIU decided to pursue this just as a one-time tax as well. So lots of different views about how people feel our tax structure needs to change. We’ll have more after the break.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>I’m Mina Kim. You’re listening to \u003cem>Forum\u003c/em>. We’re talking this hour about Proposition 40, California’s billionaire tax, a one-time 5% tax on billionaires’ assets. Here’s co-author Dave Regan, president of SEIU-UHW, on why an overall wealth tax is needed.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Dave Regan:\u003c/strong> The billionaires in California pay a tiny percentage of their financial holdings in income tax. They pay 2.5%. Seven years ago, in 2019, the aggregate wealth of California billionaires was $700 billion. Today, it’s $2.3 trillion. It has more than tripled in the last seven years. Your wages aren’t tripling. My wages aren’t tripling. I don’t know anybody whose salary is tripling. And 70% of that $2.3 trillion is in publicly traded stocks. When the value of that grows, it’s all beyond the reach of the tax system.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> That’s Regan in conversation with my guest, Marisa Lagos, KQED’s political correspondent and co-host of \u003cem>Political Breakdown\u003c/em>. Also, Guy Marzorati is with us, correspondent on KQED’s California Politics and Government Desk.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And you, our listeners, are joining the conversation with your questions about Prop 40, its countermeasures, and the attempts to nullify it in Props 41 and 42. Tell us how you’re planning to vote on Prop 40, if you already know. You can email \u003ca href=\"mailto:forum@kqed.org\">forum@kqed.org\u003c/a>. Find us on Discord, Bluesky, Facebook, or Instagram at KQED Forum. Call us at 866-733-6786, 866-733-6786.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Guy, before we get into the opposition, remind me: Who are the biggest supporters of Prop 40?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Guy Marzorati:\u003c/strong> So the biggest supporter is SEIU United Healthcare Workers West. That’s the union that organized to get this onto the ballot. They drove the signature-gathering campaign. They’ve been really the largest financial supporter of Proposition 40. And then you also have some leading progressives backing this idea, most notably Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders and, in California, Congressmember Ro Khanna in the South Bay.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Yeah, and the California Democratic Party, right?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Guy Marzorati:\u003c/strong> Yeah. After a contentious vote process, the California Democratic Party is also supporting Proposition 40. And you honestly see a split within organized labor, where there are some unions who have gotten behind it that we can talk about, and others that haven’t. So there’s a split within, you know, the Teamsters and AFSCME. They’ve supported it. The California Teachers Association and the building trades are against it. So a real split in labor as well.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Yeah. Who else is against it? A prominent Democrat, of course, is California Governor Gavin Newsom.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Guy Marzorati:\u003c/strong> Yeah, Governor Gavin Newsom, probably the most notable opponent of Proposition 40. But you’ve also seen a number of state lawmakers oppose it. There’s kind of unified opposition on the Republican side, with the California Republican Party against it. And, yeah, this is an issue that has really divided Democrats within California. Even though you mentioned the state Democratic Party endorsed Proposition 40, we’ve seen some local Democratic parties — one in San Francisco — split with the state. They opposed it. So it’s become a key issue that I would expect, honestly, to extend into the next presidential election, where you’ve seen Democrats really on either side of this.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Yeah. Well, so, Marisa, sum up for me the argument against Prop 40. You already touched on it, but —\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Marisa Lagos:\u003c/strong> Yeah. So, you know, I think there’s a couple of different ones. One is just what we’re hearing from the billionaires themselves and economists who support them: that we essentially rely on private capital to grow our economy, and these guys have most of their wealth not in cash, but in these companies and huge industries that are helping fuel the California economy. They argue that it would essentially be unfair to make them pay taxes on their overall wealth. That’s not the system that has worked, and it will actually create less innovation. It will drive not just billionaires, but potential billionaires, out of state. People who want to found companies will look toward places with lower tax burdens. Essentially, this will have a longer-term effect on the state budget.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>That’s something we hear from someone like Gavin Newsom and some of the labor unions that have joined him in opposing it, like the California Teachers Association, and some other traditionally left-leaning groups like Planned Parenthood, who have also lined up with the governor. They say they’re worried that not only will this never get collected, even if it passes, because it’ll be litigated and you won’t really be able to get the money, but that in the longer term it will essentially have a detrimental effect on the state budget because it will result in less innovation, fewer companies being built here, and therefore a lower tax base overall.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>We do have a progressive tax system, Mina, so it is true that the wealthiest folks do pay the most in terms of income and capital gains taxes.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> The other thing I understand is that at least Hoover Institution research suggests that the tax would not generate the $100 billion that proponents claim it will, and that it could be about $40 billion over five years.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Marisa Lagos:\u003c/strong> Yeah, I mean, they say the actual revenue would be between $55 billion at the top and $46 billion at the bottom. They’re relying on a couple of different things that the proponents of the tax disagree with. So they think, first of all, that someone like Sergey Brin absolutely would not have to pay it. They think there are people who have moved out of state. They’re saying that the proponents fail to exclude residential real estate from the estimates of $100 billion, so that reduces the taxable base. They say the tax’s authors wrongly calculated the number of billionaires in the state.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>I mean, you never know exactly how much money something is going to bring in, right? And so I think, at the end of the day, if you look at the wealth of these 200 billionaires, like, if somebody is worth $200 billion, they’re going to pay $10 billion under this tax. I mean, it’s not nothing, right?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Right. And then on the question of billionaires leaving, Michelle writes, “The billionaires threaten to leave California if Prop 40 passes. Would this be a great loss for California?” While another listener on Bluesky writes, “We forget how desirable California is to live in. People from everywhere around the world want to be here. Maybe some billionaires will leave. There are still plenty of rich people who will stay.”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>So, Guy, is this exodus of billionaires actually happening? There was some reporting that a handful have already left.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Guy Marzorati:\u003c/strong> Yeah, I mean, a handful have left. We really don’t know. We can talk about comparisons to previous wealth taxes internationally, models based on how this would impact California. We simply do not know exactly how this will play out if voters approve Proposition 40 and it’s enacted. Even the proponents of this have called it an experiment. I think there really is no way to run the simulation and figure out how billionaires to whom this would apply actually respond, how many of them will leave, how many will take their businesses with them, and what impact this will have on future founders and startup creators in the state.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Let me go to caller Andy in San Jose, who’s with us. Andy, go ahead. You’re on.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Andy Mattson:\u003c/strong> My name’s Andy Mattson. I’m the chair of CalCPA’s committee on taxation. I work in San Jose as a practicing CPA. I want to clarify one thing: The legislative text indicates that non-publicly traded private-company stock is subject to this tax. So one of the big issues is, if you’re a founder of a company and you get lucky and you’ve got private wealth — paper-company wealth that’s not publicly traded — where do you come up with the cash? That has not been clarified. In fact, RealCon, I believe, had a proposal where the government would loan — the federal government would loan money to pay the —\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Marisa Lagos:\u003c/strong> Can I ask —\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Andy Mattson:\u003c/strong> It’s a problem.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Marisa Lagos:\u003c/strong> Yeah, can I ask you a question? I’m curious, as a CPA. These guys can borrow against that wealth if they want to buy a house or a yacht or a private jet. Could you not do that for a tax? Sorry, I think —\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> We just need to try to get him back. It’s okay.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Marisa Lagos:\u003c/strong> It’s okay. I’m just curious because I think, to me, as a non-billionaire, it’s an interesting question. It seems like there’s always money to invest in new companies, to invest in things that they want to buy. Is that not allowed? Are you not allowed to take out loans to pay taxes?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Andy Mattson:\u003c/strong> Andy? Am I back on now?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> You are now. Thanks.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Andy Mattson:\u003c/strong> Okay. Well, I mean, each situation is different, and it just depends on the relationship between a lender and a person, and a person’s financial situation. So, you know, it just kind of depends. I don’t think you can generalize. I think the other point —\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Marisa Lagos:\u003c/strong> Well, but I’m asking legally. You could —\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Marisa Lagos:\u003c/strong> Well, but I’m asking legally, like, could you legally ask a bank for a loan against your assets?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Guy Marzorati:\u003c/strong> Yeah, but I mean, I guess the flip side of that is that the wealth they have in these companies is based on a valuation. It’s not money that — and I think that’s the flaw with Ro Khanna’s idea of, “Oh, what if the government fronted these founders the money for them to pay the tax?” Well, what happens if the company doesn’t work out? Are we, as the state, now on the hook as an owner for these companies?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>I think it’s an edge case, but in San Francisco, where you have more of these founders than anywhere else, it is an issue. If you founded a company that’s now worth, let’s say, $10 billion, and you own a third of that, you’re going to be on the hook for $150 million or $200 million next year. Do you have that money?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Marisa Lagos:\u003c/strong> Or if you own a sports team, for example. Yeah, but you have —\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Guy Marzorati:\u003c/strong> Yeah, but you have that money right now. I mean, a sports team is printing money, though. So I think there’s that question. I will say that the tax in Proposition 40 does consider this, and there are ways for the tax to be deferred. Based on how much other wealth you have as one of these startup founders, if there are other assets you have that are publicly traded, you could potentially defer what you have to pay to the state. So it could be a situation, like the caller mentions, where all of a sudden one of these founders has a $200 million tax bill, but they might not have to pay that right away in 2027.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> The fact that there are all these unknowns really exemplifies that this is new. California is the first out of the gate, and I think even Dave sort of suggested this is an experiment, right, Marisa?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Marisa Lagos:\u003c/strong> Yeah. I mean, look, there have been calls for many years in this country for not just a wealth tax specifically, but reforms to our tax system to better capture the wealth that has grown. And I do want to underscore that in a way that did not exist when I was growing up. There were no billionaires, right? I mean, it is wild.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>When you look at — I was referring to this earlier — I saw a tweet by Gabriel Zucman, who’s one of the UC Berkeley economists who helped frame and write this measure with SEIU-UHW. He’s saying that basically this wealth tax would bring Silicon Valley billionaires’ wealth back to where it was 31 days ago, because of how exponentially — and again, the wealth on paper is growing.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>So I think, you know, I’ve been working on some reporting on this and talking to progressives, and they do see this as a test case for a national wealth tax. They would prefer it happen at the national level, just the way the governor says he would, because it wouldn’t allow people to move between states. It could be structured differently so that maybe it takes into account some of these issues. But, yeah, what Regan says is our system is not working, and we’re trying something new to help the people who are going to suffer the most in the coming years.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And I think you can argue maybe all legislation is somewhat of an experiment. This one is certainly something that has not happened in the U.S. before in really any way, shape, or form.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Guy Marzorati:\u003c/strong> And that’s why this feels like such a big one, right? It’s like once in a generation in California, it feels like we have these ballot measures —\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Marisa Lagos:\u003c/strong> Like Prop 13, like, yeah.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Guy Marzorati:\u003c/strong> — that are a political earthquake, where the rest of the country wakes up the morning after the election and is like, “Why are the glasses and plates on the ground?” And I think the fact that this could be a test case going forward for Democrats, and the fact that you have this collision of incredible inequality with this incredible growth in Silicon Valley and artificial intelligence, is why, to Marisa’s point, there is so much at stake with this. It’s why it feels like, for the Democratic Party, for Silicon Valley, for the folks who could potentially gain from this, and for Gavin Newsom, there’s a reason this feels like the main event.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Marisa Lagos:\u003c/strong> But from a political perspective, it’s fascinating to me that the backers wrote this specifically to be a one-time tax to avoid some of the attacks they’re getting, and it doesn’t matter. It’s not happening anyway. And if you look at the way this campaign is going, the folks opposing Prop 40 have actually put more money into supporting Prop 42 — that’s the ballot measure that prohibits any taxes on retirement accounts and things in the stock market — than they have into No on 40. I think it’s $100 million versus $80 million between 42 and No on 40. But still, that tells you something. I think there’s a real concern among folks who oppose this that, whether it’s a slippery slope in terms of future taxes in California, it is a slippery slope in terms of taxing the wealthy, and that if this can happen in California, it could happen anywhere.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>I think the flip side of that is, if progressives fail at this in California, is that a message nationally that means there isn’t as much of a debate about this in the 2028 Democratic primary, for example?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Right. So there are a couple of things. I want to bring in a couple of things that listeners are saying. Corey writes, “I’m no fan of billionaires. I’m a tax-and-spend liberal, but this just feels like a cash grab. It doesn’t really fix the core problem. Tax how money is earned. Tax capital gains at the same rates as ordinary income. I am out of work, struggling with money, but I’m still not going to vote yes for Prop 40,” says Corey.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Neil writes, “I’m voting no because it will be another excuse for the legislature to avoid revamping California’s tax system. We’ve known for years that our tax system causes wide variations in revenue on a year-to-year basis, but the legislature doesn’t have the courage to do it.”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>So, but the thing is, right, for people who are voting no on 40, it sure doesn’t sound like they should vote yes on 41 and 42, especially if they want the legislature to act. So let’s dig into this. You have touched on 42 several times, Marisa, so just remind us specifically what 42 would do and how it could change the ability of the legislature to do anything similar or better than 40, if that’s what these listeners are suggesting they want in the future.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Marisa Lagos:\u003c/strong> Yeah. So this is a ballot measure that essentially says you may not impose taxes on unrealized capital gains, basically, in any other way than what we have now, which is when you sell these things or take them out of your accounts. So it says stocks, retirement accounts, any asset ownership cannot be subject to state taxes. It also bans retroactive state taxes, which is the second kind of poison pill.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>It basically outlaws the type of tax that’s being envisioned under Prop 40, but not just for billionaires — for anybody, longer term. So it does tie the hands of the state legislature, to your point, Mina. And then it bans retroactive state taxes like this one. So it was sort of doubly undercutting Prop 40.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>The way California law works is that you have two competing ballot measures with conflicting language on the same ballot. The competing ballot measure that gets more votes is basically the one that takes precedence. So you could have a world where Prop 40 passes, but Prop 42 gets more votes, and it essentially nullifies the billionaire tax and the state’s ability to collect it.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Right. And then remind us, Guy, what 41 does — the other —\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Marisa Lagos:\u003c/strong> Oh, you take the Gann limit, guys.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Guy Marzorati:\u003c/strong> Another poison pill, yeah, another poison pill measure. This one would disqualify Prop 40 through another route by saying that any type of tax like this has to go under the state spending limit, which is known as the Gann limit. Prop 40 is written in a way that excludes the revenue from the Gann limit, so, again, putting it in direct conflict.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Now, what Prop 41 does on its face is require new audits for special taxes. I think that’s the pitch being made for it. Really, the purpose behind this is another way to nullify Proposition 40, almost like an insurance policy. If the opponents of Proposition 40 are unable to defeat it at the ballot, they have these two insurance policies in Prop 41 and 42 that, if they also pass, could end up nullifying the wealth tax.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Right, depending on the margin by which they pass. So if all three technically pass, but these other measures get more votes, they would nullify the billionaire tax.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Marisa Lagos:\u003c/strong> I mean, we’re going to be in court no matter what.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Yeah. Even if the billionaire tax passed cleanly, for lack of a better way of describing it, we would be in court. But I guess just to put a clear point on this for our listeners: If you are really against the billionaire tax, then you would vote no on 40 and probably yes on 41 and 42.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Marisa Lagos:\u003c/strong> Yeah, but if you’re really —\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Yeah, but if you’re a really big supporter of the billionaire tax, you’d vote yes on 40 and no on 41 and 42. But if you would like to see anything like this in the future, potentially levies on unrealized capital gains or whatever, but you don’t like the billionaire tax, you’d probably vote no on all three.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Guy Marzorati:\u003c/strong> Yeah, and let me tell you a secret: The opponents of Prop 40 would be totally fine if —\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Marisa Lagos:\u003c/strong> No, if all of them went down. They don’t care. They just want to kill 40.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> We’ll have more with Marisa Lagos and Guy Marzorati as we really break down the games being played on the ballot with regard to the billionaire tax and the countermeasures to nullify it, but also the high stakes involved. Stay with us for more after the break.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>I’m Mina Kim. This is \u003cem>Forum\u003c/em>. Welcome back to \u003cem>Forum\u003c/em>. I’m Mina Kim. We’re talking about Prop 40, California’s billionaire tax, and the efforts to nullify it with 41 and 42. Here’s opposition to the billionaire tax from Stanford economist Joshua Rauh, concerned about billionaires leaving California.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Joshua Rauh:\u003c/strong> If you look at where companies like Tesla and Oracle — their CEOs left California at various points in time. Musk left California some years ago. Larry Ellison left in 2020. If you look at where those companies, which still have a presence in California, are growing their jobs, it’s in other states. It’s in Austin, Texas, and Nashville, Tennessee.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>So, much as we might like to shake our head and say, “Gee, we wish that they would just stay and pay these taxes,” it is within their legal rights to leave and go elsewhere. When they do that, it harms our economy. It harms ourselves. That’s what voters really have to ask.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> And we are asking you, voters, how you’re feeling about Prop 40 and 41 and 42, the two countermeasures to the billionaire tax, Prop 40. Also, how you’re talking about it in your circles, in your community; the messages you’re getting from the people who are backers of the measures; and how they’re being understood by you and the people helping you decide how to vote.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>The email address is \u003ca href=\"mailto:forum@kqed.org\">forum@kqed.org\u003c/a>. Find us on Discord, Bluesky, Facebook, or Instagram at KQED Forum. Call us at 866-733-6786, 866-733-6786.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Marisa Lagos and Guy Marzorati, KQED’s politics correspondents, are here to take your questions and comments. Marisa also co-hosts KQED’s podcast, \u003cem>Political Breakdown\u003c/em>.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Mark writes, “While I’m all for the idea behind taxing billionaires and taking away loopholes, I’m a little put off that the benefit would go only to health care rather than California’s general fund. I would have expected it to benefit all Californians, not just a select group.” Who wants to take this one?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Marisa Lagos:\u003c/strong> Yeah, I think that’s a really interesting point. And I think this is one of many areas of the way this was crafted that raises very interesting questions. We already talked about the one-time nature of it, the retroactivity of it, and then walling it off for health care when it is a one-time tax for something that people obviously need on an ongoing basis and that continues to rise in price. I think that’s a really interesting policy question for folks.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Part of the reason the California Teachers Association is opposed to this is that this money would go into a special account that is essentially walled off from our general fund. Previous ballot measures — Prop 98 in particular — dictate that around 40% of general fund revenues must go to education. So this is money that the teachers see as really not helping broader programs other than health care.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And so I think that’s something that has raised a lot of concerns, especially if you believe the governor’s analysis that this could essentially harm state revenues in a meaningful way moving forward. That would harm all our programs, including schools, teachers, all that. So I think that’s something you see in the split. There are certainly a lot of labor groups supporting this, and then there are others that are not. I think that’s because of the way this money is going to be earmarked for something very specific.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Well, Alvin writes, “Simply declaring that we need a national tax is vague and unconvincing while we are all bleeding to death, some literally, from health care cuts.” That has been the argument of some, including Gavin Newsom, who say, don’t do this at the state level. Do try to do this at the federal level.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Alvin goes on to say, “Prop 40 probably does have a hundred flaws, but at least it’s forcing the issue.”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Another listener, Curtis, writes, “It’s telling that all the No on 40 ads talk about literally everything but taxing billionaires. It’s clear that the vast majority of Californians want this to pass. The billionaires know this, and instead of making the issue taxing billionaires, they purposely obscure the issue.”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>I wouldn’t say it’s just No on 40 that’s avoiding talking about billionaires, but also the countermeasures, 41 and 42, are avoiding it, too.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Sharon also writes, “I’m getting texts saying Proposition 42 will prevent our retirement savings from being taxed by the state. Is that true?” So what is the messaging that 42 is trying to get across if it’s not, you know, no one taxing us billionaires?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Guy Marzorati:\u003c/strong> I mean, I think the messaging for 42 is around protecting assets from being taxed beyond income — retirement accounts, stock accounts.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> But retirement accounts with a lot of money in them, right?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Guy Marzorati:\u003c/strong> Yeah, and it’s worth saying also that a lot of that is already exempted in Proposition 40. But I think the point is that the message for Proposition 42 is to appeal to folks who might be concerned about taxes on their stock accounts or their retirement accounts, when really, again, the purpose — the reason why Prop 42 was put on the ballot — was to combat the billionaire wealth tax.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Let me go to caller Phil in Burlingame. Phil, thanks for waiting. Go ahead.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Phil:\u003c/strong> Well, you know, I thought I voted for it because I’m just so angry at the redistribution of billionaire wealth. But the whole thing is kind of crazy from an ardent capitalist, which means, why haven’t we been taxing them if they’ve been acquiring that? I mean, athletes are getting a hundred million dollars. Boards of directors are giving, you know, hundreds of millions of dollars. Why don’t we just pay no deduction for revenue of, you know, five million dollars, and then people at least get half of the revenue these billionaires have been getting?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>By doing this on the asset side, a previous caller said you don’t even know what these assets are. You have to start getting appraisals, and it is socialist to start taking property away. We have property taxes, but that’s just because it costs us that much to run the property.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Well, Phil, thanks for sharing where you’re at. And I think you are reflecting a lot of that — both the anger at the unfairness of the tax system, but also some concern about how this particularly would be enacted.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Marisa Lagos:\u003c/strong> Yeah, I mean, one of my other favorite data points from that UC Berkeley study — and I want to be clear, it’s written by economists who support this wealth tax, and he’s not a Californian, so he’s not directly affected — is that Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s CEO, at least one year recently took, I think, a $65,000 or $85,000 salary. So he qualified for the child tax credit. Obviously, he’s one of the richest men in the world.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>But, you know, I think what opponents of Prop 40 say is, “This isn’t fair. We’ve worked within the system, we’ve built our wealth, and it has helped lift up the entire economy.” And what the other side says is, “Well, you have built your wealth and structured it in a way to avoid even the taxes that do exist. This is just a way to make things a little bit more fair.”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>For people whose wealth does grow, even if it’s on paper, almost daily in the stock market, they can essentially afford to help the poorest Californians. So a lot of it, beyond the policy stuff, I think is a really philosophical argument. And I think that caller underscores what a lot of Democratic voters in this state are weighing: Even if I don’t love the details of this policy, do I want to essentially tax the rich? Or is this just a bad move that will set back the progressive movement? I don’t think we know the answer to that question.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Well, Steve on Discord writes, “I’d much rather see us go back to a progressive tax code, eliminating all the loopholes. Everyone pays the same amount on the same slice of income. Higher slices just get taxed at higher rates.” I mean, I think that was, I don’t know, the original intent.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Guy Marzorati:\u003c/strong> You know, centuries — I don’t know. And we do have that in California. I mean, we have a progressive income tax on income —\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Yeah.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Guy Marzorati:\u003c/strong> — and a progressive capital gains tax as well. But, yes, it’s not getting at this kind of wealth.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Exactly. Let me go to Dan in Santa Clara. Dan, go ahead.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Dan:\u003c/strong> Well, hey, great, great topic. I am not an economist. I am a Californian and an American. And I’ve been hearing stuff since 1980 about how, if we just let the rich people do what they do, we’re all going to get a bigger slice of the pie. I’m not seeing it. I’m with the guy from Burlingame. We’ve got to pass this thing and send a message.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Well, Dan, thanks for sharing where you’re at as well. Let me see if I can get Michael in Berkeley on. Michael, you’re on.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Michael:\u003c/strong> Thank you. I listened to the excellent \u003cem>Political Breakdown\u003c/em> show with Marisa and Dave Regan, and he literally indicated that someone has to go first. The point of my raising that is that this conversation about taxation of assets and unrealized gains is already underway, and Prop 40 has brought it to the top of our consciousness.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>I’m within ten years or so of retiring, and it scares the death out of me to potentially face future taxes on wealth that has been put away in tax-deferred plans and investments that were not accounted for all along the way. The retroactive nature of potential future taxes is also problematic. No one wants taxes to be retroactive. Taxes increase, not —\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> You voted against it, Michael, I’m assuming, then?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Michael:\u003c/strong> I will be voting against it.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> You will be voting against it.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Marisa Lagos:\u003c/strong> Yeah, I think it’s a valid concern. I mean, we do live in a really high-tax state. People, I think, have a lot of skepticism about our elected leaders and how they’ll respond.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>I also think this is why we’re not having what maybe should be the conversation, which is an entirely new tax system. I mean, when you dig into a lot of the data points on both sides of this argument, on the economy side, you sort of realize that we are — I don’t know what analogy you want to use, but we’re on the edges here. We’re not getting to the fundamental problems of the fact that our economy, the way people make money, the way people spend money, has really changed over the last couple hundred years, and we’re not really capturing the true nature of our system in this moment.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Unfortunately, in my mind, it’s a bit of a feedback loop because the harder these types of things can be, the more that scares politicians from taking on hard questions. So there’s not a lot of incentive for either Congress or Sacramento to do what would probably be a really politically difficult thing and start from scratch.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> I think Mike in Pittsburgh would underscore your point about needing something entirely different. Mike, go ahead.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mike:\u003c/strong> Hi, good morning, guys. Yeah, so basically, one thing that I’ve not heard at all in this discussion: Rich people don’t pay taxes. They move their assets into trusts, they move them overseas, they move them under a different name, they have loopholes. I don’t understand why we’re not talking about that aspect. You can have whatever tax breaks — if they’re not paying, it doesn’t matter.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Yeah, we actually did detail that in the opening of the segment, but I really appreciate you bringing that back, because that is very much part of this discussion.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Eric writes, “What do California’s billionaires say? I read Jensen Huang is for it, CEO. What do we know about the billionaires who are for it? I know Tom Steyer said yes on the campaign trail.”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Marisa Lagos:\u003c/strong> Those are the only two I know.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> I don’t know if Jensen Huang is for it. I know he just said he’d be fine with it or something like that, and that was very early, before this even qualified for the ballot.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Marisa Lagos:\u003c/strong> So what we know is that the bulk of them, or at least the ones who have gotten involved, are very much opposed to this. Again, the amount that they have now put into their super PAC, Building a Better California, to oppose this is around $200 million. Almost half that comes from Sergey Brin alone.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And they’re not saying very much, I will say. I’m very excited to have Chris Larsen on my show tomorrow, who is, I think, one of the few folks in this class who’s been willing to sit down and answer questions. But when I’ve asked for interviews with every single other person who’s donated to this, there’s just been radio silence. There’s no interest. They’ve put up folks like Josh Rauh from Stanford and others on their behalf to be surrogates.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Let me remind listeners, you’re listening to \u003cem>Forum\u003c/em>. I’m Mina Kim. What do we know about how these measures are polling — 40, 41, and 42, Guy or Marisa?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Marisa Lagos:\u003c/strong> Yeah, IGS put out a poll. This came out on September 25th, so pretty recently. None of them are hitting the 50% threshold on the yes side. Prop 40 is slightly leading, 45% to 42% in that poll, with 13% undecided. So, very close.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Interestingly to me, Prop 41 only has 37% support. Prop 42 only has 43% support, with big chunks in both still undecided. To me, that says voters are kind of reading the fine print and thinking about those measures not just in a vacuum, based on the arguments proponents are making about retirement accounts or state spending limits, but probably understanding that there’s a link between those measures and the billionaire tax, and that they need to think about that when they cast their ballot.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Guy Marzorati:\u003c/strong> And the Public Policy Institute of California had Proposition 40 slightly higher in its September poll, I think just above 50%. The key thing for me is the percentage of Democrats who support this measure in the end. When polling started on this idea of a billionaire wealth tax in the spring and summer, you were looking at seven in 10, three-quarters of Democrats supporting the idea. That slipped, but in both surveys, PPIC had Democrats down to 72%. IGS had them down to 65%. I don’t see a way for this to pass without Democratic support behind this measure hitting 70% or more.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Marisa Lagos:\u003c/strong> It’s not surprising that the younger you are, the more likely you are to support the billionaire tax. I think that tracks with some of the calls we’ve gotten and the concern people have about the longer-term stability of their own accounts, and the state’s policy.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Well, Brenno writes, “Opponents say that wealth taxes in other countries have mostly been repealed because they didn’t work.” Is this true? Guy, you want to start us off on that and tell us whether 40 addresses some of those things, or Marisa?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Guy Marzorati:\u003c/strong> Yeah, I mean, I would just say, on the other-country comparison, I don’t think it makes sense to compare it to a national wealth tax. The idea of moving between states to avoid taxation is just so different from moving between countries. But there are subnational governments that have tried this, both in Switzerland and in Spain.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>When you look at the research related to that, basically, in Switzerland, they compared two different states. Both had made slight cuts to their wealth tax, one larger than the other. They found that the state that made the larger cut had more wealth. In Spain, Madrid is a state that had a zero wealth tax. They found migration there. They also found a lot of avoidance. I think if you take the research —\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Marisa Lagos:\u003c/strong> I think you can make the argument that the EU is more akin to this. France had a wealth tax and it got repealed, and that’s one thing opponents of Prop 40 use a lot. They say, “Look.” And I think what proponents say is, well, it is easier within the European Union to move your location and business, making it more akin to moving between states. Also, the French one was way broader. It captured millionaires as well, so I think there was more of a revolt because we weren’t talking about people with such exorbitant wealth.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Guy Marzorati:\u003c/strong> And even the ones in Spain and Switzerland were not one-time taxes. So there is no one-to-one comparison you could look at for Prop 40 to say we know exactly how this is going to play out based on other states. But I think if you take the studies on these subnational wealth taxes together, you could conclude that they have an impact on the behavior of billionaires, either moving or trying to avoid the taxes. That in itself is not exactly shocking.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> You know, I feel for our voters, honestly. They have to decide on 40, and then they’ve got 41 and 42 on the ballot as well. And then there are two other tax-related measures on the ballot. You’ve got 3, right? Which is trying to make permanent the state’s higher income tax rate for the top 2% of earners. And then you’ve got 43, which is basically saying that you would need a two-thirds vote to pass any local tax measures for specific services. So there is just really a lot they’re going to have to weigh through this year.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Marisa Lagos:\u003c/strong> Yeah, as always, we have a long ballot that requires a lot of homework by voters. I want to shout out some resources here at KQED: our excellent voter guide, which you can find at kqed.org/voterguide, is going to have all these statewide races and a lot more information about local stuff.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>We’ve also done deep dives on a lot of this on my show, \u003cem>Political Breakdown\u003c/em>. We had folks on both sides of the Prop 43 debate. This is the one that would essentially make it a lot harder to raise local taxes. It’s sponsored by the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association, which, of course, wrote Prop 13 over 40 years ago. So we talked to them, and we talked to somebody on the other side of that.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>We had Dave Regan on the show about Prop 40. We talked to Josh Rauh, the economist from Stanford on the No on 40 side. I think those conversations get you a little deeper than some of the voter guides and other stuff. So definitely, it’s going to be — yet again. I mean, and the other thing I want to note, we’ve talked about this on this show, Mina, quite recently, but because of how long the ballot is, and because of our system, it’s great to get ahead of the curve and start looking at that ballot now. Try not to wait until the last minute to turn it in, so we can get those votes counted.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Well, thanks so much, Marisa, for your analysis and for being the author of so many of those great resources. And, Guy Marzorati, can’t thank you both enough. Appreciate you, too, Guy.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Guy Marzorati:\u003c/strong> Yeah, thanks.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Marisa Lagos:\u003c/strong> Thanks so much.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> And, as always, thanks to our listeners, who bring in such great, thoughtful questions and insights, and really reflect what I think a lot of people are feeling right now in California. You’ve been listening to \u003cem>Forum\u003c/em>. My thanks as well to Ana de Almeida Amaral for producing this. I’m Mina Kim.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cem>\u003cstrong>This is a computer-generated transcript. While our team has reviewed it, there may be errors.\u003c/strong>\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Welcome to \u003cem>Forum\u003c/em>. I’m Mina Kim. Voters are weighing in on what’s been one of the most divisive ballot measures, mainly for Democrats, and that’s Proposition 40, better known as the billionaire tax. The one-time 5% tax on billionaires to fund mainly health care in California may sound simple on its face, but it’s complicated. It’s ignited heated debate and counter-ballot measures, Props 41 and 42, that would nullify the billionaire tax even if it passes. We break it all down this hour with KQED’s political correspondents, Marisa Lagos and Guy Marzorati. Hey, you two.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Welcome to \u003cem>Forum\u003c/em>. I’m Mina Kim. Voters are weighing in on what’s been one of the most divisive ballot measures, mainly for Democrats, and that’s Proposition 40, better known as the billionaire tax. The one-time 5% tax on billionaires to fund mainly health care in California may sound simple on its face, but it’s complicated. It’s ignited heated debate and counter-ballot measures, Props 41 and 42, that would nullify the billionaire tax even if it passes. We break it all down this hour with KQED’s political correspondents, Marisa Lagos and Guy Marzorati. Hey, you two.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Guy Marzorati:\u003c/strong> Hey, good morning.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> So let’s first review the nuts and bolts of this. Guy, what does Prop 40 do?\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Guy Marzorati:\u003c/strong> So, yeah, a one-time 5% tax on the wealth of billionaires in California, with 90% of the money going toward health care, which could potentially backfill some of the federal cuts to Medicaid, and then 10% going to a mix of education and food assistance. There’s a lot of leeway, if this passes, for the state legislature to decide exactly how that money would get spent.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Guy Marzorati:\u003c/strong> So, yeah, a one-time 5% tax on the wealth of billionaires in California, with 90% of the money going toward health care, which could potentially backfill some of the federal cuts to Medicaid, and then 10% going to a mix of education and food assistance. There’s a lot of leeway, if this passes, for the state legislature to decide exactly how that money would get spent.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> So how many billionaires do we have, Guy?\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Guy Marzorati:\u003c/strong> Over 200 in California, and that is an argument you’ve heard proponents make as to why this tax could potentially be easy to administer, because you’re working within a limited universe of people to whom this would actually apply, even though that limited universe is made up of folks with lots of money to hire lots of lawyers and potentially drag out enforcement, even if it were to pass.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Guy Marzorati:\u003c/strong> Over 200 in California, and that is an argument you’ve heard proponents make as to why this tax could potentially be easy to administer, because you’re working within a limited universe of people to whom this would actually apply, even though that limited universe is made up of folks with lots of money to hire lots of lawyers and potentially drag out enforcement, even if it were to pass.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> And based on where their net worth was on January 1st of this year, right, Marisa?\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> And based on where their net worth was on January 1st of this year, right, Marisa?\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Marisa Lagos:\u003c/strong> Yeah. So, I mean, this is sort of part of the idea of structuring this by the backers, to avoid some of the pushback they knew would come. One of them was the idea that you could just avoid the tax by moving out of state. So they wrote into this that if you were a resident of California as of January 1st of this year, you are subject to this tax, regardless of whether you’ve moved since then.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Marisa Lagos:\u003c/strong> Yeah. So, I mean, this is sort of part of the idea of structuring this by the backers, to avoid some of the pushback they knew would come. One of them was the idea that you could just avoid the tax by moving out of state. So they wrote into this that if you were a resident of California as of January 1st of this year, you are subject to this tax, regardless of whether you’ve moved since then.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Guy Marzorati:\u003c/strong> So if you’re reading it, it’s too late.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Marisa Lagos:\u003c/strong> Exactly. And also, the one-time nature. Now, that will be litigated if it’s passed, because as this was getting on the ballot in December and it was clear that they were moving forward with this, you did see some folks, including Sergey Brin, who’s been, I believe, the biggest single donor to the No on 40 effort, the Google co-founder. He claims that he moved his residency to Reno, Nevada, prior to that January 1st deadline. I would bet that will be litigated by the courts, because the state will say, “No, actually, you still live here.” And there’s been a lot of reporting that he is still in Mountain View every day, working on AI at Google. So, I don’t know. We’ll see. A lot of this might be litigated if it passes. Well, the other question —\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Marisa Lagos:\u003c/strong> Exactly. And also, the one-time nature. Now, that will be litigated if it’s passed, because as this was getting on the ballot in December and it was clear that they were moving forward with this, you did see some folks, including Sergey Brin, who’s been, I believe, the biggest single donor to the No on 40 effort, the Google co-founder. He claims that he moved his residency to Reno, Nevada, prior to that January 1st deadline. I would bet that will be litigated by the courts, because the state will say, “No, actually, you still live here.” And there’s been a lot of reporting that he is still in Mountain View every day, working on AI at Google. So, I don’t know. We’ll see. A lot of this might be litigated if it passes. Well, the other question —\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Can be a little confusing — what counts toward this net worth calculation of a billion dollars, Marisa? I mean, the —\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Marisa Lagos:\u003c/strong> The bulk of it is going to be stocks, bonds, assets that are traded in the financial markets and are visible, essentially, because they have to be declared because they’re publicly traded. It also does include artwork, not most real estate, but properties, things like yachts. So, you know, our tax system broadly relies on people to essentially declare what they have — what they made, what they have. Obviously, there’s some, you know, your W-2 is a way the government can check that. But it is the honor system, and this would be no different. Essentially, when you file your taxes next year, there’s going to be a little question: Are you a billionaire? If you check yes, then you need to essentially file an affidavit attached to it, listing your assets. And so that is going to be at least the initial mechanism to sort of decide what the level is at which you would have to pay this tax if you are indeed a billionaire. I think most of us won’t have to worry about anything after checking that no box.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Marisa Lagos:\u003c/strong> The bulk of it is going to be stocks, bonds, assets that are traded in the financial markets and are visible, essentially, because they have to be declared because they’re publicly traded. It also does include artwork, not most real estate, but properties, things like yachts. So, you know, our tax system broadly relies on people to essentially declare what they have — what they made, what they have. Obviously, there’s some, you know, your W-2 is a way the government can check that. But it is the honor system, and this would be no different. Essentially, when you file your taxes next year, there’s going to be a little question: Are you a billionaire? If you check yes, then you need to essentially file an affidavit attached to it, listing your assets. And so that is going to be at least the initial mechanism to sort of decide what the level is at which you would have to pay this tax if you are indeed a billionaire. I think most of us won’t have to worry about anything after checking that no box.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Well, Guy, you mentioned how the money will be allocated. Talk about why so much of it will go to health care. It was really born out of the impacts of Trump’s so-called big, beautiful bill, right?\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Well, Guy, you mentioned how the money will be allocated. Talk about why so much of it will go to health care. It was really born out of the impacts of Trump’s so-called big, beautiful bill, right?\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Guy Marzorati:\u003c/strong> Yeah. So proponents — and this was put on the ballot through a signature campaign by a health care union — have argued that the money is needed to backfill these cuts to Medi-Cal, which is our system of Medicaid in California. You hear two kinds of arguments in support of Proposition 40. One is specifically about what this would fund. So, this idea that Trump and Republicans in Congress passed a bill cutting taxes on many wealthy Americans and cutting Medicaid, the health care safety net, at the same time. The argument is that, by going after the wealth of billionaires, you’d be able to backfill some of these cuts.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Guy Marzorati:\u003c/strong> Yeah. So proponents — and this was put on the ballot through a signature campaign by a health care union — have argued that the money is needed to backfill these cuts to Medi-Cal, which is our system of Medicaid in California. You hear two kinds of arguments in support of Proposition 40. One is specifically about what this would fund. So, this idea that Trump and Republicans in Congress passed a bill cutting taxes on many wealthy Americans and cutting Medicaid, the health care safety net, at the same time. The argument is that, by going after the wealth of billionaires, you’d be able to backfill some of these cuts.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>There’s another, I think, broader argument being made in support of Proposition 40, which is that fundamentally, our tax system in California, even as it’s a progressive one, is progressive as it relates to the income tax. So there’s all this wealth that Marisa mentioned in the stock market and privately owned companies that is not being captured through our progressive income tax system. And so you hear both of those arguments being made in support of Prop 40.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>There’s another, I think, broader argument being made in support of Proposition 40, which is that fundamentally, our tax system in California, even as it’s a progressive one, is progressive as it relates to the income tax. So there’s all this wealth that Marisa mentioned in the stock market and privately owned companies that is not being captured through our progressive income tax system. And so you hear both of those arguments being made in support of Prop 40.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Right. Marisa, you actually sat down and spoke with an author of the bill, Dave Regan, head of SEIU-UHW, right? What did he tell you about why SEIU went for the overall wealth tax, and what do we need to understand about the way many billionaires can avoid paying the taxes the rest of us pay?\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Right. Marisa, you actually sat down and spoke with an author of the bill, Dave Regan, head of SEIU-UHW, right? What did he tell you about why SEIU went for the overall wealth tax, and what do we need to understand about the way many billionaires can avoid paying the taxes the rest of us pay?\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Marisa Lagos:\u003c/strong> Yeah, I mean, this has been really fascinating to dig into. And, you know, I want to say at the outset that there are very differing views among economists about this tax and basically everything in economics. But what Dave Regan is saying — Regan, excuse me — is that the wealth of billionaires has grown so quickly over, you know, really even just the past 10 years. They actually put out something recently showing that since this campaign started, or in the last few months, these billionaires’ wealth has grown far more than the taxes they would need to pay under this measure.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Marisa Lagos:\u003c/strong> Yeah, I mean, this has been really fascinating to dig into. And, you know, I want to say at the outset that there are very differing views among economists about this tax and basically everything in economics. But what Dave Regan is saying — Regan, excuse me — is that the wealth of billionaires has grown so quickly over, you know, really even just the past 10 years. They actually put out something recently showing that since this campaign started, or in the last few months, these billionaires’ wealth has grown far more than the taxes they would need to pay under this measure.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>What Regan and the economist at UC Berkeley who helped him craft this measure say is that wealthy people, and billionaires especially — because I do think we need to make a distinction between being a millionaire and a billionaire. It is a big difference, right? — structure their wealth in ways that help them avoid taxes. Of course, all of us pay income taxes on the salary we make. UC Berkeley economists point out that Larry Page and Sergey Brin, co-founders of Google, had a three-year period over the last six years or so when they took $1 in income. So they were literally not paying any taxes on income in that way.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>What Regan and the economist at UC Berkeley who helped him craft this measure say is that wealthy people, and billionaires especially — because I do think we need to make a distinction between being a millionaire and a billionaire. It is a big difference, right? — structure their wealth in ways that help them avoid taxes. Of course, all of us pay income taxes on the salary we make. UC Berkeley economists point out that Larry Page and Sergey Brin, co-founders of Google, had a three-year period over the last six years or so when they took $1 in income. So they were literally not paying any taxes on income in that way.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Most of them don’t sell their stocks and bonds in order to, say, buy a house, like you or I might need to if we had money in the market and needed to pull it out for something new. They just borrow against those assets, and they essentially qualify for low- or no-interest loans against their own wealth.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>Most of them don’t sell their stocks and bonds in order to, say, buy a house, like you or I might need to if we had money in the market and needed to pull it out for something new. They just borrow against those assets, and they essentially qualify for low- or no-interest loans against their own wealth.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>And so, yes, I want to be clear: Billionaires still pay a lot of taxes. There’s still money that they have to pay taxes on. Compared to the percentage that normal Americans, even people we would consider pretty wealthy millionaires who work at a lot of these tech companies and do take normal salaries, pay, it just pales in comparison on a percentage level.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>And so, yes, I want to be clear: Billionaires still pay a lot of taxes. There’s still money that they have to pay taxes on. Compared to the percentage that normal Americans, even people we would consider pretty wealthy millionaires who work at a lot of these tech companies and do take normal salaries, pay, it just pales in comparison on a percentage level.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>And so, you know, Regan and backers of this say, look, inequality has grown hugely. The Trump administration paid for tax cuts for millionaires and billionaires by cutting health care for the poorest Americans. This is just a way to staunch the flow from those health care cuts temporarily while we figure out how, in their argument, to get a Democrat back in the White House, Democrats back in Congress, and reverse these cuts. So it’s really, you know, I think, to them, an argument of fairness. And we can get into what the other side thinks about that, because they have their own fairness arguments, for sure.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>And so, you know, Regan and backers of this say, look, inequality has grown hugely. The Trump administration paid for tax cuts for millionaires and billionaires by cutting health care for the poorest Americans. This is just a way to staunch the flow from those health care cuts temporarily while we figure out how, in their argument, to get a Democrat back in the White House, Democrats back in Congress, and reverse these cuts. So it’s really, you know, I think, to them, an argument of fairness. And we can get into what the other side thinks about that, because they have their own fairness arguments, for sure.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Yeah, we definitely will get into that. First, let me remind listeners: We’re talking about Prop 40, California’s so-called billionaire tax, a one-time 5% tax on billionaires’ assets. We’re hearing from Marisa Lagos why it’s on overall wealth versus income, and also from Guy Marzorati. They’re both correspondents on KQED’s politics desk. Marisa’s also co-host of KQED’s podcast, \u003cem>Political Breakdown\u003c/em>.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Yeah, we definitely will get into that. First, let me remind listeners: We’re talking about Prop 40, California’s so-called billionaire tax, a one-time 5% tax on billionaires’ assets. We’re hearing from Marisa Lagos why it’s on overall wealth versus income, and also from Guy Marzorati. They’re both correspondents on KQED’s politics desk. Marisa’s also co-host of KQED’s podcast, \u003cem>Political Breakdown\u003c/em>.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>And you, our listeners, join the conversation. What questions do you have about Prop 40? Or how are you planning to vote on it, and why? Email \u003ca href=\"mailto:forum@kqed.org\">forum@kqed.org\u003c/a>. Find us on Discord, Bluesky, Facebook, or Instagram at KQED Forum. Call us at 866-733-6786, 866-733-6786.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>And you, our listeners, join the conversation. What questions do you have about Prop 40? Or how are you planning to vote on it, and why? Email \u003ca href=\"mailto:forum@kqed.org\">forum@kqed.org\u003c/a>. Find us on Discord, Bluesky, Facebook, or Instagram at KQED Forum. Call us at 866-733-6786, 866-733-6786.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Sharon writes, “There’s so much misinformation out there. It’s hard to know what’s true. I just read yesterday that Prop 40 is not a one-time tax and that it could happen over again, including to non-billionaires. Is this true?” Marisa, you talked to Dave Regan about that. Tell me, how would you answer Sharon’s question?\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>Sharon writes, “There’s so much misinformation out there. It’s hard to know what’s true. I just read yesterday that Prop 40 is not a one-time tax and that it could happen over again, including to non-billionaires. Is this true?” Marisa, you talked to Dave Regan about that. Tell me, how would you answer Sharon’s question?\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Marisa Lagos:\u003c/strong> Look, the voters could always go back and approve more taxes, right? And so, like, yes, there’s always the chance that that happens. I think what Sharon’s talking about is really this argument we’re hearing on the No on 40 side, and it relates to some other ballot measures, Props 41 and 42, in particular 42. They’re essentially raising the idea that if this is allowed by voters, you could assess taxes on people’s financial assets before they cash them out.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Marisa Lagos:\u003c/strong> Look, the voters could always go back and approve more taxes, right? And so, like, yes, there’s always the chance that that happens. I think what Sharon’s talking about is really this argument we’re hearing on the No on 40 side, and it relates to some other ballot measures, Props 41 and 42, in particular 42. They’re essentially raising the idea that if this is allowed by voters, you could assess taxes on people’s financial assets before they cash them out.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>So right now we have capital gains, right? If you have a stock and you sell it, you have to pay taxes based on the amount that it increased since you got the stock — what you made off of it. They’re saying that this sort of blows up that system and creates one where you can just tax those assets before they’re really realized. And then, if they can do it to billionaires, that’s going to happen again. I don’t think they’re saying that’s going to happen per se. Again, I think the slippery-slope argument is essentially what they’re making.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>So right now we have capital gains, right? If you have a stock and you sell it, you have to pay taxes based on the amount that it increased since you got the stock — what you made off of it. They’re saying that this sort of blows up that system and creates one where you can just tax those assets before they’re really realized. And then, if they can do it to billionaires, that’s going to happen again. I don’t think they’re saying that’s going to happen per se. Again, I think the slippery-slope argument is essentially what they’re making.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>There is some language in there that does allow the legislature, like Guy said, to decide how this money is spent. And when I talk to folks who oppose Prop 40 and support Prop 42, which is one of two competing measures the billionaires put on the ballot in order to invalidate Prop 40 if all of them pass, I think that’s really important. Props 41 and 42 are really aimed at essentially making Prop 40 unenforceable if they pass with more votes than it.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>There is some language in there that does allow the legislature, like Guy said, to decide how this money is spent. And when I talk to folks who oppose Prop 40 and support Prop 42, which is one of two competing measures the billionaires put on the ballot in order to invalidate Prop 40 if all of them pass, I think that’s really important. Props 41 and 42 are really aimed at essentially making Prop 40 unenforceable if they pass with more votes than it.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Prop 42 is a strict ban on any taxes on these types of financial assets before they’re cashed out. And so that is why it’s being framed as something to protect your retirement. The 42 folks will say, well, there have been some proposals in the legislature in recent years to potentially tax some retirement accounts, things like that. I’ve never seen a serious conversation about this, and I’ve certainly never seen it move forward. And I don’t think, just in terms of the intentions of the people who wrote Prop 40, that that’s their intention in any way, shape, or form. They’re really focused on trying to save health care, and on doing so by taxing the richest folks in California.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>Prop 42 is a strict ban on any taxes on these types of financial assets before they’re cashed out. And so that is why it’s being framed as something to protect your retirement. The 42 folks will say, well, there have been some proposals in the legislature in recent years to potentially tax some retirement accounts, things like that. I’ve never seen a serious conversation about this, and I’ve certainly never seen it move forward. And I don’t think, just in terms of the intentions of the people who wrote Prop 40, that that’s their intention in any way, shape, or form. They’re really focused on trying to save health care, and on doing so by taxing the richest folks in California.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Guy Marzorati:\u003c/strong> I would just quickly say, though, the flip side of that would be history. In so many cases, taxes that are billed as one-time or emergency, or just for this purpose — well, if we get five years down the line and the federal government has not restored its funding for Medi-Cal, then what? I think history would suggest that proponents of this would probably go back for an extension, as proponents of higher income taxes have done in California and are doing this year.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Guy Marzorati:\u003c/strong> I would just quickly say, though, the flip side of that would be history. In so many cases, taxes that are billed as one-time or emergency, or just for this purpose — well, if we get five years down the line and the federal government has not restored its funding for Medi-Cal, then what? I think history would suggest that proponents of this would probably go back for an extension, as proponents of higher income taxes have done in California and are doing this year.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Marisa Lagos:\u003c/strong> For billionaires, likely, right? Yeah.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Marisa Lagos:\u003c/strong> For billionaires, likely, right? Yeah.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Guy Marzorati:\u003c/strong> Yeah, as proponents of higher income taxes have done in California and are doing this year.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Guy Marzorati:\u003c/strong> Yeah, as proponents of higher income taxes have done in California and are doing this year.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Right, they are doing that this year. But at the same time, and also on the other side of this, Marisa, there are people — and we are coming up on a break, so just set this idea out there — who have also wondered why it would have to be a one-time tax, or why SEIU decided to pursue this just as a one-time tax as well. So lots of different views about how people feel our tax structure needs to change. We’ll have more after the break.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Right, they are doing that this year. But at the same time, and also on the other side of this, Marisa, there are people — and we are coming up on a break, so just set this idea out there — who have also wondered why it would have to be a one-time tax, or why SEIU decided to pursue this just as a one-time tax as well. So lots of different views about how people feel our tax structure needs to change. We’ll have more after the break.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>I’m Mina Kim. You’re listening to \u003cem>Forum\u003c/em>. We’re talking this hour about Proposition 40, California’s billionaire tax, a one-time 5% tax on billionaires’ assets. Here’s co-author Dave Regan, president of SEIU-UHW, on why an overall wealth tax is needed.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>I’m Mina Kim. You’re listening to \u003cem>Forum\u003c/em>. We’re talking this hour about Proposition 40, California’s billionaire tax, a one-time 5% tax on billionaires’ assets. Here’s co-author Dave Regan, president of SEIU-UHW, on why an overall wealth tax is needed.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Dave Regan:\u003c/strong> The billionaires in California pay a tiny percentage of their financial holdings in income tax. They pay 2.5%. Seven years ago, in 2019, the aggregate wealth of California billionaires was $700 billion. Today, it’s $2.3 trillion. It has more than tripled in the last seven years. Your wages aren’t tripling. My wages aren’t tripling. I don’t know anybody whose salary is tripling. And 70% of that $2.3 trillion is in publicly traded stocks. When the value of that grows, it’s all beyond the reach of the tax system.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Dave Regan:\u003c/strong> The billionaires in California pay a tiny percentage of their financial holdings in income tax. They pay 2.5%. Seven years ago, in 2019, the aggregate wealth of California billionaires was $700 billion. Today, it’s $2.3 trillion. It has more than tripled in the last seven years. Your wages aren’t tripling. My wages aren’t tripling. I don’t know anybody whose salary is tripling. And 70% of that $2.3 trillion is in publicly traded stocks. When the value of that grows, it’s all beyond the reach of the tax system.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> That’s Regan in conversation with my guest, Marisa Lagos, KQED’s political correspondent and co-host of \u003cem>Political Breakdown\u003c/em>. Also, Guy Marzorati is with us, correspondent on KQED’s California Politics and Government Desk.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> That’s Regan in conversation with my guest, Marisa Lagos, KQED’s political correspondent and co-host of \u003cem>Political Breakdown\u003c/em>. Also, Guy Marzorati is with us, correspondent on KQED’s California Politics and Government Desk.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>And you, our listeners, are joining the conversation with your questions about Prop 40, its countermeasures, and the attempts to nullify it in Props 41 and 42. Tell us how you’re planning to vote on Prop 40, if you already know. You can email \u003ca href=\"mailto:forum@kqed.org\">forum@kqed.org\u003c/a>. Find us on Discord, Bluesky, Facebook, or Instagram at KQED Forum. Call us at 866-733-6786, 866-733-6786.\u003c/p>\n",
"innerContent": [
"\n\u003cp>And you, our listeners, are joining the conversation with your questions about Prop 40, its countermeasures, and the attempts to nullify it in Props 41 and 42. Tell us how you’re planning to vote on Prop 40, if you already know. You can email \u003ca href=\"mailto:forum@kqed.org\">forum@kqed.org\u003c/a>. Find us on Discord, Bluesky, Facebook, or Instagram at KQED Forum. Call us at 866-733-6786, 866-733-6786.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Guy, before we get into the opposition, remind me: Who are the biggest supporters of Prop 40?\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>Guy, before we get into the opposition, remind me: Who are the biggest supporters of Prop 40?\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Guy Marzorati:\u003c/strong> So the biggest supporter is SEIU United Healthcare Workers West. That’s the union that organized to get this onto the ballot. They drove the signature-gathering campaign. They’ve been really the largest financial supporter of Proposition 40. And then you also have some leading progressives backing this idea, most notably Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders and, in California, Congressmember Ro Khanna in the South Bay.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Guy Marzorati:\u003c/strong> So the biggest supporter is SEIU United Healthcare Workers West. That’s the union that organized to get this onto the ballot. They drove the signature-gathering campaign. They’ve been really the largest financial supporter of Proposition 40. And then you also have some leading progressives backing this idea, most notably Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders and, in California, Congressmember Ro Khanna in the South Bay.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Yeah, and the California Democratic Party, right?\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Yeah, and the California Democratic Party, right?\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Guy Marzorati:\u003c/strong> Yeah. After a contentious vote process, the California Democratic Party is also supporting Proposition 40. And you honestly see a split within organized labor, where there are some unions who have gotten behind it that we can talk about, and others that haven’t. So there’s a split within, you know, the Teamsters and AFSCME. They’ve supported it. The California Teachers Association and the building trades are against it. So a real split in labor as well.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Guy Marzorati:\u003c/strong> Yeah. After a contentious vote process, the California Democratic Party is also supporting Proposition 40. And you honestly see a split within organized labor, where there are some unions who have gotten behind it that we can talk about, and others that haven’t. So there’s a split within, you know, the Teamsters and AFSCME. They’ve supported it. The California Teachers Association and the building trades are against it. So a real split in labor as well.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Yeah. Who else is against it? A prominent Democrat, of course, is California Governor Gavin Newsom.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Yeah. Who else is against it? A prominent Democrat, of course, is California Governor Gavin Newsom.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Guy Marzorati:\u003c/strong> Yeah, Governor Gavin Newsom, probably the most notable opponent of Proposition 40. But you’ve also seen a number of state lawmakers oppose it. There’s kind of unified opposition on the Republican side, with the California Republican Party against it. And, yeah, this is an issue that has really divided Democrats within California. Even though you mentioned the state Democratic Party endorsed Proposition 40, we’ve seen some local Democratic parties — one in San Francisco — split with the state. They opposed it. So it’s become a key issue that I would expect, honestly, to extend into the next presidential election, where you’ve seen Democrats really on either side of this.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Guy Marzorati:\u003c/strong> Yeah, Governor Gavin Newsom, probably the most notable opponent of Proposition 40. But you’ve also seen a number of state lawmakers oppose it. There’s kind of unified opposition on the Republican side, with the California Republican Party against it. And, yeah, this is an issue that has really divided Democrats within California. Even though you mentioned the state Democratic Party endorsed Proposition 40, we’ve seen some local Democratic parties — one in San Francisco — split with the state. They opposed it. So it’s become a key issue that I would expect, honestly, to extend into the next presidential election, where you’ve seen Democrats really on either side of this.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Yeah. Well, so, Marisa, sum up for me the argument against Prop 40. You already touched on it, but —\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Yeah. Well, so, Marisa, sum up for me the argument against Prop 40. You already touched on it, but —\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Marisa Lagos:\u003c/strong> Yeah. So, you know, I think there’s a couple of different ones. One is just what we’re hearing from the billionaires themselves and economists who support them: that we essentially rely on private capital to grow our economy, and these guys have most of their wealth not in cash, but in these companies and huge industries that are helping fuel the California economy. They argue that it would essentially be unfair to make them pay taxes on their overall wealth. That’s not the system that has worked, and it will actually create less innovation. It will drive not just billionaires, but potential billionaires, out of state. People who want to found companies will look toward places with lower tax burdens. Essentially, this will have a longer-term effect on the state budget.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Marisa Lagos:\u003c/strong> Yeah. So, you know, I think there’s a couple of different ones. One is just what we’re hearing from the billionaires themselves and economists who support them: that we essentially rely on private capital to grow our economy, and these guys have most of their wealth not in cash, but in these companies and huge industries that are helping fuel the California economy. They argue that it would essentially be unfair to make them pay taxes on their overall wealth. That’s not the system that has worked, and it will actually create less innovation. It will drive not just billionaires, but potential billionaires, out of state. People who want to found companies will look toward places with lower tax burdens. Essentially, this will have a longer-term effect on the state budget.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>That’s something we hear from someone like Gavin Newsom and some of the labor unions that have joined him in opposing it, like the California Teachers Association, and some other traditionally left-leaning groups like Planned Parenthood, who have also lined up with the governor. They say they’re worried that not only will this never get collected, even if it passes, because it’ll be litigated and you won’t really be able to get the money, but that in the longer term it will essentially have a detrimental effect on the state budget because it will result in less innovation, fewer companies being built here, and therefore a lower tax base overall.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>That’s something we hear from someone like Gavin Newsom and some of the labor unions that have joined him in opposing it, like the California Teachers Association, and some other traditionally left-leaning groups like Planned Parenthood, who have also lined up with the governor. They say they’re worried that not only will this never get collected, even if it passes, because it’ll be litigated and you won’t really be able to get the money, but that in the longer term it will essentially have a detrimental effect on the state budget because it will result in less innovation, fewer companies being built here, and therefore a lower tax base overall.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>We do have a progressive tax system, Mina, so it is true that the wealthiest folks do pay the most in terms of income and capital gains taxes.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>We do have a progressive tax system, Mina, so it is true that the wealthiest folks do pay the most in terms of income and capital gains taxes.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> The other thing I understand is that at least Hoover Institution research suggests that the tax would not generate the $100 billion that proponents claim it will, and that it could be about $40 billion over five years.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> The other thing I understand is that at least Hoover Institution research suggests that the tax would not generate the $100 billion that proponents claim it will, and that it could be about $40 billion over five years.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Marisa Lagos:\u003c/strong> Yeah, I mean, they say the actual revenue would be between $55 billion at the top and $46 billion at the bottom. They’re relying on a couple of different things that the proponents of the tax disagree with. So they think, first of all, that someone like Sergey Brin absolutely would not have to pay it. They think there are people who have moved out of state. They’re saying that the proponents fail to exclude residential real estate from the estimates of $100 billion, so that reduces the taxable base. They say the tax’s authors wrongly calculated the number of billionaires in the state.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Marisa Lagos:\u003c/strong> Yeah, I mean, they say the actual revenue would be between $55 billion at the top and $46 billion at the bottom. They’re relying on a couple of different things that the proponents of the tax disagree with. So they think, first of all, that someone like Sergey Brin absolutely would not have to pay it. They think there are people who have moved out of state. They’re saying that the proponents fail to exclude residential real estate from the estimates of $100 billion, so that reduces the taxable base. They say the tax’s authors wrongly calculated the number of billionaires in the state.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>I mean, you never know exactly how much money something is going to bring in, right? And so I think, at the end of the day, if you look at the wealth of these 200 billionaires, like, if somebody is worth $200 billion, they’re going to pay $10 billion under this tax. I mean, it’s not nothing, right?\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>I mean, you never know exactly how much money something is going to bring in, right? And so I think, at the end of the day, if you look at the wealth of these 200 billionaires, like, if somebody is worth $200 billion, they’re going to pay $10 billion under this tax. I mean, it’s not nothing, right?\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Right. And then on the question of billionaires leaving, Michelle writes, “The billionaires threaten to leave California if Prop 40 passes. Would this be a great loss for California?” While another listener on Bluesky writes, “We forget how desirable California is to live in. People from everywhere around the world want to be here. Maybe some billionaires will leave. There are still plenty of rich people who will stay.”\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Right. And then on the question of billionaires leaving, Michelle writes, “The billionaires threaten to leave California if Prop 40 passes. Would this be a great loss for California?” While another listener on Bluesky writes, “We forget how desirable California is to live in. People from everywhere around the world want to be here. Maybe some billionaires will leave. There are still plenty of rich people who will stay.”\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>So, Guy, is this exodus of billionaires actually happening? There was some reporting that a handful have already left.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>So, Guy, is this exodus of billionaires actually happening? There was some reporting that a handful have already left.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Guy Marzorati:\u003c/strong> Yeah, I mean, a handful have left. We really don’t know. We can talk about comparisons to previous wealth taxes internationally, models based on how this would impact California. We simply do not know exactly how this will play out if voters approve Proposition 40 and it’s enacted. Even the proponents of this have called it an experiment. I think there really is no way to run the simulation and figure out how billionaires to whom this would apply actually respond, how many of them will leave, how many will take their businesses with them, and what impact this will have on future founders and startup creators in the state.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Guy Marzorati:\u003c/strong> Yeah, I mean, a handful have left. We really don’t know. We can talk about comparisons to previous wealth taxes internationally, models based on how this would impact California. We simply do not know exactly how this will play out if voters approve Proposition 40 and it’s enacted. Even the proponents of this have called it an experiment. I think there really is no way to run the simulation and figure out how billionaires to whom this would apply actually respond, how many of them will leave, how many will take their businesses with them, and what impact this will have on future founders and startup creators in the state.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Let me go to caller Andy in San Jose, who’s with us. Andy, go ahead. You’re on.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Let me go to caller Andy in San Jose, who’s with us. Andy, go ahead. You’re on.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Andy Mattson:\u003c/strong> My name’s Andy Mattson. I’m the chair of CalCPA’s committee on taxation. I work in San Jose as a practicing CPA. I want to clarify one thing: The legislative text indicates that non-publicly traded private-company stock is subject to this tax. So one of the big issues is, if you’re a founder of a company and you get lucky and you’ve got private wealth — paper-company wealth that’s not publicly traded — where do you come up with the cash? That has not been clarified. In fact, RealCon, I believe, had a proposal where the government would loan — the federal government would loan money to pay the —\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Andy Mattson:\u003c/strong> My name’s Andy Mattson. I’m the chair of CalCPA’s committee on taxation. I work in San Jose as a practicing CPA. I want to clarify one thing: The legislative text indicates that non-publicly traded private-company stock is subject to this tax. So one of the big issues is, if you’re a founder of a company and you get lucky and you’ve got private wealth — paper-company wealth that’s not publicly traded — where do you come up with the cash? That has not been clarified. In fact, RealCon, I believe, had a proposal where the government would loan — the federal government would loan money to pay the —\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Marisa Lagos:\u003c/strong> Can I ask —\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Marisa Lagos:\u003c/strong> Can I ask —\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Andy Mattson:\u003c/strong> It’s a problem.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Andy Mattson:\u003c/strong> It’s a problem.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Marisa Lagos:\u003c/strong> Yeah, can I ask you a question? I’m curious, as a CPA. These guys can borrow against that wealth if they want to buy a house or a yacht or a private jet. Could you not do that for a tax? Sorry, I think —\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Marisa Lagos:\u003c/strong> Yeah, can I ask you a question? I’m curious, as a CPA. These guys can borrow against that wealth if they want to buy a house or a yacht or a private jet. Could you not do that for a tax? Sorry, I think —\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> We just need to try to get him back. It’s okay.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> We just need to try to get him back. It’s okay.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Marisa Lagos:\u003c/strong> It’s okay. I’m just curious because I think, to me, as a non-billionaire, it’s an interesting question. It seems like there’s always money to invest in new companies, to invest in things that they want to buy. Is that not allowed? Are you not allowed to take out loans to pay taxes?\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Marisa Lagos:\u003c/strong> It’s okay. I’m just curious because I think, to me, as a non-billionaire, it’s an interesting question. It seems like there’s always money to invest in new companies, to invest in things that they want to buy. Is that not allowed? Are you not allowed to take out loans to pay taxes?\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Andy Mattson:\u003c/strong> Andy? Am I back on now?\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Andy Mattson:\u003c/strong> Andy? Am I back on now?\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> You are now. Thanks.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> You are now. Thanks.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Andy Mattson:\u003c/strong> Okay. Well, I mean, each situation is different, and it just depends on the relationship between a lender and a person, and a person’s financial situation. So, you know, it just kind of depends. I don’t think you can generalize. I think the other point —\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Andy Mattson:\u003c/strong> Okay. Well, I mean, each situation is different, and it just depends on the relationship between a lender and a person, and a person’s financial situation. So, you know, it just kind of depends. I don’t think you can generalize. I think the other point —\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Marisa Lagos:\u003c/strong> Well, but I’m asking legally. You could —\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Marisa Lagos:\u003c/strong> Well, but I’m asking legally. You could —\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Marisa Lagos:\u003c/strong> Well, but I’m asking legally, like, could you legally ask a bank for a loan against your assets?\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Marisa Lagos:\u003c/strong> Well, but I’m asking legally, like, could you legally ask a bank for a loan against your assets?\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Guy Marzorati:\u003c/strong> Yeah, but I mean, I guess the flip side of that is that the wealth they have in these companies is based on a valuation. It’s not money that — and I think that’s the flaw with Ro Khanna’s idea of, “Oh, what if the government fronted these founders the money for them to pay the tax?” Well, what happens if the company doesn’t work out? Are we, as the state, now on the hook as an owner for these companies?\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Guy Marzorati:\u003c/strong> Yeah, but I mean, I guess the flip side of that is that the wealth they have in these companies is based on a valuation. It’s not money that — and I think that’s the flaw with Ro Khanna’s idea of, “Oh, what if the government fronted these founders the money for them to pay the tax?” Well, what happens if the company doesn’t work out? Are we, as the state, now on the hook as an owner for these companies?\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>I think it’s an edge case, but in San Francisco, where you have more of these founders than anywhere else, it is an issue. If you founded a company that’s now worth, let’s say, $10 billion, and you own a third of that, you’re going to be on the hook for $150 million or $200 million next year. Do you have that money?\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>I think it’s an edge case, but in San Francisco, where you have more of these founders than anywhere else, it is an issue. If you founded a company that’s now worth, let’s say, $10 billion, and you own a third of that, you’re going to be on the hook for $150 million or $200 million next year. Do you have that money?\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Marisa Lagos:\u003c/strong> Or if you own a sports team, for example. Yeah, but you have —\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Marisa Lagos:\u003c/strong> Or if you own a sports team, for example. Yeah, but you have —\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Guy Marzorati:\u003c/strong> Yeah, but you have that money right now. I mean, a sports team is printing money, though. So I think there’s that question. I will say that the tax in Proposition 40 does consider this, and there are ways for the tax to be deferred. Based on how much other wealth you have as one of these startup founders, if there are other assets you have that are publicly traded, you could potentially defer what you have to pay to the state. So it could be a situation, like the caller mentions, where all of a sudden one of these founders has a $200 million tax bill, but they might not have to pay that right away in 2027.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Guy Marzorati:\u003c/strong> Yeah, but you have that money right now. I mean, a sports team is printing money, though. So I think there’s that question. I will say that the tax in Proposition 40 does consider this, and there are ways for the tax to be deferred. Based on how much other wealth you have as one of these startup founders, if there are other assets you have that are publicly traded, you could potentially defer what you have to pay to the state. So it could be a situation, like the caller mentions, where all of a sudden one of these founders has a $200 million tax bill, but they might not have to pay that right away in 2027.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> The fact that there are all these unknowns really exemplifies that this is new. California is the first out of the gate, and I think even Dave sort of suggested this is an experiment, right, Marisa?\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> The fact that there are all these unknowns really exemplifies that this is new. California is the first out of the gate, and I think even Dave sort of suggested this is an experiment, right, Marisa?\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Marisa Lagos:\u003c/strong> Yeah. I mean, look, there have been calls for many years in this country for not just a wealth tax specifically, but reforms to our tax system to better capture the wealth that has grown. And I do want to underscore that in a way that did not exist when I was growing up. There were no billionaires, right? I mean, it is wild.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Marisa Lagos:\u003c/strong> Yeah. I mean, look, there have been calls for many years in this country for not just a wealth tax specifically, but reforms to our tax system to better capture the wealth that has grown. And I do want to underscore that in a way that did not exist when I was growing up. There were no billionaires, right? I mean, it is wild.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>When you look at — I was referring to this earlier — I saw a tweet by Gabriel Zucman, who’s one of the UC Berkeley economists who helped frame and write this measure with SEIU-UHW. He’s saying that basically this wealth tax would bring Silicon Valley billionaires’ wealth back to where it was 31 days ago, because of how exponentially — and again, the wealth on paper is growing.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>When you look at — I was referring to this earlier — I saw a tweet by Gabriel Zucman, who’s one of the UC Berkeley economists who helped frame and write this measure with SEIU-UHW. He’s saying that basically this wealth tax would bring Silicon Valley billionaires’ wealth back to where it was 31 days ago, because of how exponentially — and again, the wealth on paper is growing.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>So I think, you know, I’ve been working on some reporting on this and talking to progressives, and they do see this as a test case for a national wealth tax. They would prefer it happen at the national level, just the way the governor says he would, because it wouldn’t allow people to move between states. It could be structured differently so that maybe it takes into account some of these issues. But, yeah, what Regan says is our system is not working, and we’re trying something new to help the people who are going to suffer the most in the coming years.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>So I think, you know, I’ve been working on some reporting on this and talking to progressives, and they do see this as a test case for a national wealth tax. They would prefer it happen at the national level, just the way the governor says he would, because it wouldn’t allow people to move between states. It could be structured differently so that maybe it takes into account some of these issues. But, yeah, what Regan says is our system is not working, and we’re trying something new to help the people who are going to suffer the most in the coming years.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>And I think you can argue maybe all legislation is somewhat of an experiment. This one is certainly something that has not happened in the U.S. before in really any way, shape, or form.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>And I think you can argue maybe all legislation is somewhat of an experiment. This one is certainly something that has not happened in the U.S. before in really any way, shape, or form.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Guy Marzorati:\u003c/strong> And that’s why this feels like such a big one, right? It’s like once in a generation in California, it feels like we have these ballot measures —\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Guy Marzorati:\u003c/strong> And that’s why this feels like such a big one, right? It’s like once in a generation in California, it feels like we have these ballot measures —\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Marisa Lagos:\u003c/strong> Like Prop 13, like, yeah.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Marisa Lagos:\u003c/strong> Like Prop 13, like, yeah.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Guy Marzorati:\u003c/strong> — that are a political earthquake, where the rest of the country wakes up the morning after the election and is like, “Why are the glasses and plates on the ground?” And I think the fact that this could be a test case going forward for Democrats, and the fact that you have this collision of incredible inequality with this incredible growth in Silicon Valley and artificial intelligence, is why, to Marisa’s point, there is so much at stake with this. It’s why it feels like, for the Democratic Party, for Silicon Valley, for the folks who could potentially gain from this, and for Gavin Newsom, there’s a reason this feels like the main event.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Guy Marzorati:\u003c/strong> — that are a political earthquake, where the rest of the country wakes up the morning after the election and is like, “Why are the glasses and plates on the ground?” And I think the fact that this could be a test case going forward for Democrats, and the fact that you have this collision of incredible inequality with this incredible growth in Silicon Valley and artificial intelligence, is why, to Marisa’s point, there is so much at stake with this. It’s why it feels like, for the Democratic Party, for Silicon Valley, for the folks who could potentially gain from this, and for Gavin Newsom, there’s a reason this feels like the main event.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Marisa Lagos:\u003c/strong> But from a political perspective, it’s fascinating to me that the backers wrote this specifically to be a one-time tax to avoid some of the attacks they’re getting, and it doesn’t matter. It’s not happening anyway. And if you look at the way this campaign is going, the folks opposing Prop 40 have actually put more money into supporting Prop 42 — that’s the ballot measure that prohibits any taxes on retirement accounts and things in the stock market — than they have into No on 40. I think it’s $100 million versus $80 million between 42 and No on 40. But still, that tells you something. I think there’s a real concern among folks who oppose this that, whether it’s a slippery slope in terms of future taxes in California, it is a slippery slope in terms of taxing the wealthy, and that if this can happen in California, it could happen anywhere.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Marisa Lagos:\u003c/strong> But from a political perspective, it’s fascinating to me that the backers wrote this specifically to be a one-time tax to avoid some of the attacks they’re getting, and it doesn’t matter. It’s not happening anyway. And if you look at the way this campaign is going, the folks opposing Prop 40 have actually put more money into supporting Prop 42 — that’s the ballot measure that prohibits any taxes on retirement accounts and things in the stock market — than they have into No on 40. I think it’s $100 million versus $80 million between 42 and No on 40. But still, that tells you something. I think there’s a real concern among folks who oppose this that, whether it’s a slippery slope in terms of future taxes in California, it is a slippery slope in terms of taxing the wealthy, and that if this can happen in California, it could happen anywhere.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>I think the flip side of that is, if progressives fail at this in California, is that a message nationally that means there isn’t as much of a debate about this in the 2028 Democratic primary, for example?\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>I think the flip side of that is, if progressives fail at this in California, is that a message nationally that means there isn’t as much of a debate about this in the 2028 Democratic primary, for example?\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Right. So there are a couple of things. I want to bring in a couple of things that listeners are saying. Corey writes, “I’m no fan of billionaires. I’m a tax-and-spend liberal, but this just feels like a cash grab. It doesn’t really fix the core problem. Tax how money is earned. Tax capital gains at the same rates as ordinary income. I am out of work, struggling with money, but I’m still not going to vote yes for Prop 40,” says Corey.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Right. So there are a couple of things. I want to bring in a couple of things that listeners are saying. Corey writes, “I’m no fan of billionaires. I’m a tax-and-spend liberal, but this just feels like a cash grab. It doesn’t really fix the core problem. Tax how money is earned. Tax capital gains at the same rates as ordinary income. I am out of work, struggling with money, but I’m still not going to vote yes for Prop 40,” says Corey.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Neil writes, “I’m voting no because it will be another excuse for the legislature to avoid revamping California’s tax system. We’ve known for years that our tax system causes wide variations in revenue on a year-to-year basis, but the legislature doesn’t have the courage to do it.”\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>Neil writes, “I’m voting no because it will be another excuse for the legislature to avoid revamping California’s tax system. We’ve known for years that our tax system causes wide variations in revenue on a year-to-year basis, but the legislature doesn’t have the courage to do it.”\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>So, but the thing is, right, for people who are voting no on 40, it sure doesn’t sound like they should vote yes on 41 and 42, especially if they want the legislature to act. So let’s dig into this. You have touched on 42 several times, Marisa, so just remind us specifically what 42 would do and how it could change the ability of the legislature to do anything similar or better than 40, if that’s what these listeners are suggesting they want in the future.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>So, but the thing is, right, for people who are voting no on 40, it sure doesn’t sound like they should vote yes on 41 and 42, especially if they want the legislature to act. So let’s dig into this. You have touched on 42 several times, Marisa, so just remind us specifically what 42 would do and how it could change the ability of the legislature to do anything similar or better than 40, if that’s what these listeners are suggesting they want in the future.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Marisa Lagos:\u003c/strong> Yeah. So this is a ballot measure that essentially says you may not impose taxes on unrealized capital gains, basically, in any other way than what we have now, which is when you sell these things or take them out of your accounts. So it says stocks, retirement accounts, any asset ownership cannot be subject to state taxes. It also bans retroactive state taxes, which is the second kind of poison pill.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Marisa Lagos:\u003c/strong> Yeah. So this is a ballot measure that essentially says you may not impose taxes on unrealized capital gains, basically, in any other way than what we have now, which is when you sell these things or take them out of your accounts. So it says stocks, retirement accounts, any asset ownership cannot be subject to state taxes. It also bans retroactive state taxes, which is the second kind of poison pill.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>It basically outlaws the type of tax that’s being envisioned under Prop 40, but not just for billionaires — for anybody, longer term. So it does tie the hands of the state legislature, to your point, Mina. And then it bans retroactive state taxes like this one. So it was sort of doubly undercutting Prop 40.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>It basically outlaws the type of tax that’s being envisioned under Prop 40, but not just for billionaires — for anybody, longer term. So it does tie the hands of the state legislature, to your point, Mina. And then it bans retroactive state taxes like this one. So it was sort of doubly undercutting Prop 40.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>The way California law works is that you have two competing ballot measures with conflicting language on the same ballot. The competing ballot measure that gets more votes is basically the one that takes precedence. So you could have a world where Prop 40 passes, but Prop 42 gets more votes, and it essentially nullifies the billionaire tax and the state’s ability to collect it.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>The way California law works is that you have two competing ballot measures with conflicting language on the same ballot. The competing ballot measure that gets more votes is basically the one that takes precedence. So you could have a world where Prop 40 passes, but Prop 42 gets more votes, and it essentially nullifies the billionaire tax and the state’s ability to collect it.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Right. And then remind us, Guy, what 41 does — the other —\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Right. And then remind us, Guy, what 41 does — the other —\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Marisa Lagos:\u003c/strong> Oh, you take the Gann limit, guys.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Marisa Lagos:\u003c/strong> Oh, you take the Gann limit, guys.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Guy Marzorati:\u003c/strong> Another poison pill, yeah, another poison pill measure. This one would disqualify Prop 40 through another route by saying that any type of tax like this has to go under the state spending limit, which is known as the Gann limit. Prop 40 is written in a way that excludes the revenue from the Gann limit, so, again, putting it in direct conflict.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Guy Marzorati:\u003c/strong> Another poison pill, yeah, another poison pill measure. This one would disqualify Prop 40 through another route by saying that any type of tax like this has to go under the state spending limit, which is known as the Gann limit. Prop 40 is written in a way that excludes the revenue from the Gann limit, so, again, putting it in direct conflict.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Now, what Prop 41 does on its face is require new audits for special taxes. I think that’s the pitch being made for it. Really, the purpose behind this is another way to nullify Proposition 40, almost like an insurance policy. If the opponents of Proposition 40 are unable to defeat it at the ballot, they have these two insurance policies in Prop 41 and 42 that, if they also pass, could end up nullifying the wealth tax.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>Now, what Prop 41 does on its face is require new audits for special taxes. I think that’s the pitch being made for it. Really, the purpose behind this is another way to nullify Proposition 40, almost like an insurance policy. If the opponents of Proposition 40 are unable to defeat it at the ballot, they have these two insurance policies in Prop 41 and 42 that, if they also pass, could end up nullifying the wealth tax.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Right, depending on the margin by which they pass. So if all three technically pass, but these other measures get more votes, they would nullify the billionaire tax.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Right, depending on the margin by which they pass. So if all three technically pass, but these other measures get more votes, they would nullify the billionaire tax.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Marisa Lagos:\u003c/strong> I mean, we’re going to be in court no matter what.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Marisa Lagos:\u003c/strong> I mean, we’re going to be in court no matter what.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Yeah. Even if the billionaire tax passed cleanly, for lack of a better way of describing it, we would be in court. But I guess just to put a clear point on this for our listeners: If you are really against the billionaire tax, then you would vote no on 40 and probably yes on 41 and 42.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Yeah. Even if the billionaire tax passed cleanly, for lack of a better way of describing it, we would be in court. But I guess just to put a clear point on this for our listeners: If you are really against the billionaire tax, then you would vote no on 40 and probably yes on 41 and 42.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Marisa Lagos:\u003c/strong> Yeah, but if you’re really —\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Marisa Lagos:\u003c/strong> Yeah, but if you’re really —\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Yeah, but if you’re a really big supporter of the billionaire tax, you’d vote yes on 40 and no on 41 and 42. But if you would like to see anything like this in the future, potentially levies on unrealized capital gains or whatever, but you don’t like the billionaire tax, you’d probably vote no on all three.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Yeah, but if you’re a really big supporter of the billionaire tax, you’d vote yes on 40 and no on 41 and 42. But if you would like to see anything like this in the future, potentially levies on unrealized capital gains or whatever, but you don’t like the billionaire tax, you’d probably vote no on all three.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Guy Marzorati:\u003c/strong> Yeah, and let me tell you a secret: The opponents of Prop 40 would be totally fine if —\u003c/p>\n",
"innerContent": [
"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Guy Marzorati:\u003c/strong> Yeah, and let me tell you a secret: The opponents of Prop 40 would be totally fine if —\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Marisa Lagos:\u003c/strong> No, if all of them went down. They don’t care. They just want to kill 40.\u003c/p>\n",
"innerContent": [
"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Marisa Lagos:\u003c/strong> No, if all of them went down. They don’t care. They just want to kill 40.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> We’ll have more with Marisa Lagos and Guy Marzorati as we really break down the games being played on the ballot with regard to the billionaire tax and the countermeasures to nullify it, but also the high stakes involved. Stay with us for more after the break.\u003c/p>\n",
"innerContent": [
"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> We’ll have more with Marisa Lagos and Guy Marzorati as we really break down the games being played on the ballot with regard to the billionaire tax and the countermeasures to nullify it, but also the high stakes involved. Stay with us for more after the break.\u003c/p>\n"
],
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>I’m Mina Kim. This is \u003cem>Forum\u003c/em>. Welcome back to \u003cem>Forum\u003c/em>. I’m Mina Kim. We’re talking about Prop 40, California’s billionaire tax, and the efforts to nullify it with 41 and 42. Here’s opposition to the billionaire tax from Stanford economist Joshua Rauh, concerned about billionaires leaving California.\u003c/p>\n",
"innerContent": [
"\n\u003cp>I’m Mina Kim. This is \u003cem>Forum\u003c/em>. Welcome back to \u003cem>Forum\u003c/em>. I’m Mina Kim. We’re talking about Prop 40, California’s billionaire tax, and the efforts to nullify it with 41 and 42. Here’s opposition to the billionaire tax from Stanford economist Joshua Rauh, concerned about billionaires leaving California.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Joshua Rauh:\u003c/strong> If you look at where companies like Tesla and Oracle — their CEOs left California at various points in time. Musk left California some years ago. Larry Ellison left in 2020. If you look at where those companies, which still have a presence in California, are growing their jobs, it’s in other states. It’s in Austin, Texas, and Nashville, Tennessee.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Joshua Rauh:\u003c/strong> If you look at where companies like Tesla and Oracle — their CEOs left California at various points in time. Musk left California some years ago. Larry Ellison left in 2020. If you look at where those companies, which still have a presence in California, are growing their jobs, it’s in other states. It’s in Austin, Texas, and Nashville, Tennessee.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>So, much as we might like to shake our head and say, “Gee, we wish that they would just stay and pay these taxes,” it is within their legal rights to leave and go elsewhere. When they do that, it harms our economy. It harms ourselves. That’s what voters really have to ask.\u003c/p>\n",
"innerContent": [
"\n\u003cp>So, much as we might like to shake our head and say, “Gee, we wish that they would just stay and pay these taxes,” it is within their legal rights to leave and go elsewhere. When they do that, it harms our economy. It harms ourselves. That’s what voters really have to ask.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> And we are asking you, voters, how you’re feeling about Prop 40 and 41 and 42, the two countermeasures to the billionaire tax, Prop 40. Also, how you’re talking about it in your circles, in your community; the messages you’re getting from the people who are backers of the measures; and how they’re being understood by you and the people helping you decide how to vote.\u003c/p>\n",
"innerContent": [
"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> And we are asking you, voters, how you’re feeling about Prop 40 and 41 and 42, the two countermeasures to the billionaire tax, Prop 40. Also, how you’re talking about it in your circles, in your community; the messages you’re getting from the people who are backers of the measures; and how they’re being understood by you and the people helping you decide how to vote.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>The email address is \u003ca href=\"mailto:forum@kqed.org\">forum@kqed.org\u003c/a>. Find us on Discord, Bluesky, Facebook, or Instagram at KQED Forum. Call us at 866-733-6786, 866-733-6786.\u003c/p>\n",
"innerContent": [
"\n\u003cp>The email address is \u003ca href=\"mailto:forum@kqed.org\">forum@kqed.org\u003c/a>. Find us on Discord, Bluesky, Facebook, or Instagram at KQED Forum. Call us at 866-733-6786, 866-733-6786.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Marisa Lagos and Guy Marzorati, KQED’s politics correspondents, are here to take your questions and comments. Marisa also co-hosts KQED’s podcast, \u003cem>Political Breakdown\u003c/em>.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>Marisa Lagos and Guy Marzorati, KQED’s politics correspondents, are here to take your questions and comments. Marisa also co-hosts KQED’s podcast, \u003cem>Political Breakdown\u003c/em>.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Mark writes, “While I’m all for the idea behind taxing billionaires and taking away loopholes, I’m a little put off that the benefit would go only to health care rather than California’s general fund. I would have expected it to benefit all Californians, not just a select group.” Who wants to take this one?\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>Mark writes, “While I’m all for the idea behind taxing billionaires and taking away loopholes, I’m a little put off that the benefit would go only to health care rather than California’s general fund. I would have expected it to benefit all Californians, not just a select group.” Who wants to take this one?\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Marisa Lagos:\u003c/strong> Yeah, I think that’s a really interesting point. And I think this is one of many areas of the way this was crafted that raises very interesting questions. We already talked about the one-time nature of it, the retroactivity of it, and then walling it off for health care when it is a one-time tax for something that people obviously need on an ongoing basis and that continues to rise in price. I think that’s a really interesting policy question for folks.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Marisa Lagos:\u003c/strong> Yeah, I think that’s a really interesting point. And I think this is one of many areas of the way this was crafted that raises very interesting questions. We already talked about the one-time nature of it, the retroactivity of it, and then walling it off for health care when it is a one-time tax for something that people obviously need on an ongoing basis and that continues to rise in price. I think that’s a really interesting policy question for folks.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Part of the reason the California Teachers Association is opposed to this is that this money would go into a special account that is essentially walled off from our general fund. Previous ballot measures — Prop 98 in particular — dictate that around 40% of general fund revenues must go to education. So this is money that the teachers see as really not helping broader programs other than health care.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>Part of the reason the California Teachers Association is opposed to this is that this money would go into a special account that is essentially walled off from our general fund. Previous ballot measures — Prop 98 in particular — dictate that around 40% of general fund revenues must go to education. So this is money that the teachers see as really not helping broader programs other than health care.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>And so I think that’s something that has raised a lot of concerns, especially if you believe the governor’s analysis that this could essentially harm state revenues in a meaningful way moving forward. That would harm all our programs, including schools, teachers, all that. So I think that’s something you see in the split. There are certainly a lot of labor groups supporting this, and then there are others that are not. I think that’s because of the way this money is going to be earmarked for something very specific.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>And so I think that’s something that has raised a lot of concerns, especially if you believe the governor’s analysis that this could essentially harm state revenues in a meaningful way moving forward. That would harm all our programs, including schools, teachers, all that. So I think that’s something you see in the split. There are certainly a lot of labor groups supporting this, and then there are others that are not. I think that’s because of the way this money is going to be earmarked for something very specific.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Well, Alvin writes, “Simply declaring that we need a national tax is vague and unconvincing while we are all bleeding to death, some literally, from health care cuts.” That has been the argument of some, including Gavin Newsom, who say, don’t do this at the state level. Do try to do this at the federal level.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Well, Alvin writes, “Simply declaring that we need a national tax is vague and unconvincing while we are all bleeding to death, some literally, from health care cuts.” That has been the argument of some, including Gavin Newsom, who say, don’t do this at the state level. Do try to do this at the federal level.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Alvin goes on to say, “Prop 40 probably does have a hundred flaws, but at least it’s forcing the issue.”\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>Alvin goes on to say, “Prop 40 probably does have a hundred flaws, but at least it’s forcing the issue.”\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Another listener, Curtis, writes, “It’s telling that all the No on 40 ads talk about literally everything but taxing billionaires. It’s clear that the vast majority of Californians want this to pass. The billionaires know this, and instead of making the issue taxing billionaires, they purposely obscure the issue.”\u003c/p>\n",
"innerContent": [
"\n\u003cp>Another listener, Curtis, writes, “It’s telling that all the No on 40 ads talk about literally everything but taxing billionaires. It’s clear that the vast majority of Californians want this to pass. The billionaires know this, and instead of making the issue taxing billionaires, they purposely obscure the issue.”\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>I wouldn’t say it’s just No on 40 that’s avoiding talking about billionaires, but also the countermeasures, 41 and 42, are avoiding it, too.\u003c/p>\n",
"innerContent": [
"\n\u003cp>I wouldn’t say it’s just No on 40 that’s avoiding talking about billionaires, but also the countermeasures, 41 and 42, are avoiding it, too.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Sharon also writes, “I’m getting texts saying Proposition 42 will prevent our retirement savings from being taxed by the state. Is that true?” So what is the messaging that 42 is trying to get across if it’s not, you know, no one taxing us billionaires?\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>Sharon also writes, “I’m getting texts saying Proposition 42 will prevent our retirement savings from being taxed by the state. Is that true?” So what is the messaging that 42 is trying to get across if it’s not, you know, no one taxing us billionaires?\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Guy Marzorati:\u003c/strong> I mean, I think the messaging for 42 is around protecting assets from being taxed beyond income — retirement accounts, stock accounts.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Guy Marzorati:\u003c/strong> I mean, I think the messaging for 42 is around protecting assets from being taxed beyond income — retirement accounts, stock accounts.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> But retirement accounts with a lot of money in them, right?\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> But retirement accounts with a lot of money in them, right?\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Guy Marzorati:\u003c/strong> Yeah, and it’s worth saying also that a lot of that is already exempted in Proposition 40. But I think the point is that the message for Proposition 42 is to appeal to folks who might be concerned about taxes on their stock accounts or their retirement accounts, when really, again, the purpose — the reason why Prop 42 was put on the ballot — was to combat the billionaire wealth tax.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Guy Marzorati:\u003c/strong> Yeah, and it’s worth saying also that a lot of that is already exempted in Proposition 40. But I think the point is that the message for Proposition 42 is to appeal to folks who might be concerned about taxes on their stock accounts or their retirement accounts, when really, again, the purpose — the reason why Prop 42 was put on the ballot — was to combat the billionaire wealth tax.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Let me go to caller Phil in Burlingame. Phil, thanks for waiting. Go ahead.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Let me go to caller Phil in Burlingame. Phil, thanks for waiting. Go ahead.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Phil:\u003c/strong> Well, you know, I thought I voted for it because I’m just so angry at the redistribution of billionaire wealth. But the whole thing is kind of crazy from an ardent capitalist, which means, why haven’t we been taxing them if they’ve been acquiring that? I mean, athletes are getting a hundred million dollars. Boards of directors are giving, you know, hundreds of millions of dollars. Why don’t we just pay no deduction for revenue of, you know, five million dollars, and then people at least get half of the revenue these billionaires have been getting?\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Phil:\u003c/strong> Well, you know, I thought I voted for it because I’m just so angry at the redistribution of billionaire wealth. But the whole thing is kind of crazy from an ardent capitalist, which means, why haven’t we been taxing them if they’ve been acquiring that? I mean, athletes are getting a hundred million dollars. Boards of directors are giving, you know, hundreds of millions of dollars. Why don’t we just pay no deduction for revenue of, you know, five million dollars, and then people at least get half of the revenue these billionaires have been getting?\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>By doing this on the asset side, a previous caller said you don’t even know what these assets are. You have to start getting appraisals, and it is socialist to start taking property away. We have property taxes, but that’s just because it costs us that much to run the property.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>By doing this on the asset side, a previous caller said you don’t even know what these assets are. You have to start getting appraisals, and it is socialist to start taking property away. We have property taxes, but that’s just because it costs us that much to run the property.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Well, Phil, thanks for sharing where you’re at. And I think you are reflecting a lot of that — both the anger at the unfairness of the tax system, but also some concern about how this particularly would be enacted.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Well, Phil, thanks for sharing where you’re at. And I think you are reflecting a lot of that — both the anger at the unfairness of the tax system, but also some concern about how this particularly would be enacted.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Marisa Lagos:\u003c/strong> Yeah, I mean, one of my other favorite data points from that UC Berkeley study — and I want to be clear, it’s written by economists who support this wealth tax, and he’s not a Californian, so he’s not directly affected — is that Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s CEO, at least one year recently took, I think, a $65,000 or $85,000 salary. So he qualified for the child tax credit. Obviously, he’s one of the richest men in the world.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Marisa Lagos:\u003c/strong> Yeah, I mean, one of my other favorite data points from that UC Berkeley study — and I want to be clear, it’s written by economists who support this wealth tax, and he’s not a Californian, so he’s not directly affected — is that Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s CEO, at least one year recently took, I think, a $65,000 or $85,000 salary. So he qualified for the child tax credit. Obviously, he’s one of the richest men in the world.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>But, you know, I think what opponents of Prop 40 say is, “This isn’t fair. We’ve worked within the system, we’ve built our wealth, and it has helped lift up the entire economy.” And what the other side says is, “Well, you have built your wealth and structured it in a way to avoid even the taxes that do exist. This is just a way to make things a little bit more fair.”\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>But, you know, I think what opponents of Prop 40 say is, “This isn’t fair. We’ve worked within the system, we’ve built our wealth, and it has helped lift up the entire economy.” And what the other side says is, “Well, you have built your wealth and structured it in a way to avoid even the taxes that do exist. This is just a way to make things a little bit more fair.”\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>For people whose wealth does grow, even if it’s on paper, almost daily in the stock market, they can essentially afford to help the poorest Californians. So a lot of it, beyond the policy stuff, I think is a really philosophical argument. And I think that caller underscores what a lot of Democratic voters in this state are weighing: Even if I don’t love the details of this policy, do I want to essentially tax the rich? Or is this just a bad move that will set back the progressive movement? I don’t think we know the answer to that question.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>For people whose wealth does grow, even if it’s on paper, almost daily in the stock market, they can essentially afford to help the poorest Californians. So a lot of it, beyond the policy stuff, I think is a really philosophical argument. And I think that caller underscores what a lot of Democratic voters in this state are weighing: Even if I don’t love the details of this policy, do I want to essentially tax the rich? Or is this just a bad move that will set back the progressive movement? I don’t think we know the answer to that question.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Well, Steve on Discord writes, “I’d much rather see us go back to a progressive tax code, eliminating all the loopholes. Everyone pays the same amount on the same slice of income. Higher slices just get taxed at higher rates.” I mean, I think that was, I don’t know, the original intent.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Well, Steve on Discord writes, “I’d much rather see us go back to a progressive tax code, eliminating all the loopholes. Everyone pays the same amount on the same slice of income. Higher slices just get taxed at higher rates.” I mean, I think that was, I don’t know, the original intent.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Guy Marzorati:\u003c/strong> You know, centuries — I don’t know. And we do have that in California. I mean, we have a progressive income tax on income —\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Guy Marzorati:\u003c/strong> You know, centuries — I don’t know. And we do have that in California. I mean, we have a progressive income tax on income —\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Yeah.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Yeah.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Guy Marzorati:\u003c/strong> — and a progressive capital gains tax as well. But, yes, it’s not getting at this kind of wealth.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Guy Marzorati:\u003c/strong> — and a progressive capital gains tax as well. But, yes, it’s not getting at this kind of wealth.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Exactly. Let me go to Dan in Santa Clara. Dan, go ahead.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Exactly. Let me go to Dan in Santa Clara. Dan, go ahead.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Dan:\u003c/strong> Well, hey, great, great topic. I am not an economist. I am a Californian and an American. And I’ve been hearing stuff since 1980 about how, if we just let the rich people do what they do, we’re all going to get a bigger slice of the pie. I’m not seeing it. I’m with the guy from Burlingame. We’ve got to pass this thing and send a message.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Dan:\u003c/strong> Well, hey, great, great topic. I am not an economist. I am a Californian and an American. And I’ve been hearing stuff since 1980 about how, if we just let the rich people do what they do, we’re all going to get a bigger slice of the pie. I’m not seeing it. I’m with the guy from Burlingame. We’ve got to pass this thing and send a message.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Well, Dan, thanks for sharing where you’re at as well. Let me see if I can get Michael in Berkeley on. Michael, you’re on.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Well, Dan, thanks for sharing where you’re at as well. Let me see if I can get Michael in Berkeley on. Michael, you’re on.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Michael:\u003c/strong> Thank you. I listened to the excellent \u003cem>Political Breakdown\u003c/em> show with Marisa and Dave Regan, and he literally indicated that someone has to go first. The point of my raising that is that this conversation about taxation of assets and unrealized gains is already underway, and Prop 40 has brought it to the top of our consciousness.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Michael:\u003c/strong> Thank you. I listened to the excellent \u003cem>Political Breakdown\u003c/em> show with Marisa and Dave Regan, and he literally indicated that someone has to go first. The point of my raising that is that this conversation about taxation of assets and unrealized gains is already underway, and Prop 40 has brought it to the top of our consciousness.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>I’m within ten years or so of retiring, and it scares the death out of me to potentially face future taxes on wealth that has been put away in tax-deferred plans and investments that were not accounted for all along the way. The retroactive nature of potential future taxes is also problematic. No one wants taxes to be retroactive. Taxes increase, not —\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>I’m within ten years or so of retiring, and it scares the death out of me to potentially face future taxes on wealth that has been put away in tax-deferred plans and investments that were not accounted for all along the way. The retroactive nature of potential future taxes is also problematic. No one wants taxes to be retroactive. Taxes increase, not —\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> You voted against it, Michael, I’m assuming, then?\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> You voted against it, Michael, I’m assuming, then?\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Michael:\u003c/strong> I will be voting against it.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Michael:\u003c/strong> I will be voting against it.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> You will be voting against it.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> You will be voting against it.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Marisa Lagos:\u003c/strong> Yeah, I think it’s a valid concern. I mean, we do live in a really high-tax state. People, I think, have a lot of skepticism about our elected leaders and how they’ll respond.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Marisa Lagos:\u003c/strong> Yeah, I think it’s a valid concern. I mean, we do live in a really high-tax state. People, I think, have a lot of skepticism about our elected leaders and how they’ll respond.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>I also think this is why we’re not having what maybe should be the conversation, which is an entirely new tax system. I mean, when you dig into a lot of the data points on both sides of this argument, on the economy side, you sort of realize that we are — I don’t know what analogy you want to use, but we’re on the edges here. We’re not getting to the fundamental problems of the fact that our economy, the way people make money, the way people spend money, has really changed over the last couple hundred years, and we’re not really capturing the true nature of our system in this moment.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>I also think this is why we’re not having what maybe should be the conversation, which is an entirely new tax system. I mean, when you dig into a lot of the data points on both sides of this argument, on the economy side, you sort of realize that we are — I don’t know what analogy you want to use, but we’re on the edges here. We’re not getting to the fundamental problems of the fact that our economy, the way people make money, the way people spend money, has really changed over the last couple hundred years, and we’re not really capturing the true nature of our system in this moment.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Unfortunately, in my mind, it’s a bit of a feedback loop because the harder these types of things can be, the more that scares politicians from taking on hard questions. So there’s not a lot of incentive for either Congress or Sacramento to do what would probably be a really politically difficult thing and start from scratch.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>Unfortunately, in my mind, it’s a bit of a feedback loop because the harder these types of things can be, the more that scares politicians from taking on hard questions. So there’s not a lot of incentive for either Congress or Sacramento to do what would probably be a really politically difficult thing and start from scratch.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> I think Mike in Pittsburgh would underscore your point about needing something entirely different. Mike, go ahead.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> I think Mike in Pittsburgh would underscore your point about needing something entirely different. Mike, go ahead.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mike:\u003c/strong> Hi, good morning, guys. Yeah, so basically, one thing that I’ve not heard at all in this discussion: Rich people don’t pay taxes. They move their assets into trusts, they move them overseas, they move them under a different name, they have loopholes. I don’t understand why we’re not talking about that aspect. You can have whatever tax breaks — if they’re not paying, it doesn’t matter.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mike:\u003c/strong> Hi, good morning, guys. Yeah, so basically, one thing that I’ve not heard at all in this discussion: Rich people don’t pay taxes. They move their assets into trusts, they move them overseas, they move them under a different name, they have loopholes. I don’t understand why we’re not talking about that aspect. You can have whatever tax breaks — if they’re not paying, it doesn’t matter.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Yeah, we actually did detail that in the opening of the segment, but I really appreciate you bringing that back, because that is very much part of this discussion.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Yeah, we actually did detail that in the opening of the segment, but I really appreciate you bringing that back, because that is very much part of this discussion.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Eric writes, “What do California’s billionaires say? I read Jensen Huang is for it, CEO. What do we know about the billionaires who are for it? I know Tom Steyer said yes on the campaign trail.”\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>Eric writes, “What do California’s billionaires say? I read Jensen Huang is for it, CEO. What do we know about the billionaires who are for it? I know Tom Steyer said yes on the campaign trail.”\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Marisa Lagos:\u003c/strong> Those are the only two I know.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Marisa Lagos:\u003c/strong> Those are the only two I know.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> I don’t know if Jensen Huang is for it. I know he just said he’d be fine with it or something like that, and that was very early, before this even qualified for the ballot.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> I don’t know if Jensen Huang is for it. I know he just said he’d be fine with it or something like that, and that was very early, before this even qualified for the ballot.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Marisa Lagos:\u003c/strong> So what we know is that the bulk of them, or at least the ones who have gotten involved, are very much opposed to this. Again, the amount that they have now put into their super PAC, Building a Better California, to oppose this is around $200 million. Almost half that comes from Sergey Brin alone.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Marisa Lagos:\u003c/strong> So what we know is that the bulk of them, or at least the ones who have gotten involved, are very much opposed to this. Again, the amount that they have now put into their super PAC, Building a Better California, to oppose this is around $200 million. Almost half that comes from Sergey Brin alone.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>And they’re not saying very much, I will say. I’m very excited to have Chris Larsen on my show tomorrow, who is, I think, one of the few folks in this class who’s been willing to sit down and answer questions. But when I’ve asked for interviews with every single other person who’s donated to this, there’s just been radio silence. There’s no interest. They’ve put up folks like Josh Rauh from Stanford and others on their behalf to be surrogates.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>And they’re not saying very much, I will say. I’m very excited to have Chris Larsen on my show tomorrow, who is, I think, one of the few folks in this class who’s been willing to sit down and answer questions. But when I’ve asked for interviews with every single other person who’s donated to this, there’s just been radio silence. There’s no interest. They’ve put up folks like Josh Rauh from Stanford and others on their behalf to be surrogates.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Let me remind listeners, you’re listening to \u003cem>Forum\u003c/em>. I’m Mina Kim. What do we know about how these measures are polling — 40, 41, and 42, Guy or Marisa?\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Let me remind listeners, you’re listening to \u003cem>Forum\u003c/em>. I’m Mina Kim. What do we know about how these measures are polling — 40, 41, and 42, Guy or Marisa?\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Marisa Lagos:\u003c/strong> Yeah, IGS put out a poll. This came out on September 25th, so pretty recently. None of them are hitting the 50% threshold on the yes side. Prop 40 is slightly leading, 45% to 42% in that poll, with 13% undecided. So, very close.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Marisa Lagos:\u003c/strong> Yeah, IGS put out a poll. This came out on September 25th, so pretty recently. None of them are hitting the 50% threshold on the yes side. Prop 40 is slightly leading, 45% to 42% in that poll, with 13% undecided. So, very close.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Interestingly to me, Prop 41 only has 37% support. Prop 42 only has 43% support, with big chunks in both still undecided. To me, that says voters are kind of reading the fine print and thinking about those measures not just in a vacuum, based on the arguments proponents are making about retirement accounts or state spending limits, but probably understanding that there’s a link between those measures and the billionaire tax, and that they need to think about that when they cast their ballot.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>Interestingly to me, Prop 41 only has 37% support. Prop 42 only has 43% support, with big chunks in both still undecided. To me, that says voters are kind of reading the fine print and thinking about those measures not just in a vacuum, based on the arguments proponents are making about retirement accounts or state spending limits, but probably understanding that there’s a link between those measures and the billionaire tax, and that they need to think about that when they cast their ballot.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Guy Marzorati:\u003c/strong> And the Public Policy Institute of California had Proposition 40 slightly higher in its September poll, I think just above 50%. The key thing for me is the percentage of Democrats who support this measure in the end. When polling started on this idea of a billionaire wealth tax in the spring and summer, you were looking at seven in 10, three-quarters of Democrats supporting the idea. That slipped, but in both surveys, PPIC had Democrats down to 72%. IGS had them down to 65%. I don’t see a way for this to pass without Democratic support behind this measure hitting 70% or more.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Guy Marzorati:\u003c/strong> And the Public Policy Institute of California had Proposition 40 slightly higher in its September poll, I think just above 50%. The key thing for me is the percentage of Democrats who support this measure in the end. When polling started on this idea of a billionaire wealth tax in the spring and summer, you were looking at seven in 10, three-quarters of Democrats supporting the idea. That slipped, but in both surveys, PPIC had Democrats down to 72%. IGS had them down to 65%. I don’t see a way for this to pass without Democratic support behind this measure hitting 70% or more.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Marisa Lagos:\u003c/strong> It’s not surprising that the younger you are, the more likely you are to support the billionaire tax. I think that tracks with some of the calls we’ve gotten and the concern people have about the longer-term stability of their own accounts, and the state’s policy.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Marisa Lagos:\u003c/strong> It’s not surprising that the younger you are, the more likely you are to support the billionaire tax. I think that tracks with some of the calls we’ve gotten and the concern people have about the longer-term stability of their own accounts, and the state’s policy.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Well, Brenno writes, “Opponents say that wealth taxes in other countries have mostly been repealed because they didn’t work.” Is this true? Guy, you want to start us off on that and tell us whether 40 addresses some of those things, or Marisa?\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Well, Brenno writes, “Opponents say that wealth taxes in other countries have mostly been repealed because they didn’t work.” Is this true? Guy, you want to start us off on that and tell us whether 40 addresses some of those things, or Marisa?\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Guy Marzorati:\u003c/strong> Yeah, I mean, I would just say, on the other-country comparison, I don’t think it makes sense to compare it to a national wealth tax. The idea of moving between states to avoid taxation is just so different from moving between countries. But there are subnational governments that have tried this, both in Switzerland and in Spain.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Guy Marzorati:\u003c/strong> Yeah, I mean, I would just say, on the other-country comparison, I don’t think it makes sense to compare it to a national wealth tax. The idea of moving between states to avoid taxation is just so different from moving between countries. But there are subnational governments that have tried this, both in Switzerland and in Spain.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>When you look at the research related to that, basically, in Switzerland, they compared two different states. Both had made slight cuts to their wealth tax, one larger than the other. They found that the state that made the larger cut had more wealth. In Spain, Madrid is a state that had a zero wealth tax. They found migration there. They also found a lot of avoidance. I think if you take the research —\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>When you look at the research related to that, basically, in Switzerland, they compared two different states. Both had made slight cuts to their wealth tax, one larger than the other. They found that the state that made the larger cut had more wealth. In Spain, Madrid is a state that had a zero wealth tax. They found migration there. They also found a lot of avoidance. I think if you take the research —\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Marisa Lagos:\u003c/strong> I think you can make the argument that the EU is more akin to this. France had a wealth tax and it got repealed, and that’s one thing opponents of Prop 40 use a lot. They say, “Look.” And I think what proponents say is, well, it is easier within the European Union to move your location and business, making it more akin to moving between states. Also, the French one was way broader. It captured millionaires as well, so I think there was more of a revolt because we weren’t talking about people with such exorbitant wealth.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Marisa Lagos:\u003c/strong> I think you can make the argument that the EU is more akin to this. France had a wealth tax and it got repealed, and that’s one thing opponents of Prop 40 use a lot. They say, “Look.” And I think what proponents say is, well, it is easier within the European Union to move your location and business, making it more akin to moving between states. Also, the French one was way broader. It captured millionaires as well, so I think there was more of a revolt because we weren’t talking about people with such exorbitant wealth.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Guy Marzorati:\u003c/strong> And even the ones in Spain and Switzerland were not one-time taxes. So there is no one-to-one comparison you could look at for Prop 40 to say we know exactly how this is going to play out based on other states. But I think if you take the studies on these subnational wealth taxes together, you could conclude that they have an impact on the behavior of billionaires, either moving or trying to avoid the taxes. That in itself is not exactly shocking.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Guy Marzorati:\u003c/strong> And even the ones in Spain and Switzerland were not one-time taxes. So there is no one-to-one comparison you could look at for Prop 40 to say we know exactly how this is going to play out based on other states. But I think if you take the studies on these subnational wealth taxes together, you could conclude that they have an impact on the behavior of billionaires, either moving or trying to avoid the taxes. That in itself is not exactly shocking.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> You know, I feel for our voters, honestly. They have to decide on 40, and then they’ve got 41 and 42 on the ballot as well. And then there are two other tax-related measures on the ballot. You’ve got 3, right? Which is trying to make permanent the state’s higher income tax rate for the top 2% of earners. And then you’ve got 43, which is basically saying that you would need a two-thirds vote to pass any local tax measures for specific services. So there is just really a lot they’re going to have to weigh through this year.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> You know, I feel for our voters, honestly. They have to decide on 40, and then they’ve got 41 and 42 on the ballot as well. And then there are two other tax-related measures on the ballot. You’ve got 3, right? Which is trying to make permanent the state’s higher income tax rate for the top 2% of earners. And then you’ve got 43, which is basically saying that you would need a two-thirds vote to pass any local tax measures for specific services. So there is just really a lot they’re going to have to weigh through this year.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Marisa Lagos:\u003c/strong> Yeah, as always, we have a long ballot that requires a lot of homework by voters. I want to shout out some resources here at KQED: our excellent voter guide, which you can find at kqed.org/voterguide, is going to have all these statewide races and a lot more information about local stuff.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Marisa Lagos:\u003c/strong> Yeah, as always, we have a long ballot that requires a lot of homework by voters. I want to shout out some resources here at KQED: our excellent voter guide, which you can find at kqed.org/voterguide, is going to have all these statewide races and a lot more information about local stuff.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>We’ve also done deep dives on a lot of this on my show, \u003cem>Political Breakdown\u003c/em>. We had folks on both sides of the Prop 43 debate. This is the one that would essentially make it a lot harder to raise local taxes. It’s sponsored by the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association, which, of course, wrote Prop 13 over 40 years ago. So we talked to them, and we talked to somebody on the other side of that.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>We’ve also done deep dives on a lot of this on my show, \u003cem>Political Breakdown\u003c/em>. We had folks on both sides of the Prop 43 debate. This is the one that would essentially make it a lot harder to raise local taxes. It’s sponsored by the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association, which, of course, wrote Prop 13 over 40 years ago. So we talked to them, and we talked to somebody on the other side of that.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>We had Dave Regan on the show about Prop 40. We talked to Josh Rauh, the economist from Stanford on the No on 40 side. I think those conversations get you a little deeper than some of the voter guides and other stuff. So definitely, it’s going to be — yet again. I mean, and the other thing I want to note, we’ve talked about this on this show, Mina, quite recently, but because of how long the ballot is, and because of our system, it’s great to get ahead of the curve and start looking at that ballot now. Try not to wait until the last minute to turn it in, so we can get those votes counted.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>We had Dave Regan on the show about Prop 40. We talked to Josh Rauh, the economist from Stanford on the No on 40 side. I think those conversations get you a little deeper than some of the voter guides and other stuff. So definitely, it’s going to be — yet again. I mean, and the other thing I want to note, we’ve talked about this on this show, Mina, quite recently, but because of how long the ballot is, and because of our system, it’s great to get ahead of the curve and start looking at that ballot now. Try not to wait until the last minute to turn it in, so we can get those votes counted.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Well, thanks so much, Marisa, for your analysis and for being the author of so many of those great resources. And, Guy Marzorati, can’t thank you both enough. Appreciate you, too, Guy.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> And, as always, thanks to our listeners, who bring in such great, thoughtful questions and insights, and really reflect what I think a lot of people are feeling right now in California. You’ve been listening to \u003cem>Forum\u003c/em>. My thanks as well to Ana de Almeida Amaral for producing this. I’m Mina Kim.\u003c/p>\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\n\u003ch2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Airdate: Wednesday, October 14, 2026 at 10 AM\u003c/h2>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>This November, Californians will vote on Proposition 40, a measure that would impose a one-time 5% tax on those whose net worth exceeded $1 billion at the beginning of 2026. While advocates argue it is time for the ultrawealthy to pay a larger share of taxes, opponents argue that Prop. 40 could drive billionaires out of the state and decrease future tax revenue. In this hour we’ll speak with KQED’s political correspondents about Prop. 40 — and the efforts to nullify it through propositions 41 and 42.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Guests:\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n\u003cli>\u003cstrong>Marisa Lagos, \u003c/strong>politics correspondent, KQED; co-host of KQED’s Political Breakdown\u003c/li>\n\n\n\n\u003cli>\u003cstrong>Guy Marzorati, \u003c/strong>Correspondent, KQED’s California Politics and Government Desk\u003c/li>\n\u003c/ul>\n\n\n\n\u003ch2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Episode Transcript\u003c/h2>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cem>\u003cstrong>This is a computer-generated transcript. While our team has reviewed it, there may be errors.\u003c/strong>\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Welcome to \u003cem>Forum\u003c/em>. I’m Mina Kim. Voters are weighing in on what’s been one of the most divisive ballot measures, mainly for Democrats, and that’s Proposition 40, better known as the billionaire tax. The one-time 5% tax on billionaires to fund mainly health care in California may sound simple on its face, but it’s complicated. It’s ignited heated debate and counter-ballot measures, Props 41 and 42, that would nullify the billionaire tax even if it passes. We break it all down this hour with KQED’s political correspondents, Marisa Lagos and Guy Marzorati. Hey, you two.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Guy Marzorati:\u003c/strong> Hey, good morning.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> So let’s first review the nuts and bolts of this. Guy, what does Prop 40 do?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Guy Marzorati:\u003c/strong> So, yeah, a one-time 5% tax on the wealth of billionaires in California, with 90% of the money going toward health care, which could potentially backfill some of the federal cuts to Medicaid, and then 10% going to a mix of education and food assistance. There’s a lot of leeway, if this passes, for the state legislature to decide exactly how that money would get spent.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> So how many billionaires do we have, Guy?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Guy Marzorati:\u003c/strong> Over 200 in California, and that is an argument you’ve heard proponents make as to why this tax could potentially be easy to administer, because you’re working within a limited universe of people to whom this would actually apply, even though that limited universe is made up of folks with lots of money to hire lots of lawyers and potentially drag out enforcement, even if it were to pass.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> And based on where their net worth was on January 1st of this year, right, Marisa?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Marisa Lagos:\u003c/strong> Yeah. So, I mean, this is sort of part of the idea of structuring this by the backers, to avoid some of the pushback they knew would come. One of them was the idea that you could just avoid the tax by moving out of state. So they wrote into this that if you were a resident of California as of January 1st of this year, you are subject to this tax, regardless of whether you’ve moved since then.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Guy Marzorati:\u003c/strong> So if you’re reading it, it’s too late.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Marisa Lagos:\u003c/strong> Exactly. And also, the one-time nature. Now, that will be litigated if it’s passed, because as this was getting on the ballot in December and it was clear that they were moving forward with this, you did see some folks, including Sergey Brin, who’s been, I believe, the biggest single donor to the No on 40 effort, the Google co-founder. He claims that he moved his residency to Reno, Nevada, prior to that January 1st deadline. I would bet that will be litigated by the courts, because the state will say, “No, actually, you still live here.” And there’s been a lot of reporting that he is still in Mountain View every day, working on AI at Google. So, I don’t know. We’ll see. A lot of this might be litigated if it passes. Well, the other question —\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Can be a little confusing — what counts toward this net worth calculation of a billion dollars, Marisa? I mean, the —\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Marisa Lagos:\u003c/strong> The bulk of it is going to be stocks, bonds, assets that are traded in the financial markets and are visible, essentially, because they have to be declared because they’re publicly traded. It also does include artwork, not most real estate, but properties, things like yachts. So, you know, our tax system broadly relies on people to essentially declare what they have — what they made, what they have. Obviously, there’s some, you know, your W-2 is a way the government can check that. But it is the honor system, and this would be no different. Essentially, when you file your taxes next year, there’s going to be a little question: Are you a billionaire? If you check yes, then you need to essentially file an affidavit attached to it, listing your assets. And so that is going to be at least the initial mechanism to sort of decide what the level is at which you would have to pay this tax if you are indeed a billionaire. I think most of us won’t have to worry about anything after checking that no box.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Well, Guy, you mentioned how the money will be allocated. Talk about why so much of it will go to health care. It was really born out of the impacts of Trump’s so-called big, beautiful bill, right?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Guy Marzorati:\u003c/strong> Yeah. So proponents — and this was put on the ballot through a signature campaign by a health care union — have argued that the money is needed to backfill these cuts to Medi-Cal, which is our system of Medicaid in California. You hear two kinds of arguments in support of Proposition 40. One is specifically about what this would fund. So, this idea that Trump and Republicans in Congress passed a bill cutting taxes on many wealthy Americans and cutting Medicaid, the health care safety net, at the same time. The argument is that, by going after the wealth of billionaires, you’d be able to backfill some of these cuts.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>There’s another, I think, broader argument being made in support of Proposition 40, which is that fundamentally, our tax system in California, even as it’s a progressive one, is progressive as it relates to the income tax. So there’s all this wealth that Marisa mentioned in the stock market and privately owned companies that is not being captured through our progressive income tax system. And so you hear both of those arguments being made in support of Prop 40.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Right. Marisa, you actually sat down and spoke with an author of the bill, Dave Regan, head of SEIU-UHW, right? What did he tell you about why SEIU went for the overall wealth tax, and what do we need to understand about the way many billionaires can avoid paying the taxes the rest of us pay?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Marisa Lagos:\u003c/strong> Yeah, I mean, this has been really fascinating to dig into. And, you know, I want to say at the outset that there are very differing views among economists about this tax and basically everything in economics. But what Dave Regan is saying — Regan, excuse me — is that the wealth of billionaires has grown so quickly over, you know, really even just the past 10 years. They actually put out something recently showing that since this campaign started, or in the last few months, these billionaires’ wealth has grown far more than the taxes they would need to pay under this measure.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>What Regan and the economist at UC Berkeley who helped him craft this measure say is that wealthy people, and billionaires especially — because I do think we need to make a distinction between being a millionaire and a billionaire. It is a big difference, right? — structure their wealth in ways that help them avoid taxes. Of course, all of us pay income taxes on the salary we make. UC Berkeley economists point out that Larry Page and Sergey Brin, co-founders of Google, had a three-year period over the last six years or so when they took $1 in income. So they were literally not paying any taxes on income in that way.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Most of them don’t sell their stocks and bonds in order to, say, buy a house, like you or I might need to if we had money in the market and needed to pull it out for something new. They just borrow against those assets, and they essentially qualify for low- or no-interest loans against their own wealth.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And so, yes, I want to be clear: Billionaires still pay a lot of taxes. There’s still money that they have to pay taxes on. Compared to the percentage that normal Americans, even people we would consider pretty wealthy millionaires who work at a lot of these tech companies and do take normal salaries, pay, it just pales in comparison on a percentage level.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And so, you know, Regan and backers of this say, look, inequality has grown hugely. The Trump administration paid for tax cuts for millionaires and billionaires by cutting health care for the poorest Americans. This is just a way to staunch the flow from those health care cuts temporarily while we figure out how, in their argument, to get a Democrat back in the White House, Democrats back in Congress, and reverse these cuts. So it’s really, you know, I think, to them, an argument of fairness. And we can get into what the other side thinks about that, because they have their own fairness arguments, for sure.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Yeah, we definitely will get into that. First, let me remind listeners: We’re talking about Prop 40, California’s so-called billionaire tax, a one-time 5% tax on billionaires’ assets. We’re hearing from Marisa Lagos why it’s on overall wealth versus income, and also from Guy Marzorati. They’re both correspondents on KQED’s politics desk. Marisa’s also co-host of KQED’s podcast, \u003cem>Political Breakdown\u003c/em>.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And you, our listeners, join the conversation. What questions do you have about Prop 40? Or how are you planning to vote on it, and why? Email \u003ca href=\"mailto:forum@kqed.org\">forum@kqed.org\u003c/a>. Find us on Discord, Bluesky, Facebook, or Instagram at KQED Forum. Call us at 866-733-6786, 866-733-6786.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Sharon writes, “There’s so much misinformation out there. It’s hard to know what’s true. I just read yesterday that Prop 40 is not a one-time tax and that it could happen over again, including to non-billionaires. Is this true?” Marisa, you talked to Dave Regan about that. Tell me, how would you answer Sharon’s question?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Marisa Lagos:\u003c/strong> Look, the voters could always go back and approve more taxes, right? And so, like, yes, there’s always the chance that that happens. I think what Sharon’s talking about is really this argument we’re hearing on the No on 40 side, and it relates to some other ballot measures, Props 41 and 42, in particular 42. They’re essentially raising the idea that if this is allowed by voters, you could assess taxes on people’s financial assets before they cash them out.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>So right now we have capital gains, right? If you have a stock and you sell it, you have to pay taxes based on the amount that it increased since you got the stock — what you made off of it. They’re saying that this sort of blows up that system and creates one where you can just tax those assets before they’re really realized. And then, if they can do it to billionaires, that’s going to happen again. I don’t think they’re saying that’s going to happen per se. Again, I think the slippery-slope argument is essentially what they’re making.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>There is some language in there that does allow the legislature, like Guy said, to decide how this money is spent. And when I talk to folks who oppose Prop 40 and support Prop 42, which is one of two competing measures the billionaires put on the ballot in order to invalidate Prop 40 if all of them pass, I think that’s really important. Props 41 and 42 are really aimed at essentially making Prop 40 unenforceable if they pass with more votes than it.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Prop 42 is a strict ban on any taxes on these types of financial assets before they’re cashed out. And so that is why it’s being framed as something to protect your retirement. The 42 folks will say, well, there have been some proposals in the legislature in recent years to potentially tax some retirement accounts, things like that. I’ve never seen a serious conversation about this, and I’ve certainly never seen it move forward. And I don’t think, just in terms of the intentions of the people who wrote Prop 40, that that’s their intention in any way, shape, or form. They’re really focused on trying to save health care, and on doing so by taxing the richest folks in California.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Guy Marzorati:\u003c/strong> I would just quickly say, though, the flip side of that would be history. In so many cases, taxes that are billed as one-time or emergency, or just for this purpose — well, if we get five years down the line and the federal government has not restored its funding for Medi-Cal, then what? I think history would suggest that proponents of this would probably go back for an extension, as proponents of higher income taxes have done in California and are doing this year.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Marisa Lagos:\u003c/strong> For billionaires, likely, right? Yeah.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Guy Marzorati:\u003c/strong> Yeah, as proponents of higher income taxes have done in California and are doing this year.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Right, they are doing that this year. But at the same time, and also on the other side of this, Marisa, there are people — and we are coming up on a break, so just set this idea out there — who have also wondered why it would have to be a one-time tax, or why SEIU decided to pursue this just as a one-time tax as well. So lots of different views about how people feel our tax structure needs to change. We’ll have more after the break.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>I’m Mina Kim. You’re listening to \u003cem>Forum\u003c/em>. We’re talking this hour about Proposition 40, California’s billionaire tax, a one-time 5% tax on billionaires’ assets. Here’s co-author Dave Regan, president of SEIU-UHW, on why an overall wealth tax is needed.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Dave Regan:\u003c/strong> The billionaires in California pay a tiny percentage of their financial holdings in income tax. They pay 2.5%. Seven years ago, in 2019, the aggregate wealth of California billionaires was $700 billion. Today, it’s $2.3 trillion. It has more than tripled in the last seven years. Your wages aren’t tripling. My wages aren’t tripling. I don’t know anybody whose salary is tripling. And 70% of that $2.3 trillion is in publicly traded stocks. When the value of that grows, it’s all beyond the reach of the tax system.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> That’s Regan in conversation with my guest, Marisa Lagos, KQED’s political correspondent and co-host of \u003cem>Political Breakdown\u003c/em>. Also, Guy Marzorati is with us, correspondent on KQED’s California Politics and Government Desk.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And you, our listeners, are joining the conversation with your questions about Prop 40, its countermeasures, and the attempts to nullify it in Props 41 and 42. Tell us how you’re planning to vote on Prop 40, if you already know. You can email \u003ca href=\"mailto:forum@kqed.org\">forum@kqed.org\u003c/a>. Find us on Discord, Bluesky, Facebook, or Instagram at KQED Forum. Call us at 866-733-6786, 866-733-6786.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Guy, before we get into the opposition, remind me: Who are the biggest supporters of Prop 40?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Guy Marzorati:\u003c/strong> So the biggest supporter is SEIU United Healthcare Workers West. That’s the union that organized to get this onto the ballot. They drove the signature-gathering campaign. They’ve been really the largest financial supporter of Proposition 40. And then you also have some leading progressives backing this idea, most notably Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders and, in California, Congressmember Ro Khanna in the South Bay.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Yeah, and the California Democratic Party, right?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Guy Marzorati:\u003c/strong> Yeah. After a contentious vote process, the California Democratic Party is also supporting Proposition 40. And you honestly see a split within organized labor, where there are some unions who have gotten behind it that we can talk about, and others that haven’t. So there’s a split within, you know, the Teamsters and AFSCME. They’ve supported it. The California Teachers Association and the building trades are against it. So a real split in labor as well.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Yeah. Who else is against it? A prominent Democrat, of course, is California Governor Gavin Newsom.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Guy Marzorati:\u003c/strong> Yeah, Governor Gavin Newsom, probably the most notable opponent of Proposition 40. But you’ve also seen a number of state lawmakers oppose it. There’s kind of unified opposition on the Republican side, with the California Republican Party against it. And, yeah, this is an issue that has really divided Democrats within California. Even though you mentioned the state Democratic Party endorsed Proposition 40, we’ve seen some local Democratic parties — one in San Francisco — split with the state. They opposed it. So it’s become a key issue that I would expect, honestly, to extend into the next presidential election, where you’ve seen Democrats really on either side of this.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Yeah. Well, so, Marisa, sum up for me the argument against Prop 40. You already touched on it, but —\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Marisa Lagos:\u003c/strong> Yeah. So, you know, I think there’s a couple of different ones. One is just what we’re hearing from the billionaires themselves and economists who support them: that we essentially rely on private capital to grow our economy, and these guys have most of their wealth not in cash, but in these companies and huge industries that are helping fuel the California economy. They argue that it would essentially be unfair to make them pay taxes on their overall wealth. That’s not the system that has worked, and it will actually create less innovation. It will drive not just billionaires, but potential billionaires, out of state. People who want to found companies will look toward places with lower tax burdens. Essentially, this will have a longer-term effect on the state budget.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>That’s something we hear from someone like Gavin Newsom and some of the labor unions that have joined him in opposing it, like the California Teachers Association, and some other traditionally left-leaning groups like Planned Parenthood, who have also lined up with the governor. They say they’re worried that not only will this never get collected, even if it passes, because it’ll be litigated and you won’t really be able to get the money, but that in the longer term it will essentially have a detrimental effect on the state budget because it will result in less innovation, fewer companies being built here, and therefore a lower tax base overall.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>We do have a progressive tax system, Mina, so it is true that the wealthiest folks do pay the most in terms of income and capital gains taxes.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> The other thing I understand is that at least Hoover Institution research suggests that the tax would not generate the $100 billion that proponents claim it will, and that it could be about $40 billion over five years.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Marisa Lagos:\u003c/strong> Yeah, I mean, they say the actual revenue would be between $55 billion at the top and $46 billion at the bottom. They’re relying on a couple of different things that the proponents of the tax disagree with. So they think, first of all, that someone like Sergey Brin absolutely would not have to pay it. They think there are people who have moved out of state. They’re saying that the proponents fail to exclude residential real estate from the estimates of $100 billion, so that reduces the taxable base. They say the tax’s authors wrongly calculated the number of billionaires in the state.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>I mean, you never know exactly how much money something is going to bring in, right? And so I think, at the end of the day, if you look at the wealth of these 200 billionaires, like, if somebody is worth $200 billion, they’re going to pay $10 billion under this tax. I mean, it’s not nothing, right?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Right. And then on the question of billionaires leaving, Michelle writes, “The billionaires threaten to leave California if Prop 40 passes. Would this be a great loss for California?” While another listener on Bluesky writes, “We forget how desirable California is to live in. People from everywhere around the world want to be here. Maybe some billionaires will leave. There are still plenty of rich people who will stay.”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>So, Guy, is this exodus of billionaires actually happening? There was some reporting that a handful have already left.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Guy Marzorati:\u003c/strong> Yeah, I mean, a handful have left. We really don’t know. We can talk about comparisons to previous wealth taxes internationally, models based on how this would impact California. We simply do not know exactly how this will play out if voters approve Proposition 40 and it’s enacted. Even the proponents of this have called it an experiment. I think there really is no way to run the simulation and figure out how billionaires to whom this would apply actually respond, how many of them will leave, how many will take their businesses with them, and what impact this will have on future founders and startup creators in the state.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Let me go to caller Andy in San Jose, who’s with us. Andy, go ahead. You’re on.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Andy Mattson:\u003c/strong> My name’s Andy Mattson. I’m the chair of CalCPA’s committee on taxation. I work in San Jose as a practicing CPA. I want to clarify one thing: The legislative text indicates that non-publicly traded private-company stock is subject to this tax. So one of the big issues is, if you’re a founder of a company and you get lucky and you’ve got private wealth — paper-company wealth that’s not publicly traded — where do you come up with the cash? That has not been clarified. In fact, RealCon, I believe, had a proposal where the government would loan — the federal government would loan money to pay the —\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Marisa Lagos:\u003c/strong> Can I ask —\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Andy Mattson:\u003c/strong> It’s a problem.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Marisa Lagos:\u003c/strong> Yeah, can I ask you a question? I’m curious, as a CPA. These guys can borrow against that wealth if they want to buy a house or a yacht or a private jet. Could you not do that for a tax? Sorry, I think —\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> We just need to try to get him back. It’s okay.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Marisa Lagos:\u003c/strong> It’s okay. I’m just curious because I think, to me, as a non-billionaire, it’s an interesting question. It seems like there’s always money to invest in new companies, to invest in things that they want to buy. Is that not allowed? Are you not allowed to take out loans to pay taxes?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Andy Mattson:\u003c/strong> Andy? Am I back on now?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> You are now. Thanks.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Andy Mattson:\u003c/strong> Okay. Well, I mean, each situation is different, and it just depends on the relationship between a lender and a person, and a person’s financial situation. So, you know, it just kind of depends. I don’t think you can generalize. I think the other point —\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Marisa Lagos:\u003c/strong> Well, but I’m asking legally. You could —\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Marisa Lagos:\u003c/strong> Well, but I’m asking legally, like, could you legally ask a bank for a loan against your assets?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Guy Marzorati:\u003c/strong> Yeah, but I mean, I guess the flip side of that is that the wealth they have in these companies is based on a valuation. It’s not money that — and I think that’s the flaw with Ro Khanna’s idea of, “Oh, what if the government fronted these founders the money for them to pay the tax?” Well, what happens if the company doesn’t work out? Are we, as the state, now on the hook as an owner for these companies?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>I think it’s an edge case, but in San Francisco, where you have more of these founders than anywhere else, it is an issue. If you founded a company that’s now worth, let’s say, $10 billion, and you own a third of that, you’re going to be on the hook for $150 million or $200 million next year. Do you have that money?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Marisa Lagos:\u003c/strong> Or if you own a sports team, for example. Yeah, but you have —\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Guy Marzorati:\u003c/strong> Yeah, but you have that money right now. I mean, a sports team is printing money, though. So I think there’s that question. I will say that the tax in Proposition 40 does consider this, and there are ways for the tax to be deferred. Based on how much other wealth you have as one of these startup founders, if there are other assets you have that are publicly traded, you could potentially defer what you have to pay to the state. So it could be a situation, like the caller mentions, where all of a sudden one of these founders has a $200 million tax bill, but they might not have to pay that right away in 2027.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> The fact that there are all these unknowns really exemplifies that this is new. California is the first out of the gate, and I think even Dave sort of suggested this is an experiment, right, Marisa?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Marisa Lagos:\u003c/strong> Yeah. I mean, look, there have been calls for many years in this country for not just a wealth tax specifically, but reforms to our tax system to better capture the wealth that has grown. And I do want to underscore that in a way that did not exist when I was growing up. There were no billionaires, right? I mean, it is wild.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>When you look at — I was referring to this earlier — I saw a tweet by Gabriel Zucman, who’s one of the UC Berkeley economists who helped frame and write this measure with SEIU-UHW. He’s saying that basically this wealth tax would bring Silicon Valley billionaires’ wealth back to where it was 31 days ago, because of how exponentially — and again, the wealth on paper is growing.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>So I think, you know, I’ve been working on some reporting on this and talking to progressives, and they do see this as a test case for a national wealth tax. They would prefer it happen at the national level, just the way the governor says he would, because it wouldn’t allow people to move between states. It could be structured differently so that maybe it takes into account some of these issues. But, yeah, what Regan says is our system is not working, and we’re trying something new to help the people who are going to suffer the most in the coming years.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And I think you can argue maybe all legislation is somewhat of an experiment. This one is certainly something that has not happened in the U.S. before in really any way, shape, or form.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Guy Marzorati:\u003c/strong> And that’s why this feels like such a big one, right? It’s like once in a generation in California, it feels like we have these ballot measures —\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Marisa Lagos:\u003c/strong> Like Prop 13, like, yeah.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Guy Marzorati:\u003c/strong> — that are a political earthquake, where the rest of the country wakes up the morning after the election and is like, “Why are the glasses and plates on the ground?” And I think the fact that this could be a test case going forward for Democrats, and the fact that you have this collision of incredible inequality with this incredible growth in Silicon Valley and artificial intelligence, is why, to Marisa’s point, there is so much at stake with this. It’s why it feels like, for the Democratic Party, for Silicon Valley, for the folks who could potentially gain from this, and for Gavin Newsom, there’s a reason this feels like the main event.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Marisa Lagos:\u003c/strong> But from a political perspective, it’s fascinating to me that the backers wrote this specifically to be a one-time tax to avoid some of the attacks they’re getting, and it doesn’t matter. It’s not happening anyway. And if you look at the way this campaign is going, the folks opposing Prop 40 have actually put more money into supporting Prop 42 — that’s the ballot measure that prohibits any taxes on retirement accounts and things in the stock market — than they have into No on 40. I think it’s $100 million versus $80 million between 42 and No on 40. But still, that tells you something. I think there’s a real concern among folks who oppose this that, whether it’s a slippery slope in terms of future taxes in California, it is a slippery slope in terms of taxing the wealthy, and that if this can happen in California, it could happen anywhere.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>I think the flip side of that is, if progressives fail at this in California, is that a message nationally that means there isn’t as much of a debate about this in the 2028 Democratic primary, for example?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Right. So there are a couple of things. I want to bring in a couple of things that listeners are saying. Corey writes, “I’m no fan of billionaires. I’m a tax-and-spend liberal, but this just feels like a cash grab. It doesn’t really fix the core problem. Tax how money is earned. Tax capital gains at the same rates as ordinary income. I am out of work, struggling with money, but I’m still not going to vote yes for Prop 40,” says Corey.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Neil writes, “I’m voting no because it will be another excuse for the legislature to avoid revamping California’s tax system. We’ve known for years that our tax system causes wide variations in revenue on a year-to-year basis, but the legislature doesn’t have the courage to do it.”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>So, but the thing is, right, for people who are voting no on 40, it sure doesn’t sound like they should vote yes on 41 and 42, especially if they want the legislature to act. So let’s dig into this. You have touched on 42 several times, Marisa, so just remind us specifically what 42 would do and how it could change the ability of the legislature to do anything similar or better than 40, if that’s what these listeners are suggesting they want in the future.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Marisa Lagos:\u003c/strong> Yeah. So this is a ballot measure that essentially says you may not impose taxes on unrealized capital gains, basically, in any other way than what we have now, which is when you sell these things or take them out of your accounts. So it says stocks, retirement accounts, any asset ownership cannot be subject to state taxes. It also bans retroactive state taxes, which is the second kind of poison pill.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>It basically outlaws the type of tax that’s being envisioned under Prop 40, but not just for billionaires — for anybody, longer term. So it does tie the hands of the state legislature, to your point, Mina. And then it bans retroactive state taxes like this one. So it was sort of doubly undercutting Prop 40.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>The way California law works is that you have two competing ballot measures with conflicting language on the same ballot. The competing ballot measure that gets more votes is basically the one that takes precedence. So you could have a world where Prop 40 passes, but Prop 42 gets more votes, and it essentially nullifies the billionaire tax and the state’s ability to collect it.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Right. And then remind us, Guy, what 41 does — the other —\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Marisa Lagos:\u003c/strong> Oh, you take the Gann limit, guys.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Guy Marzorati:\u003c/strong> Another poison pill, yeah, another poison pill measure. This one would disqualify Prop 40 through another route by saying that any type of tax like this has to go under the state spending limit, which is known as the Gann limit. Prop 40 is written in a way that excludes the revenue from the Gann limit, so, again, putting it in direct conflict.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Now, what Prop 41 does on its face is require new audits for special taxes. I think that’s the pitch being made for it. Really, the purpose behind this is another way to nullify Proposition 40, almost like an insurance policy. If the opponents of Proposition 40 are unable to defeat it at the ballot, they have these two insurance policies in Prop 41 and 42 that, if they also pass, could end up nullifying the wealth tax.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Right, depending on the margin by which they pass. So if all three technically pass, but these other measures get more votes, they would nullify the billionaire tax.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Marisa Lagos:\u003c/strong> I mean, we’re going to be in court no matter what.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Yeah. Even if the billionaire tax passed cleanly, for lack of a better way of describing it, we would be in court. But I guess just to put a clear point on this for our listeners: If you are really against the billionaire tax, then you would vote no on 40 and probably yes on 41 and 42.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Marisa Lagos:\u003c/strong> Yeah, but if you’re really —\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Yeah, but if you’re a really big supporter of the billionaire tax, you’d vote yes on 40 and no on 41 and 42. But if you would like to see anything like this in the future, potentially levies on unrealized capital gains or whatever, but you don’t like the billionaire tax, you’d probably vote no on all three.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Guy Marzorati:\u003c/strong> Yeah, and let me tell you a secret: The opponents of Prop 40 would be totally fine if —\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Marisa Lagos:\u003c/strong> No, if all of them went down. They don’t care. They just want to kill 40.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> We’ll have more with Marisa Lagos and Guy Marzorati as we really break down the games being played on the ballot with regard to the billionaire tax and the countermeasures to nullify it, but also the high stakes involved. Stay with us for more after the break.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>I’m Mina Kim. This is \u003cem>Forum\u003c/em>. Welcome back to \u003cem>Forum\u003c/em>. I’m Mina Kim. We’re talking about Prop 40, California’s billionaire tax, and the efforts to nullify it with 41 and 42. Here’s opposition to the billionaire tax from Stanford economist Joshua Rauh, concerned about billionaires leaving California.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Joshua Rauh:\u003c/strong> If you look at where companies like Tesla and Oracle — their CEOs left California at various points in time. Musk left California some years ago. Larry Ellison left in 2020. If you look at where those companies, which still have a presence in California, are growing their jobs, it’s in other states. It’s in Austin, Texas, and Nashville, Tennessee.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>So, much as we might like to shake our head and say, “Gee, we wish that they would just stay and pay these taxes,” it is within their legal rights to leave and go elsewhere. When they do that, it harms our economy. It harms ourselves. That’s what voters really have to ask.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> And we are asking you, voters, how you’re feeling about Prop 40 and 41 and 42, the two countermeasures to the billionaire tax, Prop 40. Also, how you’re talking about it in your circles, in your community; the messages you’re getting from the people who are backers of the measures; and how they’re being understood by you and the people helping you decide how to vote.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>The email address is \u003ca href=\"mailto:forum@kqed.org\">forum@kqed.org\u003c/a>. Find us on Discord, Bluesky, Facebook, or Instagram at KQED Forum. Call us at 866-733-6786, 866-733-6786.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Marisa Lagos and Guy Marzorati, KQED’s politics correspondents, are here to take your questions and comments. Marisa also co-hosts KQED’s podcast, \u003cem>Political Breakdown\u003c/em>.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Mark writes, “While I’m all for the idea behind taxing billionaires and taking away loopholes, I’m a little put off that the benefit would go only to health care rather than California’s general fund. I would have expected it to benefit all Californians, not just a select group.” Who wants to take this one?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Marisa Lagos:\u003c/strong> Yeah, I think that’s a really interesting point. And I think this is one of many areas of the way this was crafted that raises very interesting questions. We already talked about the one-time nature of it, the retroactivity of it, and then walling it off for health care when it is a one-time tax for something that people obviously need on an ongoing basis and that continues to rise in price. I think that’s a really interesting policy question for folks.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Part of the reason the California Teachers Association is opposed to this is that this money would go into a special account that is essentially walled off from our general fund. Previous ballot measures — Prop 98 in particular — dictate that around 40% of general fund revenues must go to education. So this is money that the teachers see as really not helping broader programs other than health care.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And so I think that’s something that has raised a lot of concerns, especially if you believe the governor’s analysis that this could essentially harm state revenues in a meaningful way moving forward. That would harm all our programs, including schools, teachers, all that. So I think that’s something you see in the split. There are certainly a lot of labor groups supporting this, and then there are others that are not. I think that’s because of the way this money is going to be earmarked for something very specific.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Well, Alvin writes, “Simply declaring that we need a national tax is vague and unconvincing while we are all bleeding to death, some literally, from health care cuts.” That has been the argument of some, including Gavin Newsom, who say, don’t do this at the state level. Do try to do this at the federal level.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Alvin goes on to say, “Prop 40 probably does have a hundred flaws, but at least it’s forcing the issue.”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Another listener, Curtis, writes, “It’s telling that all the No on 40 ads talk about literally everything but taxing billionaires. It’s clear that the vast majority of Californians want this to pass. The billionaires know this, and instead of making the issue taxing billionaires, they purposely obscure the issue.”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>I wouldn’t say it’s just No on 40 that’s avoiding talking about billionaires, but also the countermeasures, 41 and 42, are avoiding it, too.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Sharon also writes, “I’m getting texts saying Proposition 42 will prevent our retirement savings from being taxed by the state. Is that true?” So what is the messaging that 42 is trying to get across if it’s not, you know, no one taxing us billionaires?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Guy Marzorati:\u003c/strong> I mean, I think the messaging for 42 is around protecting assets from being taxed beyond income — retirement accounts, stock accounts.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> But retirement accounts with a lot of money in them, right?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Guy Marzorati:\u003c/strong> Yeah, and it’s worth saying also that a lot of that is already exempted in Proposition 40. But I think the point is that the message for Proposition 42 is to appeal to folks who might be concerned about taxes on their stock accounts or their retirement accounts, when really, again, the purpose — the reason why Prop 42 was put on the ballot — was to combat the billionaire wealth tax.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Let me go to caller Phil in Burlingame. Phil, thanks for waiting. Go ahead.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Phil:\u003c/strong> Well, you know, I thought I voted for it because I’m just so angry at the redistribution of billionaire wealth. But the whole thing is kind of crazy from an ardent capitalist, which means, why haven’t we been taxing them if they’ve been acquiring that? I mean, athletes are getting a hundred million dollars. Boards of directors are giving, you know, hundreds of millions of dollars. Why don’t we just pay no deduction for revenue of, you know, five million dollars, and then people at least get half of the revenue these billionaires have been getting?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>By doing this on the asset side, a previous caller said you don’t even know what these assets are. You have to start getting appraisals, and it is socialist to start taking property away. We have property taxes, but that’s just because it costs us that much to run the property.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Well, Phil, thanks for sharing where you’re at. And I think you are reflecting a lot of that — both the anger at the unfairness of the tax system, but also some concern about how this particularly would be enacted.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Marisa Lagos:\u003c/strong> Yeah, I mean, one of my other favorite data points from that UC Berkeley study — and I want to be clear, it’s written by economists who support this wealth tax, and he’s not a Californian, so he’s not directly affected — is that Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s CEO, at least one year recently took, I think, a $65,000 or $85,000 salary. So he qualified for the child tax credit. Obviously, he’s one of the richest men in the world.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>But, you know, I think what opponents of Prop 40 say is, “This isn’t fair. We’ve worked within the system, we’ve built our wealth, and it has helped lift up the entire economy.” And what the other side says is, “Well, you have built your wealth and structured it in a way to avoid even the taxes that do exist. This is just a way to make things a little bit more fair.”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>For people whose wealth does grow, even if it’s on paper, almost daily in the stock market, they can essentially afford to help the poorest Californians. So a lot of it, beyond the policy stuff, I think is a really philosophical argument. And I think that caller underscores what a lot of Democratic voters in this state are weighing: Even if I don’t love the details of this policy, do I want to essentially tax the rich? Or is this just a bad move that will set back the progressive movement? I don’t think we know the answer to that question.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Well, Steve on Discord writes, “I’d much rather see us go back to a progressive tax code, eliminating all the loopholes. Everyone pays the same amount on the same slice of income. Higher slices just get taxed at higher rates.” I mean, I think that was, I don’t know, the original intent.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Guy Marzorati:\u003c/strong> You know, centuries — I don’t know. And we do have that in California. I mean, we have a progressive income tax on income —\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Yeah.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Guy Marzorati:\u003c/strong> — and a progressive capital gains tax as well. But, yes, it’s not getting at this kind of wealth.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Exactly. Let me go to Dan in Santa Clara. Dan, go ahead.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Dan:\u003c/strong> Well, hey, great, great topic. I am not an economist. I am a Californian and an American. And I’ve been hearing stuff since 1980 about how, if we just let the rich people do what they do, we’re all going to get a bigger slice of the pie. I’m not seeing it. I’m with the guy from Burlingame. We’ve got to pass this thing and send a message.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Well, Dan, thanks for sharing where you’re at as well. Let me see if I can get Michael in Berkeley on. Michael, you’re on.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Michael:\u003c/strong> Thank you. I listened to the excellent \u003cem>Political Breakdown\u003c/em> show with Marisa and Dave Regan, and he literally indicated that someone has to go first. The point of my raising that is that this conversation about taxation of assets and unrealized gains is already underway, and Prop 40 has brought it to the top of our consciousness.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>I’m within ten years or so of retiring, and it scares the death out of me to potentially face future taxes on wealth that has been put away in tax-deferred plans and investments that were not accounted for all along the way. The retroactive nature of potential future taxes is also problematic. No one wants taxes to be retroactive. Taxes increase, not —\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> You voted against it, Michael, I’m assuming, then?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Michael:\u003c/strong> I will be voting against it.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> You will be voting against it.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Marisa Lagos:\u003c/strong> Yeah, I think it’s a valid concern. I mean, we do live in a really high-tax state. People, I think, have a lot of skepticism about our elected leaders and how they’ll respond.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>I also think this is why we’re not having what maybe should be the conversation, which is an entirely new tax system. I mean, when you dig into a lot of the data points on both sides of this argument, on the economy side, you sort of realize that we are — I don’t know what analogy you want to use, but we’re on the edges here. We’re not getting to the fundamental problems of the fact that our economy, the way people make money, the way people spend money, has really changed over the last couple hundred years, and we’re not really capturing the true nature of our system in this moment.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Unfortunately, in my mind, it’s a bit of a feedback loop because the harder these types of things can be, the more that scares politicians from taking on hard questions. So there’s not a lot of incentive for either Congress or Sacramento to do what would probably be a really politically difficult thing and start from scratch.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> I think Mike in Pittsburgh would underscore your point about needing something entirely different. Mike, go ahead.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mike:\u003c/strong> Hi, good morning, guys. Yeah, so basically, one thing that I’ve not heard at all in this discussion: Rich people don’t pay taxes. They move their assets into trusts, they move them overseas, they move them under a different name, they have loopholes. I don’t understand why we’re not talking about that aspect. You can have whatever tax breaks — if they’re not paying, it doesn’t matter.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Yeah, we actually did detail that in the opening of the segment, but I really appreciate you bringing that back, because that is very much part of this discussion.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Eric writes, “What do California’s billionaires say? I read Jensen Huang is for it, CEO. What do we know about the billionaires who are for it? I know Tom Steyer said yes on the campaign trail.”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Marisa Lagos:\u003c/strong> Those are the only two I know.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> I don’t know if Jensen Huang is for it. I know he just said he’d be fine with it or something like that, and that was very early, before this even qualified for the ballot.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Marisa Lagos:\u003c/strong> So what we know is that the bulk of them, or at least the ones who have gotten involved, are very much opposed to this. Again, the amount that they have now put into their super PAC, Building a Better California, to oppose this is around $200 million. Almost half that comes from Sergey Brin alone.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And they’re not saying very much, I will say. I’m very excited to have Chris Larsen on my show tomorrow, who is, I think, one of the few folks in this class who’s been willing to sit down and answer questions. But when I’ve asked for interviews with every single other person who’s donated to this, there’s just been radio silence. There’s no interest. They’ve put up folks like Josh Rauh from Stanford and others on their behalf to be surrogates.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Let me remind listeners, you’re listening to \u003cem>Forum\u003c/em>. I’m Mina Kim. What do we know about how these measures are polling — 40, 41, and 42, Guy or Marisa?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Marisa Lagos:\u003c/strong> Yeah, IGS put out a poll. This came out on September 25th, so pretty recently. None of them are hitting the 50% threshold on the yes side. Prop 40 is slightly leading, 45% to 42% in that poll, with 13% undecided. So, very close.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Interestingly to me, Prop 41 only has 37% support. Prop 42 only has 43% support, with big chunks in both still undecided. To me, that says voters are kind of reading the fine print and thinking about those measures not just in a vacuum, based on the arguments proponents are making about retirement accounts or state spending limits, but probably understanding that there’s a link between those measures and the billionaire tax, and that they need to think about that when they cast their ballot.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Guy Marzorati:\u003c/strong> And the Public Policy Institute of California had Proposition 40 slightly higher in its September poll, I think just above 50%. The key thing for me is the percentage of Democrats who support this measure in the end. When polling started on this idea of a billionaire wealth tax in the spring and summer, you were looking at seven in 10, three-quarters of Democrats supporting the idea. That slipped, but in both surveys, PPIC had Democrats down to 72%. IGS had them down to 65%. I don’t see a way for this to pass without Democratic support behind this measure hitting 70% or more.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Marisa Lagos:\u003c/strong> It’s not surprising that the younger you are, the more likely you are to support the billionaire tax. I think that tracks with some of the calls we’ve gotten and the concern people have about the longer-term stability of their own accounts, and the state’s policy.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Well, Brenno writes, “Opponents say that wealth taxes in other countries have mostly been repealed because they didn’t work.” Is this true? Guy, you want to start us off on that and tell us whether 40 addresses some of those things, or Marisa?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Guy Marzorati:\u003c/strong> Yeah, I mean, I would just say, on the other-country comparison, I don’t think it makes sense to compare it to a national wealth tax. The idea of moving between states to avoid taxation is just so different from moving between countries. But there are subnational governments that have tried this, both in Switzerland and in Spain.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>When you look at the research related to that, basically, in Switzerland, they compared two different states. Both had made slight cuts to their wealth tax, one larger than the other. They found that the state that made the larger cut had more wealth. In Spain, Madrid is a state that had a zero wealth tax. They found migration there. They also found a lot of avoidance. I think if you take the research —\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Marisa Lagos:\u003c/strong> I think you can make the argument that the EU is more akin to this. France had a wealth tax and it got repealed, and that’s one thing opponents of Prop 40 use a lot. They say, “Look.” And I think what proponents say is, well, it is easier within the European Union to move your location and business, making it more akin to moving between states. Also, the French one was way broader. It captured millionaires as well, so I think there was more of a revolt because we weren’t talking about people with such exorbitant wealth.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Guy Marzorati:\u003c/strong> And even the ones in Spain and Switzerland were not one-time taxes. So there is no one-to-one comparison you could look at for Prop 40 to say we know exactly how this is going to play out based on other states. But I think if you take the studies on these subnational wealth taxes together, you could conclude that they have an impact on the behavior of billionaires, either moving or trying to avoid the taxes. That in itself is not exactly shocking.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> You know, I feel for our voters, honestly. They have to decide on 40, and then they’ve got 41 and 42 on the ballot as well. And then there are two other tax-related measures on the ballot. You’ve got 3, right? Which is trying to make permanent the state’s higher income tax rate for the top 2% of earners. And then you’ve got 43, which is basically saying that you would need a two-thirds vote to pass any local tax measures for specific services. So there is just really a lot they’re going to have to weigh through this year.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Marisa Lagos:\u003c/strong> Yeah, as always, we have a long ballot that requires a lot of homework by voters. I want to shout out some resources here at KQED: our excellent voter guide, which you can find at kqed.org/voterguide, is going to have all these statewide races and a lot more information about local stuff.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>We’ve also done deep dives on a lot of this on my show, \u003cem>Political Breakdown\u003c/em>. We had folks on both sides of the Prop 43 debate. This is the one that would essentially make it a lot harder to raise local taxes. It’s sponsored by the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association, which, of course, wrote Prop 13 over 40 years ago. So we talked to them, and we talked to somebody on the other side of that.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>We had Dave Regan on the show about Prop 40. We talked to Josh Rauh, the economist from Stanford on the No on 40 side. I think those conversations get you a little deeper than some of the voter guides and other stuff. So definitely, it’s going to be — yet again. I mean, and the other thing I want to note, we’ve talked about this on this show, Mina, quite recently, but because of how long the ballot is, and because of our system, it’s great to get ahead of the curve and start looking at that ballot now. Try not to wait until the last minute to turn it in, so we can get those votes counted.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Well, thanks so much, Marisa, for your analysis and for being the author of so many of those great resources. And, Guy Marzorati, can’t thank you both enough. Appreciate you, too, Guy.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Guy Marzorati:\u003c/strong> Yeah, thanks.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Marisa Lagos:\u003c/strong> Thanks so much.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> And, as always, thanks to our listeners, who bring in such great, thoughtful questions and insights, and really reflect what I think a lot of people are feeling right now in California. You’ve been listening to \u003cem>Forum\u003c/em>. My thanks as well to Ana de Almeida Amaral for producing this. I’m Mina Kim.\u003c/p>\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"content": "\n\u003ch2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Airdate: Wednesday, October 7, 2026 at 10 AM\u003c/h2>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>The California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA), which requires most proposed public and private development projects to go through a thorough environmental impact review process, has long been blamed for slowing or stopping the development of new construction in the state. This November, Californians will vote on Proposition 45, which attempts to streamline CEQA review for certain “essential” projects. We’ll look at how changes could impact housing, data centers and more.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Guests:\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n\u003cli>\u003cstrong>Ethan Elkind,\u003c/strong> director of the Climate Program at the Center for Law, Energy and the Environment, UC Berkeley School of Law; podcast host, Climate Break\u003c/li>\n\n\n\n\u003cli>\u003cstrong>Jason Elliott,\u003c/strong> president, Versus Solutions; former deputy chief of staff to Governor Gavin Newsom, helped craft Prop 45\u003c/li>\n\n\n\n\u003cli>\u003cstrong>Jordan Grimes,\u003c/strong> legislative director, Greenbelt Alliance\u003c/li>\n\u003c/ul>\n\n\n\n\u003ch2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Episode Transcript\u003c/h2>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cem>\u003cstrong>This is a computer-generated transcript. While our team has reviewed it, there may be errors.\u003c/strong>\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Laura Klivans:\u003c/strong> Welcome to \u003cem>Forum\u003c/em>. I’m Laura Klivans in for Mina Kim. When then-Governor Ronald Reagan signed the California Environmental Quality Act in 1970, it was meant to keep bulldozers from tearing up sensitive ecosystems. Fifty-six years later, CEQA is one of the most fiercely debated laws in the state. Its champions say it gives marginalized communities a means to stop harmful development. Critics say it’s been weaponized to block housing and drive up costs.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>For decades, politicians wouldn’t go near CEQA reform, but as California’s housing crisis has deepened and clean energy projects must roll out at a faster pace, the calculation has shifted. Legislation passed last year made huge changes to the law, and this year, potentially more could come in the form of Proposition 45.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>We’re going to hear from the people who’ve brought this initiative and those who oppose it, and we’ll talk about how unexpected players — data centers — have entered the conversation. But first, we’re joined by Ethan Elkind, Director of the Climate Program at UC Berkeley Center for Law, Energy, and the Environment. Welcome, Ethan.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Ethan Elkind:\u003c/strong> Thank you, Laura. Good to be with you.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Laura Klivans:\u003c/strong> Well, thanks for joining us, Ethan. I’ve spoken to you a lot. I’m a climate reporter here at KQED. Today we are talking about CEQA, which is, of course, the California Environmental Quality Act. Tell us, what is actually in this? What does it mean?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Ethan Elkind:\u003c/strong> Yes. Well, as you mentioned, it was signed by Ronald Reagan, and it was originally just proposed to apply to major public infrastructure projects. And the point of the law was to require decision-makers, in advance of deciding on a big project, to figure out what are the likely environmental impacts of that project. And if there are significant negative environmental impacts, then decision-makers would have to mitigate those impacts if it’s feasible to do so.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Now, if it is not feasible, the project is just going to have a lot of impacts and there’s nothing you can really do, then the project could proceed. But basically, it was a way to inform decision-makers and inform the public about the project’s scope of impacts, and also potential alternatives to the project.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Now, the courts have dramatically expanded it. And there was a big decision in 1972 that basically said now all projects that require some sort of public approval, which is basically all projects, now have to go through the CEQA process. So it has been greatly expanded by the courts based on what Ronald Reagan thought he was signing — I’m assuming what he thought he was signing in 1970.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Laura Klivans:\u003c/strong> So it started out as something that’s like, this is about, you know, dams. And then now it’s like, this is about your neighbor’s house.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Ethan Elkind:\u003c/strong> Yes, although many projects are exempt or face very streamlined review. Now, the biggest projects have to undergo what’s called an environmental impact report. And these can be like multiple phone-book-sized documents that look at all types of impacts. But that’s really just a very small percentage of projects.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And then once those environmental impact reports come out, and really almost all steps in the process of CEQA, there’s opportunities for the public to sue if they feel like decision-makers have done an inadequate job in analyzing those impacts. And that’s really where a lot of the controversy around CEQA has come into play, that it provides members of the public with opportunities to have pretty extreme leverage in some cases over particularly large projects.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Laura Klivans:\u003c/strong> And so talk me through that. CEQA has been criticized for stunting development. So take us through the process of what a developer actually must do to comply with it.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Ethan Elkind:\u003c/strong> Well, like I say, it really depends on how big the project is. Many projects are completely exempt. If a project just has a very narrow set of likely impacts, then often it’s very easy to just come up with some simple mitigation measures, and then the developer can move forward.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>But for big projects that have a lot of impacts — think of, like, a big industrial project, maybe a large subdivision out on green space, farmland, maybe transmission lines, logging projects, et cetera. Those kinds of projects have multiple types of impacts. They’ll impact the air quality, they’ll impact endangered species habitat, they will impact noise, visual aesthetics, archaeological resources, historical resources. All of these types of impacts have to be analyzed for these large projects and mitigated where feasible.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And at that point, the public, if there’s maybe an economic competitor, if they’re neighbors, uh… There’s environmental groups — they have the ability to sue if those impacts are not analyzed properly and the mitigation measures aren’t adequate, uh… And so that’s really where the leverage comes into play, and it’s often at the very end of the process when a developer’s already sort of lined up a lot of their financing, figured out where legally they’re allowed to proceed under the land-use laws.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And so for developers, for industry, they hate this law because it injects a huge amount of uncertainty really right at the end of the process. And by delaying projects, that costs money. I mean, time is money for developers. And while the law is not meant to stop any projects, it can effectively do so if there’s litigation that draws out the timelines by many years.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Laura Klivans:\u003c/strong> Okay. And then, so how long does CEQA review actually take in some of those instances? On average, maybe, and then in the worst-case scenarios.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Ethan Elkind:\u003c/strong> Yeah, I haven’t really looked at the data on this. I mean, anecdotally, what you hear is that if it does go to an environmental impact report and is litigated, it can take a couple of years sometimes. I mean, in some cases, there have been some high-profile cases that have lasted decades. Those are very controversial, very large projects. And usually, there’s other factors involved. But I would guess that’s probably a year or two to resolve.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Laura Klivans:\u003c/strong> And then CEQA — you know, we see CEQA come up again for folks who are just tuning in, the California Environmental Quality Act. So Ethan Elkind, people are often critical of CEQA saying, like, look at what happened at Berkeley with student housing. Can you sort of spell out what was that example for us, and what is — how common is that kind of thing to happen?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Ethan Elkind:\u003c/strong> Well, this is the issue that there are these high-profile lawsuits that just look kind of ridiculous on their face, and then people throw up their hands and say CEQA is being abused and it really should go away.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>So in this particular case, you had student housing proposed at People’s Park in Berkeley, and the courts ruled that essentially students were an environmental impact. I mean, I’m sort of saying this a little superficially here, but the result of it was to hold up a really badly needed student housing project that the university wanted to move forward on.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And the legislature immediately stepped in in response to the negative publicity, and they amended the law in an emergency statute so that it would go into effect right away instead of in the next year to overrule what the court had decided.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>But in reality, there are less than 200 lawsuits a year. This has been very well tracked by multiple sources. So litigation is actually quite infrequent. But when it does happen, it makes a lot of headlines. And so you get a sort of anecdotally driven debate on CEQA. We’re not really looking at the actual numbers, which are quite rare.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Although I will say that the threat of lawsuits is very — has a really chilling effect. It’s a big deterrent for a lot of developers. A lot of developers I spoke to, if they think there’s any risk of a CEQA lawsuit for a project, they won’t move forward. They’ll choose a different area or they’ll design the project differently. So even though litigation is rare, I do acknowledge that it has a chilling effect on a lot of developers.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Laura Klivans:\u003c/strong> Okay.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>So now let’s talk about Prop 45. Californians are going to see that on our ballots this year. If you’ve already received yours in the mail, it’s right there. What is Prop 45 proposing?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Ethan Elkind:\u003c/strong> Well, Prop 45 would dramatically scale back the scope and timeline of environmental review for what its backers have called essential projects. And these are high-impact, often very polluting types of projects.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>So housing, which would mean all types of subdivisions, large-scale subdivisions over open space that generate a lot of traffic and can eat up a lot of endangered species habitat. Renewable energy projects. All types of transportation projects, with the exception of high-speed rail, so freeways, freeway widening. Uh… Dams and irrigation projects, logging projects. Broadband infrastructure projects, which some have interpreted to potentially cover data centers as well.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>So it’s a wide swath of projects. These are backed by some of the big industry groups in the state. This proposition is backed by some big industry groups in the state. And it would essentially allow the developer to define the scope of the impact. So it would be a greatly narrowed set of impacts.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>There would be a dramatically reduced shot clock on deeming the CEQA review complete, so just 90 days, with some exceptions. And it will be really hard for the public to be able to challenge any of these CEQA decisions. It raises the bar for any sort of judicial attacks on what decision-makers have done on CEQA. It’s hard and will make it hard for the legislature to amend this proposition. It would require a two-thirds majority of the legislature to amend itself.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Basically, for some of the biggest projects in the state, it would dramatically scale back the type of review, the shot clock, and the ability of the public to challenge any decision-making under CEQA.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Laura Klivans:\u003c/strong> Okay, and then I want to talk about data centers because that has really come into this conversation in the last few months, and we are already getting lots of comments on that. So, okay, talk about why people are concerned that data centers might be part of this proposition.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Ethan Elkind:\u003c/strong> Well, the issue is that they’re not explicitly excluded. This project — this proposition — does explicitly exclude high-speed rail, as I mentioned. It also excludes a Delta conveyance tunnel, but it did not exclude data centers, and the way that they’ve written what an essential project is for broadband infrastructure could arguably include data centers.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>I don’t think it’s an open-and-shut case, but I think you’re gonna see developers of all types of projects try to argue that their projects are essential. And we don’t know how courts would decide on this. They’re supposed to be giving a lot of deference to industry under this proposition. And so I don’t think we have any assurance that data centers wouldn’t qualify for the benefits that Prop 45 would offer.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Laura Klivans:\u003c/strong> Interesting, because a lot of this debate about data centers is looking into the future and saying, well, maybe a lawsuit could happen. And from your position, Ethan Elkind, at UC Berkeley as a lawyer, it potentially could.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Ethan Elkind:\u003c/strong> Absolutely. That’s the whole issue with this. It’s going to create a lot of judicial uncertainty because there’s a lot of vagueness in how essential projects are defined. You’re going to want to see every single project developer argue that their project is essential.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Because of the way this proposition is written, we don’t know how courts are going to come out on this. So it does inject a lot of uncertainty. Like I said, they knew they could have excluded data centers. When they wrote this proposition, data centers were unpopular at the time. There’s a reason they excluded high-speed rail and Delta conveyance and some other things. They chose not to exclude data centers. So that, I think, is very telling on its face.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Laura Klivans:\u003c/strong> All right, well, briefly, when CEQA is at its best, what does it do?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Ethan Elkind:\u003c/strong> Well, I think it allows the public to have some information about what a project is going to do to the environment, to their community. It gives the public an opportunity to weigh in, and it gives decision-makers an opportunity to understand what they’re approving.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And more importantly than all of this is that when there are impacts, they’re required to be mitigated, again, when feasible. And so it not only gives the public and decision-makers information, it makes sure that we try to lessen the environmental impacts of big projects.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Laura Klivans:\u003c/strong> Thank you.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>All right, this is \u003cem>Forum\u003c/em>. I’m Laura Klivans in for Mina Kim. We are talking about Proposition 45, a ballot measure proposing changes to California’s landmark environmental protection law, known as CEQA. And we are joined by Ethan Elkind, Director of the Climate Program at UC Berkeley Center for Law, Energy, and the Environment.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And we want to hear from you. What are your questions about Prop 45 and the California Environmental Quality Act? Give us a call. Or email your comments and questions to \u003ca href=\"mailto:forum@kqed.org\">forum@kqed.org\u003c/a>. Find us on Discord, Bluesky, Facebook, and Instagram. All those places, we’re at KQED Forum. Or give us a call now at 866-733-6786.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>This is \u003cem>Forum\u003c/em>. I’m Laura Klivans in for Mina Kim. We’re talking about Proposition 45, a ballot measure proposing changes to California’s landmark environmental protection law, which is called CEQA. That just rolls off the tongue.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And we’re joined by Ethan Elkind. He’s the director of the Climate Program at UC Berkeley Center for Law, Energy, and the Environment. And we are now welcoming in two additional people.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>We have Jason Elliott. He is the president of policy consulting firm Versus Solutions. He helped craft Prop 45. And we also have Jordan Grimes. He’s the legislative director with the environmental nonprofit Greenbelt Alliance. He’s part of the Know on Prop 45 campaign.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>So you have heard Ethan. He shared his interpretations of CEQA and Prop 45. Jason, I saw that you were shaking your head a bit on some of that stuff. Give us what that shaking of a head was about.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jason Elliott:\u003c/strong> First of all, thanks for hosting this \u003cem>Forum\u003c/em> today. I think that everyone wants to talk for an hour about the intricacies of environmental review law.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Laura Klivans:\u003c/strong> So stick with us, folks. That and Taylor Swift.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jason Elliott:\u003c/strong> I can get Taylor Swift in here somehow.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>So I appreciate the professor’s blessings upon Ethan for explaining CEQA, which is one of the most complicated laws in California. I do take a little bit of exception to some of the characterization of Prop 45, because I’ve heard some of those talking points, and they’re the talking points of our opponents.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>But let’s talk about what is happening here. Look, California has decided what it wants. It wants cleaner air. It wants clean water. It wants affordable and clean energy. It wants housing you can afford.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Frankly, over the years, voters have voted on and the legislature has passed a number of bills to move us towards those goals. We funded it, we’ve passed bonds, we’ve done spending programs, but what we haven’t done is we haven’t built those things. We haven’t provided housing you could afford. We haven’t provided abundant clean energy at the level we need.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Prop 45 is on the ballot because a state that can’t build what it promises isn’t protecting the environment. It’s not creating cleaner water. It’s protecting the status quo. And that’s really what Prop 45 was about. It’s about shaking up that status quo.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>We have the toughest environmental rules in America, in California. I worked in government for 18 years. I helped craft a number of those environmental rules. I’m very proud of those.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Proposition 45 leaves every single environmental protection that’s in law today — leaves it intact. That’s true for laws that protect against paving over prime agricultural land. It’s true about laws that protect against paving over wetlands. It’s true about laws that protect against clear-cutting in our forests. All of those laws continue to exist untouched by Proposition 45.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>What Proposition 45 does do is it ends the acceptance of endless delay as the status quo. As I said, I’ve worked in California politics and state and local government for 17, 18 years before I left and founded my firm. No one ever once said to me, California builds things way too fast. That’s never been the problem, right?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Our inability to execute against our own environmental and housing goals erodes our credibility to lead on environmentalism and inclusion. Prop 45 speeds up schools. It speeds up electricity projects and water without sacrificing any environmental review.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>I just want to make one sort of clarification. This is less an argument about Prop 45 and more just a thing that I think would maybe be helpful for the listeners.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>CEQA, as Ethan described it, he described what CEQA is, I think, very well. CEQA is environmental review. What CEQA is not is land-use decision-making or environmental regulation setting.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>So in California, the state government and local governments decide where they wanna put housing, and then they zone for it. They decide how much new electricity infrastructure and where they want schools, and they zone for those things. The state has planning processes around providing clean water to people. They decide how to deploy money.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>All of those processes, all of the land-use processes and the law-setting processes, are different than CEQA. Those happen through public process with public comment, publicly noticed meetings, and so forth, and years of council hearings. That’s a totally different thing than CEQA.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>CEQA is the environmental review that occurs after a community has decided, we think this is where housing should go. We wanna get water infrastructure, we wanna get a new hospital built here.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Once the community has decided we’re gonna zone this parcel of land over here for a hospital, developers do their thing or public agencies do their thing and bring a project forward. And then CEQA is the safety review at the end of that planning process.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>So I think it’s really important for people to understand that Proposition 45 doesn’t touch, or purport to touch in any way, the land-use planning powers that state and local governments have. They — every data center was mentioned in the intro. Proposition 45 does not cover data centers, period. We can have a longer conversation about that.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Laura Klivans:\u003c/strong> Yeah, we’ll talk about that in a little bit.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jason Elliott:\u003c/strong> But just to make the point, and I won’t fight that fight right now because I’m sure it’ll come up. If a community doesn’t want a data center in their city, just don’t zone for one, just don’t approve one. And then CEQA is irrelevant because the underlying land use won’t allow for that data center.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And I think that’s a key point to make, is that we’re gonna keep differentiating because opponents of this measure obscure that line to try to be hyperbolic. I think it’s important to pull those things apart.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Land-use authority, what goes in your community, remains the power of your mayor, your city council, your board of supervisors. Prop 45 doesn’t impact that.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Laura Klivans:\u003c/strong> We’re hearing from Jason Elliott. He’s the president of policy consulting firm Versus Solutions. We also have Jordan Grimes here, the legislative director with environmental nonprofit Greenbelt Alliance.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Jordan, what we’ve just heard is largely an argument around streamlining CEQA. It is not about the decision around land use, as Jason’s telling us. What about Prop 45 concerns you? You’re part of the Know on Prop 45 campaign.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jordan Grimes:\u003c/strong> Yes, thank you so much for having me back. Great to be here.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>You know, there are many, I would say, problematic aspects with the measure. It’s hard to know where to start with, I think, the things that are most concerning.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>You know, to step back, as we are discussing both with Jason and with Ethan, the Environmental Quality Act is fundamentally this law that provides protection to communities. It’s not about delay, although certainly that has been a tactic that bad actors have used. But fundamentally, it is about review. It is about looking at and analyzing whether or not there’s potential for environmental harm and then requiring mitigation of that harm.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And so it is the first line of defense for many communities. And ultimately, what Prop 45 does is strip away many of the protections inherent in that law.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>The timelines, I think, are some of the most reasonable pieces of the initiative, although, again, it doesn’t differentiate between size of projects. It doesn’t differentiate, I think, between geography, where a project is, if it’s in a greenfield, if you’re paving over open space, or if you are in a city, for example. So I think that is inherently problematic in the initiative.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Laura Klivans:\u003c/strong> Will Jordan tell us what those timelines are?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jordan Grimes:\u003c/strong> Yeah, the explicit timelines in the initiative are, generally speaking, 365 days for a full environmental impact report. Okay. You know, there are other timelines dependent on the type of environmental review, some jargony acronyms that we won’t get into too much, as we sort of discussed.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jason Elliott:\u003c/strong> Basically —\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Laura Klivans:\u003c/strong> Jargon for this.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>It’s basically putting a time limit on the environmental review and then also curtailing lawsuits around it, right? But it’s not just letting them go on for an indefinite period of time.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jordan Grimes:\u003c/strong> Exactly. And we’ve talked about that, but it’s actually quite a bit more than that.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Laura Klivans:\u003c/strong> What are the other concerns you have with it?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jordan Grimes:\u003c/strong> Quite a few. I think the most concerning one for me is a new private right of action for developers to be able to sue municipalities if they deny a project or if they require sort of different mitigations that the developer views as unlawful.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>That’s something that is a huge change to CEQA, that is to the Environmental Quality Act, that isn’t there right now. There’s also a provision that basically says if there is a conflict between other environmental laws, that the initiative provisions prevail.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>There are provisions that severely limit what a court can consider and that severely limits what a court can consider even after — even if environmental harm has been found. The court is very limited in its remedies under the initiative.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>So there are, I think, a litany of different things with this measure that go far beyond the timelines, many of which I think would be reasonable for certain projects. If we are talking about an apartment building in San Francisco, for example, the timelines that the initiative have in place might even be too long. It might not even make sense to do a year for an apartment project in Hayes Valley.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Laura Klivans:\u003c/strong> Okay.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jordan Grimes:\u003c/strong> Um, but if you’re talking about, uh, a new, you know, exurban development in the wildland-urban interface in a high-fire area, um, one of your, uh, I would say probably wouldn’t be enough.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Laura Klivans:\u003c/strong> I want to go to a caller now. We have Jim in Richmond. Jim, welcome to \u003cem>Forum\u003c/em>. Thanks for calling in.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jim:\u003c/strong> Yeah, thank you, and thank you for holding the show. As somebody who has read CEQA documents here in the Bay Area on really, frankly, bad projects, I want to tell you that as a citizen, we will — and even the city will — approach a developer to try to cause less damage to habitat or traffic, and without CEQA, or without the ability to challenge it, this really feels like one of those TV shows where you’re running across a lake and you’re competing against people, you know, jumping across these rubber balls or whatever.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>It’s so many obstacles. It just seems impossible at this point. It really feels undemocratic. And I’d like you to address the cost of this as reported in the state pamphlet. Thank you.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Laura Klivans:\u003c/strong> Thank you. Jason, can you address this? Does it take away someone’s ability to challenge?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jason Elliott:\u003c/strong> And thanks for the call, Jim. I appreciate your advocacy.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>No, it doesn’t take away someone’s ability to challenge it. Let me draw an analogy. I mean, I could go through the provision measure by measure, but this show isn’t long enough. So let me draw an analogy.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>If you think about CEQA and the environmental impact report, so CEQA requires big projects to do the environmental impact report, which is what Ethan had laid out at the top of the hour. Think about the environmental impact report like the SAT test that we probably all endured when we were high schoolers.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>The question — Prop 45 doesn’t make the questions on the SAT easier. It doesn’t allow you to skip the SAT and go straight to college. Proposition 45 doesn’t limit any of those things.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>What Proposition 45 does is say, once you’ve done the SAT, the grader — the state, the city — has a timeline in which they have to grade the SAT and give you your score back, so you can go ahead and apply to college in a timely fashion.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>It’s a timeline, right? It also says that while the grader’s grading your SAT test, the grader can’t say, well, you know, we don’t think that that’s how calculus works anymore. We’re gonna just, like, change one of the rules about log functions. And so you kind of have — you have to start over on the SAT.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>That’s how CEQA works today. The way CEQA works is you can finish your environmental impact report with mitigations to make sure that you’re having that conversation with community and local government, get rid of the worst parts of a project that are the most harmful to communities, right?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>All of that stays intact. All of the mitigation processes, all of that public feedback all stays intact. But once you’re done with that EIR, with that SAT test, it gets graded in a timely fashion, so you can build your project.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>In our case, we estimate that it will cut the time for projects with EIRs in half, from about 3.1 years to about one and a half years. So it’s half the time, but all the protections.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And I think that’s the key point: it doesn’t strip away any protections. It doesn’t eliminate CEQA. So what I heard in Jim’s question was, Prop 45 would eliminate the public’s ability to raise these concerns. It won’t eliminate it. That’s a misconception, so I want to address that.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>But it does say that let’s get this stuff done in a timely fashion, so that we can get good projects approved.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And last point I’ll make on this, Proposition 45 leaves intact every local government’s ability to reject an EIR and reject the project. There are no automatic approvals anywhere in Proposition 45. So if a developer brings forward a truly bad environmental project, the city council could just go ahead and reject it and reject the EIR and/or reject the underlying project.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Laura Klivans:\u003c/strong> Jordan, how does this sound for you when we’re thinking about what Jim is saying, the ability to challenge a project? Do you feel like it would be harder when Prop 45, if it passes?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jordan Grimes:\u003c/strong> Absolutely. A hundred percent. You’re significantly limiting in terms of what the public is allowed to comment on, right? There are provisions that severely limit public comment. You are limiting the timelines in which the public comments are made.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Laura Klivans:\u003c/strong> Do it for —\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jason Elliott:\u003c/strong> It’s a time limitation. It’s not a qualitative limitation, so let’s make sure we’re accurate about what the measure does.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Laura Klivans:\u003c/strong> Right, but it does put a date —\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jason Elliott:\u003c/strong> Like the amount of days, okay?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Laura Klivans:\u003c/strong> Yes, it’s a time limit, not a subjective limit.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jordan Grimes:\u003c/strong> You are limited in terms of vesting. If environmental conditions change on the ground, you are locked into a certain vesting schedule. So basically, things would go — everything would shift.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>So, for example, right now, if an EIR was being conducted and conditions changed —\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Laura Klivans:\u003c/strong> That’s the environmental impact report.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jordan Grimes:\u003c/strong> Yes. Sorry about the jargon. If an environmental impact report was being conducted and conditions on the ground shifted in terms of habitat, in terms of various other things, right now, as the process works, those things can be considered.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>The way the initiative would change the Environmental Quality Act would mean that you could not consider those. The conditions on the ground at the time of the project application would be locked in.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Laura Klivans:\u003c/strong> Like, read the very start.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jordan Grimes:\u003c/strong> Exactly. And then the last thing I’ll just say is, yes, a city council or local jurisdiction could deny a project, with the potential that a developer could sue. And so there’s this chilling effect now under this new private right of action, right, where a municipality would have to weigh, do we want to deny this project? Do we want to risk getting sued by a project developer?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And again, we’re not just talking about projects that are potentially environmentally beneficial, right? You know, new housing in places we want to see it, bike lanes, public transit. We’re talking about some really potentially harmful projects.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jason Elliott:\u003c/strong> Schools, clinics, hospitals, parks.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jordan Grimes:\u003c/strong> Clean energy, clean water facilities.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Laura Klivans:\u003c/strong> Sure, that’s the side that’s a —\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>But I’ve also seen the no side saying, well, what about freeway expansion? We’re talking, like, we’re talking —\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jordan Grimes:\u003c/strong> Is that also included? Freeway expansions are absolutely included. We’re talking about CO2 pipelines. We are talking about exurban developments in high-fire areas. There’s a lot of different things that this project allows. Some of them are good. Some of them, I think, deserve that streamlining.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>What we are looking at is, on net, is this better than the status quo? And our calculation is absolutely not.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Laura Klivans:\u003c/strong> Okay, okay. We’re gonna go to — we’re going to go to a caller, and then there’s lots of time to talk about these different things.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Okay. Lisa, we are going to go to you in San Francisco. Lisa, thank you for calling.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Lisa:\u003c/strong> Good morning. My head is spinning.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Laura Klivans:\u003c/strong> You’re not the only one.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Lisa:\u003c/strong> Yeah. This is a great debate, but I think for me, in this horrific time where, you know, these astroturf super PACs pop up named, you know, Neighborhoods for San Francisco or whatever. And it’s the real estate lobby or the apartment owners association or what have you, or developers, market-rate developers.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>What I want to know from both of your guests, the proponent and the opponent, I would like to know who the major sponsors pro and their money, and I would like to know who are the sponsors against? Because we know that organizations like the San Francisco — the Sierra Club has been captured by real estate forces. I mean, everything is through the looking glass now.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>So who are the funders of this initiative?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Laura Klivans:\u003c/strong> That’s a great question. Streamline, I’m triggered. Yes, there’s millions of dollars behind this initiative.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>So actually, I know you were asking to go to Jason and Jordan. I’m gonna actually see if Ethan, if you could answer this one. Ethan Elkind with UC Berkeley, where’s the money coming from from both sides?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Ethan Elkind:\u003c/strong> Yeah, I don’t have encyclopedic knowledge, but I have looked at the backers. I mean, you have the Building Industry Association as a major backer of this. They’re the big sprawl developers in the state. You have the Chamber of Commerce supporting this initiative.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>You basically have a lot of industry groups that are supporting this. On the con side, you’ve got environmental groups, and then you’ve got labor unions that often use CEQA as leverage to try to get project labor agreements, uh… for their union members, uh… And then, you know, it’s a grab bag of other folks, but I’m sure Jordan and Jason could speak in more detail. But that’s the general gist on the yes and the no side.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Laura Klivans:\u003c/strong> We’re going to come back to that because we’re about to take a break. This is \u003cem>Forum\u003c/em>. I’m Laura Klivans in for Mina Kim. We’re talking about Proposition 45, a ballot measure proposing changes to California’s landmark environmental protection law.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And we’re joined by Ethan Elkind of UC Berkeley, Jason Elliott, president of the policy consulting firm Versus Solutions, and Jordan Grimes, legislative director with environmental nonprofit Greenbelt Alliance.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And we want to hear from you. How are you planning to vote on Prop 45 and why? Email your comments and questions to \u003ca href=\"mailto:forum@kqed.org\">forum@kqed.org\u003c/a>. Find us on Discord, Bluesky, Facebook, and Instagram. We’re at KQED Forum, or give us a call now at 866-733-6786.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Welcome back to \u003cem>Forum\u003c/em>. I’m Laura Klivans in for Mina Kim. We are talking about Proposition 45. It’s a ballot measure that is proposing changes to California’s landmark environmental protection law called CEQA.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>We are joined by Ethan Elkind, the Director of the Climate Program at UC Berkeley Center for Law, Energy and the Environment; Jason Elliott, President of the policy consulting firm Versus Solutions; and Jordan Grimes, Legislative Director with environmental nonprofit Greenbelt Alliance.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>I want to go to a question that comes from listener Jeff. Jeff writes, “To what extent do the guests believe the passage of Prop 45 will meaningfully change the speed of development, and in what sectors? Is that clean energy, roads, housing?”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Jason, let’s go to you.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jason Elliott:\u003c/strong> Sure. Well, we do believe that it will speed up development, and that’s the purpose for crafting this measure. And speeding up development, let me say why that’s important.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Speed on its own is not necessarily a good thing. But when you have housing and clean energy and clean water projects, hospital projects, school projects that are delivered faster, that creates cost savings for local governments.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Of the non-housing projects that this measure covers, 76% of them that we expect would be covered by EIRs are projects that are brought forward by your local government, by your city, by your county. So they’re looking to fix a bridge, they’re looking to improve a public restroom facility, they’re looking to build a new school campus, high school campus, whatever it might be.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>These — the overwhelming majority of projects we believe, not housing, we can talk about housing, is a little different because governments don’t build housing. But of the non-housing projects, the overwhelming majority are public projects.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>The longer that those delay, the more the cost goes up. And it’s not some greedy developer hiding in a back room that bears that cost. It’s you, the taxpayer. So this really is around taxpayer protection.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>In terms of housing, because the housing part of this measure and the non-housing part of the measure are similar, but they operate, they function in different ways in terms of speeding things up.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>In terms of housing, the average — we estimate that the average delay from CEQA alone increases the cost when an EIR has to be performed, increases the cost by $75,000 per new home that’s built by the private sector. So reducing time does reduce cost, which makes houses more affordable.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>So this really is all around reducing the cost of living by reducing how expensive it is to build stuff.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Laura Klivans:\u003c/strong> California. And this is one of the reasons why it seems like the Cal Chamber wanted to bring this.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jason Elliott:\u003c/strong> That’s right.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Laura Klivans:\u003c/strong> And so, can you actually give us a number, a year number, like right now it takes an average of this many years to build housing and after this it would, we believe —\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jason Elliott:\u003c/strong> Well, I’ll give you a number that I can stand behind, which is how long CEQA delays projects, because how long it takes to build housing can depend on so many factors.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>But in terms of housing, housing projects that have to perform this environmental impact report that we’ve been discussing take on average 3.1 years. Non-housing projects that also have to perform an EIR take on an average of 3.0 years, so about three years.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>We anticipate that our measure would, because of the timelines that Jordan mentioned, conclude in 17 months. So you’re talking about roughly half the time. You’re cutting that roughly in half without diminishing any of the underlying environmental protections.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And I think that’s just a key point that keeps getting lost here. The underlying legal environmental protections all remain in place under Proposition 45.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Laura Klivans:\u003c/strong> Okay.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Jordan Grimes from the environmental nonprofit Greenbelt Alliance. What is your take on how much this, if we pass Prop 45, would speed up development? And then I wanna ask you about cost as well.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jordan Grimes:\u003c/strong> Yeah, absolutely. I think the concern, the biggest concern to us, is that it will tremendously speed up projects that are going to harm the environment.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>I actually don’t think it will do very much at all for projects that are environmentally beneficial, for the projects that I think people care most about. The California legislature last year granted a clean, complete statutory exemption to infill housing projects. It was a watershed moment for the state in acknowledging that environmental review can be used. For infill, the legislature remedied it.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>So if you want to build an apartment in Beverly Hills or Palo Alto, you no longer have to go through that environmental review, which will be a huge boon to solving our housing crisis.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Likewise, the legislature has provided statutory exemptions for bike lanes, for bus projects, for public transit, for clean energy. And so, realistically, I think the types of projects that Californians are really demanding — the clean energy, the housing projects that we need — we have already exempted those things.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And so I do think it will speed up projects, but they’re the projects that we don’t want to see. It’s new subdivisions in high wildfire areas. It’s the CO2 pipelines. It’s potentially data centers, right?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Laura Klivans:\u003c/strong> Let’s talk about that, just that housing piece. So what you are saying is that because last year California passed what was called AB 130, it is now — housing developments are exempt in urban areas, right? From CEQA, from all this stuff.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And so I have seen the no side say, listen, why do we need this if we’ve already gotten that? It’s still rolling out. And that you believe that housing, it would be easier to build housing in wildfire-prone areas. Like a place like Paradise that is, you know, in this gorgeous wooded area, but also very fire-prone, right?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>So Jordan, if you could — or excuse me, Jason, can you tell me what is your take on that? Is it gonna be easier to build housing in these places where we don’t necessarily wanna promote it?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jason Elliott:\u003c/strong> Yeah, great. And thanks, Jordan, for mentioning Assembly Bill 130. I worked for years when I was inside state government to bring that policy forward, to do the politics and the policy, and thank God for Buffy Wicks and Scott Wiener. Amen. Yeah. And they brought that forward.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>So that’s a huge win. Really proud of the work on that and Governor Newsom for pushing it through the budget. But he pushed it through the budget. The legislature did that. They found their courage, and thank God for Scott Wiener and Buffy Wicks.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>But, you know, the courage of a couple of legislators is not a statewide housing policy. And in this state, we are millions of units short. I ran housing policy for the state for a number of years. We’re millions of years short, right? Yeah, we’re millions of units short.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And when you have this much of a housing deficit in California, you have to build up, but you also have to build out, right?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And I think it’s really important that we just acknowledge that reality, the uncomfortable reality that some of our environmental opponents — about 100 organizations who opposed AB 130 — we met in the hall, and I know that’s not you, but 100-plus environmental organizations that opposed Assembly Bill 130 last year, that streamlining we were just talking about, they called it, quote, “the worst anti-environmental law in recent history.”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>That exact same coalition is now opposing Proposition 45. And I’m not trying to put this on you, Jordan, we just met. You seem like you’re a pro-housing guy, and I appreciate your leadership on that. But let’s talk about who’s behind the opposition to this measure.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>It is the same anti-housing environmental groups that for decades, decades, have been blocking the kinds of housing we need.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Because here’s the thing about Proposition 45. I think it’s another important point to make. Jordan keeps mentioning, and some of the opponents of the measure talk about, well, it’s not just housing. It’s all these other things.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>All those other things are what make housing complete neighborhoods. A housing unit is just a housing unit until you attach it to water, until you build a school nearby, so forth.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And, you know, I see housing — just last point I wanna make on this — you know I’ve been working on these issues for years and years, and the way that I see housing development, it’s like a complicated safe in, like, one of those safe-cracking movies where you gotta get every little pin lined up.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And if you don’t have the water and the electricity, you know, one of the big problems we have in this state is interconnection. A new building gets built, but you can’t get power to it, so it just stays empty.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>You gotta get all these pins, and if one of these pins is just a hair off, you can’t unlock that new neighborhood, you can’t move families in.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>So Proposition 45 absolutely does streamline a number of those other things that are necessary. People drive on highways, right? People need to turn on the lights and have clean energy, power their microwaves and so forth.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>So yes, Proposition 45 is about building those complete neighborhoods because a housing unit is just a paper promise until we connect it to all that infrastructure. Then it becomes a home.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Laura Klivans:\u003c/strong> I want to bring in Ethan Elkind. He’s from UC Berkeley, a legal expert.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Ethan, from your legal standpoint, you have seen that AB 130 passed last year. It’s begun to be implemented. How much Prop 45 changes housing development compared to the reforms of the past?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Ethan Elkind:\u003c/strong> Well, I think, as Jordan said, infill housing — the kinds of environmentally beneficial housing that we want to see — basically got a free pass under CEQA.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And the reality is — and Jason basically described this — there are so many barriers to all sorts of projects in the state that go well beyond where environmental review comes into the process, that, you know, by blaming CEQA for all the delays that we have, we’re taking our eye off the ball of all these other problems.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>I mean, Jason described how CEQA does not [involve] local land-use decision-making, but that’s exactly why we’re not really getting at the heart of the problem as to why there are so many delays for projects in the state. We have a lot of different local governments, special districts, utilities, all of which could create a lot of delays for projects that CEQA does not touch.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And so your question around how housing is affected, because we’ve already carved out an exemption that really just went into effect for all infill housing projects: the beneficiaries of Prop 45, by narrowing the scope of environmental review, by narrowing the alternatives, by dramatically shortening the shot clock for any sort of challenges, by raising the bar to judicial challenges, the only beneficiaries of that are going to be these sort of large subdivision projects, because all other types of housing in the state is now essentially exempted.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>So those are the beneficiaries. It’s going to be a lot harder for the public to be able to hold to account decision-makers who are approving these large subdivisions. We’re going to lose the ability to require mitigation and analyze those impacts really adequately in advance.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jason Elliott:\u003c/strong> That’s not true that we lose the ability. I’m sorry, but that’s a mischaracterization of the measure.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Ethan Elkind:\u003c/strong> Well, but by dramatically reducing the scope of the impacts, by reducing the alternatives, and by putting a really dramatically increased shot clock, you’re limiting the ability of the public to understand what the impacts are and to challenge them because they’re not going to have the time and the information to be able to do so.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And if they do want to challenge them in court, the bar to challenging them in the court has now been raised dramatically by Prop 45.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Laura Klivans:\u003c/strong> I’m going to interrupt this one because we’re going to go to a caller. I want to remind us all this is \u003cem>Forum\u003c/em>. I’m Laura Klivans, I’m in for Mina Kim.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>We are talking about Proposition 45, which you can tell is contentious. It’s a ballot measure proposing changes to California’s landmark environmental protection law. We are joined with Ethan Elkind, Jason Elliott, Jordan Grimes, and we want to hear from you.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Are there — were you in California when CEQA got started in the ’60s and ’70s? What do you make of the way it’s evolved over the decades? Email us your comments and questions to \u003ca href=\"mailto:forum@kqed.org\">forum@kqed.org\u003c/a>. You can find us on all the online things. You can call us at 1-866-733-6786.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>I wanna go now to a caller, Douglas in San Leandro. Thank you so much for joining us, Douglas. What’s your question?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Douglas:\u003c/strong> Uh… Good morning. It may be, uh… more of a comment. I’d like to bring data centers back to the conversation, with the data centers, which are huge energy and water demand for exactly the kind of thing that CEQA was intended to address.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Uh… And yet, uh… you know, what’s happening at 70% or more the public has indicated they’re really not in favor, is that the independent developers are rushing, rushing, rushing to get stuff done.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And, you know, the idea that, well, we can just go to the city council and get them to defeat it, or we can look at our zoning codes and say, well, it’s not zoned for data centers — it’s not true.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>What just happened in the city of Hayward next door to me is, right, the Planning Commission approved a humongous data center, more than 300,000 square feet. It never went to the City Council. The people of Hayward never knew about it. It was approved as office space, and we’re faced with the same thing here in San Leandro, where our Planning Commission just approved a conditional use permit for a similarly sized place, and it looks like it’s primed to be a data center.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Nowhere are there any codes about data centers. It would be good if there were because then it would flag us for it.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>So the problem about shortening the timeline is we don’t know what’s going on. And it’s these data center developers are, you know, they’re having our official sign non-disclosure agreements, so what the heck is happening in closed session? We don’t know.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>So the time is actually really quite an important protection for us, the public.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Laura Klivans:\u003c/strong> And given what Ethan Elkind said earlier in the hour is that he believes from his legal perspective that data centers could be included in this proposition, Prop 45.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Jordan Grimes from the Greenbelt Alliance, why do you consider data centers as potentially part of this legislation?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jordan Grimes:\u003c/strong> Yeah, well, I’ll say it’s not just me. It’s attorneys and legal scholars from UC Berkeley, from UC Davis. But essentially, the way the provision is drafted, right? “Essential broadband internet access project.”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Laura Klivans:\u003c/strong> Um —\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jordan Grimes:\u003c/strong> What that language means and the broad applicability of that, we absolutely believe covers data centers.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Laura Klivans:\u003c/strong> There’s also a provision — why do you think that? Because it says broadband access, right?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jordan Grimes:\u003c/strong> I think fundamentally that could absolutely — broadband access could, given the legal definition, be applied to data centers.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Laura Klivans:\u003c/strong> Okay. There’s a co-location of a broadband center and a data center, and that would get —\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jordan Grimes:\u003c/strong> Potentially. There’s also the provision in the measure that allows for the provisions of the measure to apply to ancillary infrastructure. So if you’re locating a broadband internet access project in a facility that houses multiple tenants, there is that aspect, but there’s the aspect that you could apply this would be required to furnish those things.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Laura Klivans:\u003c/strong> That’s okay.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Uh… Merit matters. I think it is about time to hear — if you want to hear your response.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jason Elliott:\u003c/strong> Yeah, data centers are not covered by Proposition 45, and I appreciate that the opponents of this measure, as you’ve heard, want to assert that they are.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>We have a former CPUC Public Utilities Commissioner, former FCC Commissioner, a bunch of lawyers who are not affiliated with the campaign who have published opinions that they don’t think data centers are covered, so we can go lawyer for lawyer, I suppose.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>But, you know, the data center coalition itself, the sort of industry arm, mouthpiece of the data center industry, has declined to support the measure because they say that data centers — this measure doesn’t help data centers. So I suppose that’s probably the greatest validation of all.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>But look, this question around data centers… I’ve been doing campaigns a long time. I get why the opponents are using data centers. I have seen polling too. We have our own polling. Data centers are profoundly unpopular. It’s why we didn’t include them in the measure.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Laura Klivans:\u003c/strong> Right. The measure does have carve-outs, right? It says, okay, clean energy projects are included, but not nuclear. So why did it say, but not —\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jason Elliott:\u003c/strong> Data centers. It’s a great question. Let’s take high-speed rail, for example.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Laura Klivans:\u003c/strong> Yeah, but why does it say not data centers?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jason Elliott:\u003c/strong> I’m going to explain why using high-speed rail. So high-speed rail was excluded or carved out, as you said, because transportation projects otherwise are included. So had we not carved out high-speed rail or the Delta Tunnel, as was mentioned earlier, that would be covered under existing central project definitions.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Data centers just don’t factor into this because despite Jordan’s best attempts, a data center is not a broadband line. They’re just different things.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And if you read the text of the measure, you will see that they are, just by plain reading, different things. Will someone somewhere try to make some argument? Sure, but the text of the measure is absolutely clear that data centers are just simply not covered, right?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>The list of things that are not covered is quite literally infinite. I mean, you could just keep going and going and doing, but we excluded things that would have otherwise been covered.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And, you know, I just like — I think that there’s a key point here. Campaigns, you can basically say anything you want with a glossy mailer or like on a social media ad, right? Here’s where you can’t say anything. You can’t say anything you want in the official ballot argument that you actually have to submit to the Secretary of State.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>That’s where there’s a legal bar for truthfulness and veracity, right? Because you can litigate those, right? Guess where data centers does not appear in the official ballot argument. The opponents of this measure know that it’s a specious argument, and so they didn’t put it in their official ballot arguments, and that’s kind of all you need to know.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>They’re using it because it polls. Well, I would do the same thing if I were in their shoes, but let’s not use scare tactics. Let’s talk about what’s actually in the —\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jordan Grimes:\u003c/strong> I do really want to push back on the idea that these are scare tactics.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>You have data center developers who are donating to this campaign. You have Prologis, who, by the way… Prologis builds solar. Prologis is building five data centers right now in San Jose.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Laura Klivans:\u003c/strong> And then the campaign finance rate, isn’t there something around $15 million that has been donated by a PAC that does have representatives from data centers?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jordan Grimes:\u003c/strong> Absolutely.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Laura Klivans:\u003c/strong> For the pro side.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jordan Grimes:\u003c/strong> Absolutely. And again, the Prologis — the PUC expert that was cited, you know, is a board member of Prologis, right? You have them giving half a million dollars to the campaign.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Okay, I don’t think they would be doing that, quite frankly, if they, you know, weren’t getting something pretty significant.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jason Elliott:\u003c/strong> The no side has received $16 million in contributions from one billionaire. Okay, so, like, if we’re gonna have a discussion about funding, I’ll tell you where our money comes from and our support. The infill builders have supported our measure.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Laura Klivans:\u003c/strong> I’m so sorry, we are gonna have to leave it there. There is so much to talk about. The time goes very quickly. Let’s do another hour.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>This is \u003cem>Forum\u003c/em>. I’m Laura Klivans. I’m in for Mina Kim. We’ve been talking about Prop 45. We’ve been joined by Ethan Elkind, the director of the Climate Program at UC Berkeley Center for Law, Energy, and the Environment; Jason Elliott of Versus Solutions; Jordan Grimes from the Greenbelt Alliance.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Thank you so much for joining us. Have a great day.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jason Elliott:\u003c/strong> Thanks so much.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Laura Klivans:\u003c/strong> Welcome to \u003cem>Forum\u003c/em>. I’m Laura Klivans in for Mina Kim. When then-Governor Ronald Reagan signed the California Environmental Quality Act in 1970, it was meant to keep bulldozers from tearing up sensitive ecosystems. Fifty-six years later, CEQA is one of the most fiercely debated laws in the state. Its champions say it gives marginalized communities a means to stop harmful development. Critics say it’s been weaponized to block housing and drive up costs.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Laura Klivans:\u003c/strong> Welcome to \u003cem>Forum\u003c/em>. I’m Laura Klivans in for Mina Kim. When then-Governor Ronald Reagan signed the California Environmental Quality Act in 1970, it was meant to keep bulldozers from tearing up sensitive ecosystems. Fifty-six years later, CEQA is one of the most fiercely debated laws in the state. Its champions say it gives marginalized communities a means to stop harmful development. Critics say it’s been weaponized to block housing and drive up costs.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>For decades, politicians wouldn’t go near CEQA reform, but as California’s housing crisis has deepened and clean energy projects must roll out at a faster pace, the calculation has shifted. Legislation passed last year made huge changes to the law, and this year, potentially more could come in the form of Proposition 45.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>For decades, politicians wouldn’t go near CEQA reform, but as California’s housing crisis has deepened and clean energy projects must roll out at a faster pace, the calculation has shifted. Legislation passed last year made huge changes to the law, and this year, potentially more could come in the form of Proposition 45.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>We’re going to hear from the people who’ve brought this initiative and those who oppose it, and we’ll talk about how unexpected players — data centers — have entered the conversation. But first, we’re joined by Ethan Elkind, Director of the Climate Program at UC Berkeley Center for Law, Energy, and the Environment. Welcome, Ethan.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>We’re going to hear from the people who’ve brought this initiative and those who oppose it, and we’ll talk about how unexpected players — data centers — have entered the conversation. But first, we’re joined by Ethan Elkind, Director of the Climate Program at UC Berkeley Center for Law, Energy, and the Environment. Welcome, Ethan.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Ethan Elkind:\u003c/strong> Thank you, Laura. Good to be with you.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Ethan Elkind:\u003c/strong> Thank you, Laura. Good to be with you.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Laura Klivans:\u003c/strong> Well, thanks for joining us, Ethan. I’ve spoken to you a lot. I’m a climate reporter here at KQED. Today we are talking about CEQA, which is, of course, the California Environmental Quality Act. Tell us, what is actually in this? What does it mean?\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Laura Klivans:\u003c/strong> Well, thanks for joining us, Ethan. I’ve spoken to you a lot. I’m a climate reporter here at KQED. Today we are talking about CEQA, which is, of course, the California Environmental Quality Act. Tell us, what is actually in this? What does it mean?\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Ethan Elkind:\u003c/strong> Yes. Well, as you mentioned, it was signed by Ronald Reagan, and it was originally just proposed to apply to major public infrastructure projects. And the point of the law was to require decision-makers, in advance of deciding on a big project, to figure out what are the likely environmental impacts of that project. And if there are significant negative environmental impacts, then decision-makers would have to mitigate those impacts if it’s feasible to do so.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Ethan Elkind:\u003c/strong> Yes. Well, as you mentioned, it was signed by Ronald Reagan, and it was originally just proposed to apply to major public infrastructure projects. And the point of the law was to require decision-makers, in advance of deciding on a big project, to figure out what are the likely environmental impacts of that project. And if there are significant negative environmental impacts, then decision-makers would have to mitigate those impacts if it’s feasible to do so.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Now, if it is not feasible, the project is just going to have a lot of impacts and there’s nothing you can really do, then the project could proceed. But basically, it was a way to inform decision-makers and inform the public about the project’s scope of impacts, and also potential alternatives to the project.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>Now, if it is not feasible, the project is just going to have a lot of impacts and there’s nothing you can really do, then the project could proceed. But basically, it was a way to inform decision-makers and inform the public about the project’s scope of impacts, and also potential alternatives to the project.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Now, the courts have dramatically expanded it. And there was a big decision in 1972 that basically said now all projects that require some sort of public approval, which is basically all projects, now have to go through the CEQA process. So it has been greatly expanded by the courts based on what Ronald Reagan thought he was signing — I’m assuming what he thought he was signing in 1970.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>Now, the courts have dramatically expanded it. And there was a big decision in 1972 that basically said now all projects that require some sort of public approval, which is basically all projects, now have to go through the CEQA process. So it has been greatly expanded by the courts based on what Ronald Reagan thought he was signing — I’m assuming what he thought he was signing in 1970.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Laura Klivans:\u003c/strong> So it started out as something that’s like, this is about, you know, dams. And then now it’s like, this is about your neighbor’s house.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Laura Klivans:\u003c/strong> So it started out as something that’s like, this is about, you know, dams. And then now it’s like, this is about your neighbor’s house.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Ethan Elkind:\u003c/strong> Yes, although many projects are exempt or face very streamlined review. Now, the biggest projects have to undergo what’s called an environmental impact report. And these can be like multiple phone-book-sized documents that look at all types of impacts. But that’s really just a very small percentage of projects.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Ethan Elkind:\u003c/strong> Yes, although many projects are exempt or face very streamlined review. Now, the biggest projects have to undergo what’s called an environmental impact report. And these can be like multiple phone-book-sized documents that look at all types of impacts. But that’s really just a very small percentage of projects.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>And then once those environmental impact reports come out, and really almost all steps in the process of CEQA, there’s opportunities for the public to sue if they feel like decision-makers have done an inadequate job in analyzing those impacts. And that’s really where a lot of the controversy around CEQA has come into play, that it provides members of the public with opportunities to have pretty extreme leverage in some cases over particularly large projects.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>And then once those environmental impact reports come out, and really almost all steps in the process of CEQA, there’s opportunities for the public to sue if they feel like decision-makers have done an inadequate job in analyzing those impacts. And that’s really where a lot of the controversy around CEQA has come into play, that it provides members of the public with opportunities to have pretty extreme leverage in some cases over particularly large projects.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Laura Klivans:\u003c/strong> And so talk me through that. CEQA has been criticized for stunting development. So take us through the process of what a developer actually must do to comply with it.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Laura Klivans:\u003c/strong> And so talk me through that. CEQA has been criticized for stunting development. So take us through the process of what a developer actually must do to comply with it.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Ethan Elkind:\u003c/strong> Well, like I say, it really depends on how big the project is. Many projects are completely exempt. If a project just has a very narrow set of likely impacts, then often it’s very easy to just come up with some simple mitigation measures, and then the developer can move forward.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Ethan Elkind:\u003c/strong> Well, like I say, it really depends on how big the project is. Many projects are completely exempt. If a project just has a very narrow set of likely impacts, then often it’s very easy to just come up with some simple mitigation measures, and then the developer can move forward.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>But for big projects that have a lot of impacts — think of, like, a big industrial project, maybe a large subdivision out on green space, farmland, maybe transmission lines, logging projects, et cetera. Those kinds of projects have multiple types of impacts. They’ll impact the air quality, they’ll impact endangered species habitat, they will impact noise, visual aesthetics, archaeological resources, historical resources. All of these types of impacts have to be analyzed for these large projects and mitigated where feasible.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>But for big projects that have a lot of impacts — think of, like, a big industrial project, maybe a large subdivision out on green space, farmland, maybe transmission lines, logging projects, et cetera. Those kinds of projects have multiple types of impacts. They’ll impact the air quality, they’ll impact endangered species habitat, they will impact noise, visual aesthetics, archaeological resources, historical resources. All of these types of impacts have to be analyzed for these large projects and mitigated where feasible.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>And at that point, the public, if there’s maybe an economic competitor, if they’re neighbors, uh… There’s environmental groups — they have the ability to sue if those impacts are not analyzed properly and the mitigation measures aren’t adequate, uh… And so that’s really where the leverage comes into play, and it’s often at the very end of the process when a developer’s already sort of lined up a lot of their financing, figured out where legally they’re allowed to proceed under the land-use laws.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>And at that point, the public, if there’s maybe an economic competitor, if they’re neighbors, uh… There’s environmental groups — they have the ability to sue if those impacts are not analyzed properly and the mitigation measures aren’t adequate, uh… And so that’s really where the leverage comes into play, and it’s often at the very end of the process when a developer’s already sort of lined up a lot of their financing, figured out where legally they’re allowed to proceed under the land-use laws.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>And so for developers, for industry, they hate this law because it injects a huge amount of uncertainty really right at the end of the process. And by delaying projects, that costs money. I mean, time is money for developers. And while the law is not meant to stop any projects, it can effectively do so if there’s litigation that draws out the timelines by many years.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>And so for developers, for industry, they hate this law because it injects a huge amount of uncertainty really right at the end of the process. And by delaying projects, that costs money. I mean, time is money for developers. And while the law is not meant to stop any projects, it can effectively do so if there’s litigation that draws out the timelines by many years.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Laura Klivans:\u003c/strong> Okay. And then, so how long does CEQA review actually take in some of those instances? On average, maybe, and then in the worst-case scenarios.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Laura Klivans:\u003c/strong> Okay. And then, so how long does CEQA review actually take in some of those instances? On average, maybe, and then in the worst-case scenarios.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Ethan Elkind:\u003c/strong> Yeah, I haven’t really looked at the data on this. I mean, anecdotally, what you hear is that if it does go to an environmental impact report and is litigated, it can take a couple of years sometimes. I mean, in some cases, there have been some high-profile cases that have lasted decades. Those are very controversial, very large projects. And usually, there’s other factors involved. But I would guess that’s probably a year or two to resolve.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Ethan Elkind:\u003c/strong> Yeah, I haven’t really looked at the data on this. I mean, anecdotally, what you hear is that if it does go to an environmental impact report and is litigated, it can take a couple of years sometimes. I mean, in some cases, there have been some high-profile cases that have lasted decades. Those are very controversial, very large projects. And usually, there’s other factors involved. But I would guess that’s probably a year or two to resolve.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Laura Klivans:\u003c/strong> And then CEQA — you know, we see CEQA come up again for folks who are just tuning in, the California Environmental Quality Act. So Ethan Elkind, people are often critical of CEQA saying, like, look at what happened at Berkeley with student housing. Can you sort of spell out what was that example for us, and what is — how common is that kind of thing to happen?\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Laura Klivans:\u003c/strong> And then CEQA — you know, we see CEQA come up again for folks who are just tuning in, the California Environmental Quality Act. So Ethan Elkind, people are often critical of CEQA saying, like, look at what happened at Berkeley with student housing. Can you sort of spell out what was that example for us, and what is — how common is that kind of thing to happen?\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Ethan Elkind:\u003c/strong> Well, this is the issue that there are these high-profile lawsuits that just look kind of ridiculous on their face, and then people throw up their hands and say CEQA is being abused and it really should go away.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Ethan Elkind:\u003c/strong> Well, this is the issue that there are these high-profile lawsuits that just look kind of ridiculous on their face, and then people throw up their hands and say CEQA is being abused and it really should go away.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>So in this particular case, you had student housing proposed at People’s Park in Berkeley, and the courts ruled that essentially students were an environmental impact. I mean, I’m sort of saying this a little superficially here, but the result of it was to hold up a really badly needed student housing project that the university wanted to move forward on.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>So in this particular case, you had student housing proposed at People’s Park in Berkeley, and the courts ruled that essentially students were an environmental impact. I mean, I’m sort of saying this a little superficially here, but the result of it was to hold up a really badly needed student housing project that the university wanted to move forward on.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>And the legislature immediately stepped in in response to the negative publicity, and they amended the law in an emergency statute so that it would go into effect right away instead of in the next year to overrule what the court had decided.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>And the legislature immediately stepped in in response to the negative publicity, and they amended the law in an emergency statute so that it would go into effect right away instead of in the next year to overrule what the court had decided.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>But in reality, there are less than 200 lawsuits a year. This has been very well tracked by multiple sources. So litigation is actually quite infrequent. But when it does happen, it makes a lot of headlines. And so you get a sort of anecdotally driven debate on CEQA. We’re not really looking at the actual numbers, which are quite rare.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>But in reality, there are less than 200 lawsuits a year. This has been very well tracked by multiple sources. So litigation is actually quite infrequent. But when it does happen, it makes a lot of headlines. And so you get a sort of anecdotally driven debate on CEQA. We’re not really looking at the actual numbers, which are quite rare.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Although I will say that the threat of lawsuits is very — has a really chilling effect. It’s a big deterrent for a lot of developers. A lot of developers I spoke to, if they think there’s any risk of a CEQA lawsuit for a project, they won’t move forward. They’ll choose a different area or they’ll design the project differently. So even though litigation is rare, I do acknowledge that it has a chilling effect on a lot of developers.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>Although I will say that the threat of lawsuits is very — has a really chilling effect. It’s a big deterrent for a lot of developers. A lot of developers I spoke to, if they think there’s any risk of a CEQA lawsuit for a project, they won’t move forward. They’ll choose a different area or they’ll design the project differently. So even though litigation is rare, I do acknowledge that it has a chilling effect on a lot of developers.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Laura Klivans:\u003c/strong> Okay.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Laura Klivans:\u003c/strong> Okay.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>So now let’s talk about Prop 45. Californians are going to see that on our ballots this year. If you’ve already received yours in the mail, it’s right there. What is Prop 45 proposing?\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>So now let’s talk about Prop 45. Californians are going to see that on our ballots this year. If you’ve already received yours in the mail, it’s right there. What is Prop 45 proposing?\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Ethan Elkind:\u003c/strong> Well, Prop 45 would dramatically scale back the scope and timeline of environmental review for what its backers have called essential projects. And these are high-impact, often very polluting types of projects.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Ethan Elkind:\u003c/strong> Well, Prop 45 would dramatically scale back the scope and timeline of environmental review for what its backers have called essential projects. And these are high-impact, often very polluting types of projects.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>So housing, which would mean all types of subdivisions, large-scale subdivisions over open space that generate a lot of traffic and can eat up a lot of endangered species habitat. Renewable energy projects. All types of transportation projects, with the exception of high-speed rail, so freeways, freeway widening. Uh… Dams and irrigation projects, logging projects. Broadband infrastructure projects, which some have interpreted to potentially cover data centers as well.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>So housing, which would mean all types of subdivisions, large-scale subdivisions over open space that generate a lot of traffic and can eat up a lot of endangered species habitat. Renewable energy projects. All types of transportation projects, with the exception of high-speed rail, so freeways, freeway widening. Uh… Dams and irrigation projects, logging projects. Broadband infrastructure projects, which some have interpreted to potentially cover data centers as well.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>So it’s a wide swath of projects. These are backed by some of the big industry groups in the state. This proposition is backed by some big industry groups in the state. And it would essentially allow the developer to define the scope of the impact. So it would be a greatly narrowed set of impacts.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>So it’s a wide swath of projects. These are backed by some of the big industry groups in the state. This proposition is backed by some big industry groups in the state. And it would essentially allow the developer to define the scope of the impact. So it would be a greatly narrowed set of impacts.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>There would be a dramatically reduced shot clock on deeming the CEQA review complete, so just 90 days, with some exceptions. And it will be really hard for the public to be able to challenge any of these CEQA decisions. It raises the bar for any sort of judicial attacks on what decision-makers have done on CEQA. It’s hard and will make it hard for the legislature to amend this proposition. It would require a two-thirds majority of the legislature to amend itself.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>There would be a dramatically reduced shot clock on deeming the CEQA review complete, so just 90 days, with some exceptions. And it will be really hard for the public to be able to challenge any of these CEQA decisions. It raises the bar for any sort of judicial attacks on what decision-makers have done on CEQA. It’s hard and will make it hard for the legislature to amend this proposition. It would require a two-thirds majority of the legislature to amend itself.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Basically, for some of the biggest projects in the state, it would dramatically scale back the type of review, the shot clock, and the ability of the public to challenge any decision-making under CEQA.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>Basically, for some of the biggest projects in the state, it would dramatically scale back the type of review, the shot clock, and the ability of the public to challenge any decision-making under CEQA.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Laura Klivans:\u003c/strong> Okay, and then I want to talk about data centers because that has really come into this conversation in the last few months, and we are already getting lots of comments on that. So, okay, talk about why people are concerned that data centers might be part of this proposition.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Laura Klivans:\u003c/strong> Okay, and then I want to talk about data centers because that has really come into this conversation in the last few months, and we are already getting lots of comments on that. So, okay, talk about why people are concerned that data centers might be part of this proposition.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Ethan Elkind:\u003c/strong> Well, the issue is that they’re not explicitly excluded. This project — this proposition — does explicitly exclude high-speed rail, as I mentioned. It also excludes a Delta conveyance tunnel, but it did not exclude data centers, and the way that they’ve written what an essential project is for broadband infrastructure could arguably include data centers.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Ethan Elkind:\u003c/strong> Well, the issue is that they’re not explicitly excluded. This project — this proposition — does explicitly exclude high-speed rail, as I mentioned. It also excludes a Delta conveyance tunnel, but it did not exclude data centers, and the way that they’ve written what an essential project is for broadband infrastructure could arguably include data centers.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>I don’t think it’s an open-and-shut case, but I think you’re gonna see developers of all types of projects try to argue that their projects are essential. And we don’t know how courts would decide on this. They’re supposed to be giving a lot of deference to industry under this proposition. And so I don’t think we have any assurance that data centers wouldn’t qualify for the benefits that Prop 45 would offer.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>I don’t think it’s an open-and-shut case, but I think you’re gonna see developers of all types of projects try to argue that their projects are essential. And we don’t know how courts would decide on this. They’re supposed to be giving a lot of deference to industry under this proposition. And so I don’t think we have any assurance that data centers wouldn’t qualify for the benefits that Prop 45 would offer.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Laura Klivans:\u003c/strong> Interesting, because a lot of this debate about data centers is looking into the future and saying, well, maybe a lawsuit could happen. And from your position, Ethan Elkind, at UC Berkeley as a lawyer, it potentially could.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Laura Klivans:\u003c/strong> Interesting, because a lot of this debate about data centers is looking into the future and saying, well, maybe a lawsuit could happen. And from your position, Ethan Elkind, at UC Berkeley as a lawyer, it potentially could.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Ethan Elkind:\u003c/strong> Absolutely. That’s the whole issue with this. It’s going to create a lot of judicial uncertainty because there’s a lot of vagueness in how essential projects are defined. You’re going to want to see every single project developer argue that their project is essential.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Ethan Elkind:\u003c/strong> Absolutely. That’s the whole issue with this. It’s going to create a lot of judicial uncertainty because there’s a lot of vagueness in how essential projects are defined. You’re going to want to see every single project developer argue that their project is essential.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Because of the way this proposition is written, we don’t know how courts are going to come out on this. So it does inject a lot of uncertainty. Like I said, they knew they could have excluded data centers. When they wrote this proposition, data centers were unpopular at the time. There’s a reason they excluded high-speed rail and Delta conveyance and some other things. They chose not to exclude data centers. So that, I think, is very telling on its face.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>Because of the way this proposition is written, we don’t know how courts are going to come out on this. So it does inject a lot of uncertainty. Like I said, they knew they could have excluded data centers. When they wrote this proposition, data centers were unpopular at the time. There’s a reason they excluded high-speed rail and Delta conveyance and some other things. They chose not to exclude data centers. So that, I think, is very telling on its face.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Laura Klivans:\u003c/strong> All right, well, briefly, when CEQA is at its best, what does it do?\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Laura Klivans:\u003c/strong> All right, well, briefly, when CEQA is at its best, what does it do?\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Ethan Elkind:\u003c/strong> Well, I think it allows the public to have some information about what a project is going to do to the environment, to their community. It gives the public an opportunity to weigh in, and it gives decision-makers an opportunity to understand what they’re approving.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Ethan Elkind:\u003c/strong> Well, I think it allows the public to have some information about what a project is going to do to the environment, to their community. It gives the public an opportunity to weigh in, and it gives decision-makers an opportunity to understand what they’re approving.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>And more importantly than all of this is that when there are impacts, they’re required to be mitigated, again, when feasible. And so it not only gives the public and decision-makers information, it makes sure that we try to lessen the environmental impacts of big projects.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>And more importantly than all of this is that when there are impacts, they’re required to be mitigated, again, when feasible. And so it not only gives the public and decision-makers information, it makes sure that we try to lessen the environmental impacts of big projects.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Laura Klivans:\u003c/strong> Thank you.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Laura Klivans:\u003c/strong> Thank you.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>All right, this is \u003cem>Forum\u003c/em>. I’m Laura Klivans in for Mina Kim. We are talking about Proposition 45, a ballot measure proposing changes to California’s landmark environmental protection law, known as CEQA. And we are joined by Ethan Elkind, Director of the Climate Program at UC Berkeley Center for Law, Energy, and the Environment.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>All right, this is \u003cem>Forum\u003c/em>. I’m Laura Klivans in for Mina Kim. We are talking about Proposition 45, a ballot measure proposing changes to California’s landmark environmental protection law, known as CEQA. And we are joined by Ethan Elkind, Director of the Climate Program at UC Berkeley Center for Law, Energy, and the Environment.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>And we want to hear from you. What are your questions about Prop 45 and the California Environmental Quality Act? Give us a call. Or email your comments and questions to \u003ca href=\"mailto:forum@kqed.org\">forum@kqed.org\u003c/a>. Find us on Discord, Bluesky, Facebook, and Instagram. All those places, we’re at KQED Forum. Or give us a call now at 866-733-6786.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>And we want to hear from you. What are your questions about Prop 45 and the California Environmental Quality Act? Give us a call. Or email your comments and questions to \u003ca href=\"mailto:forum@kqed.org\">forum@kqed.org\u003c/a>. Find us on Discord, Bluesky, Facebook, and Instagram. All those places, we’re at KQED Forum. Or give us a call now at 866-733-6786.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>This is \u003cem>Forum\u003c/em>. I’m Laura Klivans in for Mina Kim. We’re talking about Proposition 45, a ballot measure proposing changes to California’s landmark environmental protection law, which is called CEQA. That just rolls off the tongue.\u003c/p>\n",
"innerContent": [
"\n\u003cp>This is \u003cem>Forum\u003c/em>. I’m Laura Klivans in for Mina Kim. We’re talking about Proposition 45, a ballot measure proposing changes to California’s landmark environmental protection law, which is called CEQA. That just rolls off the tongue.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>And we’re joined by Ethan Elkind. He’s the director of the Climate Program at UC Berkeley Center for Law, Energy, and the Environment. And we are now welcoming in two additional people.\u003c/p>\n",
"innerContent": [
"\n\u003cp>And we’re joined by Ethan Elkind. He’s the director of the Climate Program at UC Berkeley Center for Law, Energy, and the Environment. And we are now welcoming in two additional people.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>We have Jason Elliott. He is the president of policy consulting firm Versus Solutions. He helped craft Prop 45. And we also have Jordan Grimes. He’s the legislative director with the environmental nonprofit Greenbelt Alliance. He’s part of the Know on Prop 45 campaign.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>We have Jason Elliott. He is the president of policy consulting firm Versus Solutions. He helped craft Prop 45. And we also have Jordan Grimes. He’s the legislative director with the environmental nonprofit Greenbelt Alliance. He’s part of the Know on Prop 45 campaign.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>So you have heard Ethan. He shared his interpretations of CEQA and Prop 45. Jason, I saw that you were shaking your head a bit on some of that stuff. Give us what that shaking of a head was about.\u003c/p>\n",
"innerContent": [
"\n\u003cp>So you have heard Ethan. He shared his interpretations of CEQA and Prop 45. Jason, I saw that you were shaking your head a bit on some of that stuff. Give us what that shaking of a head was about.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jason Elliott:\u003c/strong> First of all, thanks for hosting this \u003cem>Forum\u003c/em> today. I think that everyone wants to talk for an hour about the intricacies of environmental review law.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jason Elliott:\u003c/strong> First of all, thanks for hosting this \u003cem>Forum\u003c/em> today. I think that everyone wants to talk for an hour about the intricacies of environmental review law.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Laura Klivans:\u003c/strong> So stick with us, folks. That and Taylor Swift.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Laura Klivans:\u003c/strong> So stick with us, folks. That and Taylor Swift.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jason Elliott:\u003c/strong> I can get Taylor Swift in here somehow.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jason Elliott:\u003c/strong> I can get Taylor Swift in here somehow.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>So I appreciate the professor’s blessings upon Ethan for explaining CEQA, which is one of the most complicated laws in California. I do take a little bit of exception to some of the characterization of Prop 45, because I’ve heard some of those talking points, and they’re the talking points of our opponents.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>So I appreciate the professor’s blessings upon Ethan for explaining CEQA, which is one of the most complicated laws in California. I do take a little bit of exception to some of the characterization of Prop 45, because I’ve heard some of those talking points, and they’re the talking points of our opponents.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>But let’s talk about what is happening here. Look, California has decided what it wants. It wants cleaner air. It wants clean water. It wants affordable and clean energy. It wants housing you can afford.\u003c/p>\n",
"innerContent": [
"\n\u003cp>But let’s talk about what is happening here. Look, California has decided what it wants. It wants cleaner air. It wants clean water. It wants affordable and clean energy. It wants housing you can afford.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Frankly, over the years, voters have voted on and the legislature has passed a number of bills to move us towards those goals. We funded it, we’ve passed bonds, we’ve done spending programs, but what we haven’t done is we haven’t built those things. We haven’t provided housing you could afford. We haven’t provided abundant clean energy at the level we need.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>Frankly, over the years, voters have voted on and the legislature has passed a number of bills to move us towards those goals. We funded it, we’ve passed bonds, we’ve done spending programs, but what we haven’t done is we haven’t built those things. We haven’t provided housing you could afford. We haven’t provided abundant clean energy at the level we need.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Prop 45 is on the ballot because a state that can’t build what it promises isn’t protecting the environment. It’s not creating cleaner water. It’s protecting the status quo. And that’s really what Prop 45 was about. It’s about shaking up that status quo.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>Prop 45 is on the ballot because a state that can’t build what it promises isn’t protecting the environment. It’s not creating cleaner water. It’s protecting the status quo. And that’s really what Prop 45 was about. It’s about shaking up that status quo.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>We have the toughest environmental rules in America, in California. I worked in government for 18 years. I helped craft a number of those environmental rules. I’m very proud of those.\u003c/p>\n",
"innerContent": [
"\n\u003cp>We have the toughest environmental rules in America, in California. I worked in government for 18 years. I helped craft a number of those environmental rules. I’m very proud of those.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Proposition 45 leaves every single environmental protection that’s in law today — leaves it intact. That’s true for laws that protect against paving over prime agricultural land. It’s true about laws that protect against paving over wetlands. It’s true about laws that protect against clear-cutting in our forests. All of those laws continue to exist untouched by Proposition 45.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>Proposition 45 leaves every single environmental protection that’s in law today — leaves it intact. That’s true for laws that protect against paving over prime agricultural land. It’s true about laws that protect against paving over wetlands. It’s true about laws that protect against clear-cutting in our forests. All of those laws continue to exist untouched by Proposition 45.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>What Proposition 45 does do is it ends the acceptance of endless delay as the status quo. As I said, I’ve worked in California politics and state and local government for 17, 18 years before I left and founded my firm. No one ever once said to me, California builds things way too fast. That’s never been the problem, right?\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>What Proposition 45 does do is it ends the acceptance of endless delay as the status quo. As I said, I’ve worked in California politics and state and local government for 17, 18 years before I left and founded my firm. No one ever once said to me, California builds things way too fast. That’s never been the problem, right?\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Our inability to execute against our own environmental and housing goals erodes our credibility to lead on environmentalism and inclusion. Prop 45 speeds up schools. It speeds up electricity projects and water without sacrificing any environmental review.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>Our inability to execute against our own environmental and housing goals erodes our credibility to lead on environmentalism and inclusion. Prop 45 speeds up schools. It speeds up electricity projects and water without sacrificing any environmental review.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>I just want to make one sort of clarification. This is less an argument about Prop 45 and more just a thing that I think would maybe be helpful for the listeners.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>I just want to make one sort of clarification. This is less an argument about Prop 45 and more just a thing that I think would maybe be helpful for the listeners.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>CEQA, as Ethan described it, he described what CEQA is, I think, very well. CEQA is environmental review. What CEQA is not is land-use decision-making or environmental regulation setting.\u003c/p>\n",
"innerContent": [
"\n\u003cp>CEQA, as Ethan described it, he described what CEQA is, I think, very well. CEQA is environmental review. What CEQA is not is land-use decision-making or environmental regulation setting.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>So in California, the state government and local governments decide where they wanna put housing, and then they zone for it. They decide how much new electricity infrastructure and where they want schools, and they zone for those things. The state has planning processes around providing clean water to people. They decide how to deploy money.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>So in California, the state government and local governments decide where they wanna put housing, and then they zone for it. They decide how much new electricity infrastructure and where they want schools, and they zone for those things. The state has planning processes around providing clean water to people. They decide how to deploy money.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>All of those processes, all of the land-use processes and the law-setting processes, are different than CEQA. Those happen through public process with public comment, publicly noticed meetings, and so forth, and years of council hearings. That’s a totally different thing than CEQA.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>All of those processes, all of the land-use processes and the law-setting processes, are different than CEQA. Those happen through public process with public comment, publicly noticed meetings, and so forth, and years of council hearings. That’s a totally different thing than CEQA.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>CEQA is the environmental review that occurs after a community has decided, we think this is where housing should go. We wanna get water infrastructure, we wanna get a new hospital built here.\u003c/p>\n",
"innerContent": [
"\n\u003cp>CEQA is the environmental review that occurs after a community has decided, we think this is where housing should go. We wanna get water infrastructure, we wanna get a new hospital built here.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Once the community has decided we’re gonna zone this parcel of land over here for a hospital, developers do their thing or public agencies do their thing and bring a project forward. And then CEQA is the safety review at the end of that planning process.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>Once the community has decided we’re gonna zone this parcel of land over here for a hospital, developers do their thing or public agencies do their thing and bring a project forward. And then CEQA is the safety review at the end of that planning process.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>So I think it’s really important for people to understand that Proposition 45 doesn’t touch, or purport to touch in any way, the land-use planning powers that state and local governments have. They — every data center was mentioned in the intro. Proposition 45 does not cover data centers, period. We can have a longer conversation about that.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>So I think it’s really important for people to understand that Proposition 45 doesn’t touch, or purport to touch in any way, the land-use planning powers that state and local governments have. They — every data center was mentioned in the intro. Proposition 45 does not cover data centers, period. We can have a longer conversation about that.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Laura Klivans:\u003c/strong> Yeah, we’ll talk about that in a little bit.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Laura Klivans:\u003c/strong> Yeah, we’ll talk about that in a little bit.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jason Elliott:\u003c/strong> But just to make the point, and I won’t fight that fight right now because I’m sure it’ll come up. If a community doesn’t want a data center in their city, just don’t zone for one, just don’t approve one. And then CEQA is irrelevant because the underlying land use won’t allow for that data center.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jason Elliott:\u003c/strong> But just to make the point, and I won’t fight that fight right now because I’m sure it’ll come up. If a community doesn’t want a data center in their city, just don’t zone for one, just don’t approve one. And then CEQA is irrelevant because the underlying land use won’t allow for that data center.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>And I think that’s a key point to make, is that we’re gonna keep differentiating because opponents of this measure obscure that line to try to be hyperbolic. I think it’s important to pull those things apart.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>And I think that’s a key point to make, is that we’re gonna keep differentiating because opponents of this measure obscure that line to try to be hyperbolic. I think it’s important to pull those things apart.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Land-use authority, what goes in your community, remains the power of your mayor, your city council, your board of supervisors. Prop 45 doesn’t impact that.\u003c/p>\n",
"innerContent": [
"\n\u003cp>Land-use authority, what goes in your community, remains the power of your mayor, your city council, your board of supervisors. Prop 45 doesn’t impact that.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Laura Klivans:\u003c/strong> We’re hearing from Jason Elliott. He’s the president of policy consulting firm Versus Solutions. We also have Jordan Grimes here, the legislative director with environmental nonprofit Greenbelt Alliance.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Laura Klivans:\u003c/strong> We’re hearing from Jason Elliott. He’s the president of policy consulting firm Versus Solutions. We also have Jordan Grimes here, the legislative director with environmental nonprofit Greenbelt Alliance.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Jordan, what we’ve just heard is largely an argument around streamlining CEQA. It is not about the decision around land use, as Jason’s telling us. What about Prop 45 concerns you? You’re part of the Know on Prop 45 campaign.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>Jordan, what we’ve just heard is largely an argument around streamlining CEQA. It is not about the decision around land use, as Jason’s telling us. What about Prop 45 concerns you? You’re part of the Know on Prop 45 campaign.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jordan Grimes:\u003c/strong> Yes, thank you so much for having me back. Great to be here.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jordan Grimes:\u003c/strong> Yes, thank you so much for having me back. Great to be here.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>You know, there are many, I would say, problematic aspects with the measure. It’s hard to know where to start with, I think, the things that are most concerning.\u003c/p>\n",
"innerContent": [
"\n\u003cp>You know, there are many, I would say, problematic aspects with the measure. It’s hard to know where to start with, I think, the things that are most concerning.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>You know, to step back, as we are discussing both with Jason and with Ethan, the Environmental Quality Act is fundamentally this law that provides protection to communities. It’s not about delay, although certainly that has been a tactic that bad actors have used. But fundamentally, it is about review. It is about looking at and analyzing whether or not there’s potential for environmental harm and then requiring mitigation of that harm.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>You know, to step back, as we are discussing both with Jason and with Ethan, the Environmental Quality Act is fundamentally this law that provides protection to communities. It’s not about delay, although certainly that has been a tactic that bad actors have used. But fundamentally, it is about review. It is about looking at and analyzing whether or not there’s potential for environmental harm and then requiring mitigation of that harm.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>And so it is the first line of defense for many communities. And ultimately, what Prop 45 does is strip away many of the protections inherent in that law.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>And so it is the first line of defense for many communities. And ultimately, what Prop 45 does is strip away many of the protections inherent in that law.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>The timelines, I think, are some of the most reasonable pieces of the initiative, although, again, it doesn’t differentiate between size of projects. It doesn’t differentiate, I think, between geography, where a project is, if it’s in a greenfield, if you’re paving over open space, or if you are in a city, for example. So I think that is inherently problematic in the initiative.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>The timelines, I think, are some of the most reasonable pieces of the initiative, although, again, it doesn’t differentiate between size of projects. It doesn’t differentiate, I think, between geography, where a project is, if it’s in a greenfield, if you’re paving over open space, or if you are in a city, for example. So I think that is inherently problematic in the initiative.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Laura Klivans:\u003c/strong> Will Jordan tell us what those timelines are?\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Laura Klivans:\u003c/strong> Will Jordan tell us what those timelines are?\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jordan Grimes:\u003c/strong> Yeah, the explicit timelines in the initiative are, generally speaking, 365 days for a full environmental impact report. Okay. You know, there are other timelines dependent on the type of environmental review, some jargony acronyms that we won’t get into too much, as we sort of discussed.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jordan Grimes:\u003c/strong> Yeah, the explicit timelines in the initiative are, generally speaking, 365 days for a full environmental impact report. Okay. You know, there are other timelines dependent on the type of environmental review, some jargony acronyms that we won’t get into too much, as we sort of discussed.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jason Elliott:\u003c/strong> Basically —\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jason Elliott:\u003c/strong> Basically —\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Laura Klivans:\u003c/strong> Jargon for this.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Laura Klivans:\u003c/strong> Jargon for this.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>It’s basically putting a time limit on the environmental review and then also curtailing lawsuits around it, right? But it’s not just letting them go on for an indefinite period of time.\u003c/p>\n",
"innerContent": [
"\n\u003cp>It’s basically putting a time limit on the environmental review and then also curtailing lawsuits around it, right? But it’s not just letting them go on for an indefinite period of time.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jordan Grimes:\u003c/strong> Exactly. And we’ve talked about that, but it’s actually quite a bit more than that.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jordan Grimes:\u003c/strong> Exactly. And we’ve talked about that, but it’s actually quite a bit more than that.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Laura Klivans:\u003c/strong> What are the other concerns you have with it?\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Laura Klivans:\u003c/strong> What are the other concerns you have with it?\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jordan Grimes:\u003c/strong> Quite a few. I think the most concerning one for me is a new private right of action for developers to be able to sue municipalities if they deny a project or if they require sort of different mitigations that the developer views as unlawful.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jordan Grimes:\u003c/strong> Quite a few. I think the most concerning one for me is a new private right of action for developers to be able to sue municipalities if they deny a project or if they require sort of different mitigations that the developer views as unlawful.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>That’s something that is a huge change to CEQA, that is to the Environmental Quality Act, that isn’t there right now. There’s also a provision that basically says if there is a conflict between other environmental laws, that the initiative provisions prevail.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>That’s something that is a huge change to CEQA, that is to the Environmental Quality Act, that isn’t there right now. There’s also a provision that basically says if there is a conflict between other environmental laws, that the initiative provisions prevail.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>There are provisions that severely limit what a court can consider and that severely limits what a court can consider even after — even if environmental harm has been found. The court is very limited in its remedies under the initiative.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>There are provisions that severely limit what a court can consider and that severely limits what a court can consider even after — even if environmental harm has been found. The court is very limited in its remedies under the initiative.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>So there are, I think, a litany of different things with this measure that go far beyond the timelines, many of which I think would be reasonable for certain projects. If we are talking about an apartment building in San Francisco, for example, the timelines that the initiative have in place might even be too long. It might not even make sense to do a year for an apartment project in Hayes Valley.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>So there are, I think, a litany of different things with this measure that go far beyond the timelines, many of which I think would be reasonable for certain projects. If we are talking about an apartment building in San Francisco, for example, the timelines that the initiative have in place might even be too long. It might not even make sense to do a year for an apartment project in Hayes Valley.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Laura Klivans:\u003c/strong> Okay.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Laura Klivans:\u003c/strong> Okay.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jordan Grimes:\u003c/strong> Um, but if you’re talking about, uh, a new, you know, exurban development in the wildland-urban interface in a high-fire area, um, one of your, uh, I would say probably wouldn’t be enough.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jordan Grimes:\u003c/strong> Um, but if you’re talking about, uh, a new, you know, exurban development in the wildland-urban interface in a high-fire area, um, one of your, uh, I would say probably wouldn’t be enough.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Laura Klivans:\u003c/strong> I want to go to a caller now. We have Jim in Richmond. Jim, welcome to \u003cem>Forum\u003c/em>. Thanks for calling in.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Laura Klivans:\u003c/strong> I want to go to a caller now. We have Jim in Richmond. Jim, welcome to \u003cem>Forum\u003c/em>. Thanks for calling in.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jim:\u003c/strong> Yeah, thank you, and thank you for holding the show. As somebody who has read CEQA documents here in the Bay Area on really, frankly, bad projects, I want to tell you that as a citizen, we will — and even the city will — approach a developer to try to cause less damage to habitat or traffic, and without CEQA, or without the ability to challenge it, this really feels like one of those TV shows where you’re running across a lake and you’re competing against people, you know, jumping across these rubber balls or whatever.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jim:\u003c/strong> Yeah, thank you, and thank you for holding the show. As somebody who has read CEQA documents here in the Bay Area on really, frankly, bad projects, I want to tell you that as a citizen, we will — and even the city will — approach a developer to try to cause less damage to habitat or traffic, and without CEQA, or without the ability to challenge it, this really feels like one of those TV shows where you’re running across a lake and you’re competing against people, you know, jumping across these rubber balls or whatever.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>It’s so many obstacles. It just seems impossible at this point. It really feels undemocratic. And I’d like you to address the cost of this as reported in the state pamphlet. Thank you.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>It’s so many obstacles. It just seems impossible at this point. It really feels undemocratic. And I’d like you to address the cost of this as reported in the state pamphlet. Thank you.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Laura Klivans:\u003c/strong> Thank you. Jason, can you address this? Does it take away someone’s ability to challenge?\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Laura Klivans:\u003c/strong> Thank you. Jason, can you address this? Does it take away someone’s ability to challenge?\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jason Elliott:\u003c/strong> And thanks for the call, Jim. I appreciate your advocacy.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jason Elliott:\u003c/strong> And thanks for the call, Jim. I appreciate your advocacy.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>No, it doesn’t take away someone’s ability to challenge it. Let me draw an analogy. I mean, I could go through the provision measure by measure, but this show isn’t long enough. So let me draw an analogy.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>No, it doesn’t take away someone’s ability to challenge it. Let me draw an analogy. I mean, I could go through the provision measure by measure, but this show isn’t long enough. So let me draw an analogy.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>If you think about CEQA and the environmental impact report, so CEQA requires big projects to do the environmental impact report, which is what Ethan had laid out at the top of the hour. Think about the environmental impact report like the SAT test that we probably all endured when we were high schoolers.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>If you think about CEQA and the environmental impact report, so CEQA requires big projects to do the environmental impact report, which is what Ethan had laid out at the top of the hour. Think about the environmental impact report like the SAT test that we probably all endured when we were high schoolers.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>The question — Prop 45 doesn’t make the questions on the SAT easier. It doesn’t allow you to skip the SAT and go straight to college. Proposition 45 doesn’t limit any of those things.\u003c/p>\n",
"innerContent": [
"\n\u003cp>The question — Prop 45 doesn’t make the questions on the SAT easier. It doesn’t allow you to skip the SAT and go straight to college. Proposition 45 doesn’t limit any of those things.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>What Proposition 45 does is say, once you’ve done the SAT, the grader — the state, the city — has a timeline in which they have to grade the SAT and give you your score back, so you can go ahead and apply to college in a timely fashion.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>What Proposition 45 does is say, once you’ve done the SAT, the grader — the state, the city — has a timeline in which they have to grade the SAT and give you your score back, so you can go ahead and apply to college in a timely fashion.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>It’s a timeline, right? It also says that while the grader’s grading your SAT test, the grader can’t say, well, you know, we don’t think that that’s how calculus works anymore. We’re gonna just, like, change one of the rules about log functions. And so you kind of have — you have to start over on the SAT.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>It’s a timeline, right? It also says that while the grader’s grading your SAT test, the grader can’t say, well, you know, we don’t think that that’s how calculus works anymore. We’re gonna just, like, change one of the rules about log functions. And so you kind of have — you have to start over on the SAT.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>That’s how CEQA works today. The way CEQA works is you can finish your environmental impact report with mitigations to make sure that you’re having that conversation with community and local government, get rid of the worst parts of a project that are the most harmful to communities, right?\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>That’s how CEQA works today. The way CEQA works is you can finish your environmental impact report with mitigations to make sure that you’re having that conversation with community and local government, get rid of the worst parts of a project that are the most harmful to communities, right?\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>All of that stays intact. All of the mitigation processes, all of that public feedback all stays intact. But once you’re done with that EIR, with that SAT test, it gets graded in a timely fashion, so you can build your project.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>All of that stays intact. All of the mitigation processes, all of that public feedback all stays intact. But once you’re done with that EIR, with that SAT test, it gets graded in a timely fashion, so you can build your project.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>In our case, we estimate that it will cut the time for projects with EIRs in half, from about 3.1 years to about one and a half years. So it’s half the time, but all the protections.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>In our case, we estimate that it will cut the time for projects with EIRs in half, from about 3.1 years to about one and a half years. So it’s half the time, but all the protections.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>And I think that’s the key point: it doesn’t strip away any protections. It doesn’t eliminate CEQA. So what I heard in Jim’s question was, Prop 45 would eliminate the public’s ability to raise these concerns. It won’t eliminate it. That’s a misconception, so I want to address that.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>And I think that’s the key point: it doesn’t strip away any protections. It doesn’t eliminate CEQA. So what I heard in Jim’s question was, Prop 45 would eliminate the public’s ability to raise these concerns. It won’t eliminate it. That’s a misconception, so I want to address that.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>But it does say that let’s get this stuff done in a timely fashion, so that we can get good projects approved.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>But it does say that let’s get this stuff done in a timely fashion, so that we can get good projects approved.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>And last point I’ll make on this, Proposition 45 leaves intact every local government’s ability to reject an EIR and reject the project. There are no automatic approvals anywhere in Proposition 45. So if a developer brings forward a truly bad environmental project, the city council could just go ahead and reject it and reject the EIR and/or reject the underlying project.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>And last point I’ll make on this, Proposition 45 leaves intact every local government’s ability to reject an EIR and reject the project. There are no automatic approvals anywhere in Proposition 45. So if a developer brings forward a truly bad environmental project, the city council could just go ahead and reject it and reject the EIR and/or reject the underlying project.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Laura Klivans:\u003c/strong> Jordan, how does this sound for you when we’re thinking about what Jim is saying, the ability to challenge a project? Do you feel like it would be harder when Prop 45, if it passes?\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Laura Klivans:\u003c/strong> Jordan, how does this sound for you when we’re thinking about what Jim is saying, the ability to challenge a project? Do you feel like it would be harder when Prop 45, if it passes?\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jordan Grimes:\u003c/strong> Absolutely. A hundred percent. You’re significantly limiting in terms of what the public is allowed to comment on, right? There are provisions that severely limit public comment. You are limiting the timelines in which the public comments are made.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jordan Grimes:\u003c/strong> Absolutely. A hundred percent. You’re significantly limiting in terms of what the public is allowed to comment on, right? There are provisions that severely limit public comment. You are limiting the timelines in which the public comments are made.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Laura Klivans:\u003c/strong> Do it for —\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Laura Klivans:\u003c/strong> Do it for —\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jason Elliott:\u003c/strong> It’s a time limitation. It’s not a qualitative limitation, so let’s make sure we’re accurate about what the measure does.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jason Elliott:\u003c/strong> It’s a time limitation. It’s not a qualitative limitation, so let’s make sure we’re accurate about what the measure does.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Laura Klivans:\u003c/strong> Right, but it does put a date —\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Laura Klivans:\u003c/strong> Right, but it does put a date —\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jason Elliott:\u003c/strong> Like the amount of days, okay?\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jason Elliott:\u003c/strong> Like the amount of days, okay?\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Laura Klivans:\u003c/strong> Yes, it’s a time limit, not a subjective limit.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Laura Klivans:\u003c/strong> Yes, it’s a time limit, not a subjective limit.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jordan Grimes:\u003c/strong> You are limited in terms of vesting. If environmental conditions change on the ground, you are locked into a certain vesting schedule. So basically, things would go — everything would shift.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jordan Grimes:\u003c/strong> You are limited in terms of vesting. If environmental conditions change on the ground, you are locked into a certain vesting schedule. So basically, things would go — everything would shift.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>So, for example, right now, if an EIR was being conducted and conditions changed —\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>So, for example, right now, if an EIR was being conducted and conditions changed —\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Laura Klivans:\u003c/strong> That’s the environmental impact report.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Laura Klivans:\u003c/strong> That’s the environmental impact report.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jordan Grimes:\u003c/strong> Yes. Sorry about the jargon. If an environmental impact report was being conducted and conditions on the ground shifted in terms of habitat, in terms of various other things, right now, as the process works, those things can be considered.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jordan Grimes:\u003c/strong> Yes. Sorry about the jargon. If an environmental impact report was being conducted and conditions on the ground shifted in terms of habitat, in terms of various other things, right now, as the process works, those things can be considered.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>The way the initiative would change the Environmental Quality Act would mean that you could not consider those. The conditions on the ground at the time of the project application would be locked in.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>The way the initiative would change the Environmental Quality Act would mean that you could not consider those. The conditions on the ground at the time of the project application would be locked in.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Laura Klivans:\u003c/strong> Like, read the very start.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Laura Klivans:\u003c/strong> Like, read the very start.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jordan Grimes:\u003c/strong> Exactly. And then the last thing I’ll just say is, yes, a city council or local jurisdiction could deny a project, with the potential that a developer could sue. And so there’s this chilling effect now under this new private right of action, right, where a municipality would have to weigh, do we want to deny this project? Do we want to risk getting sued by a project developer?\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jordan Grimes:\u003c/strong> Exactly. And then the last thing I’ll just say is, yes, a city council or local jurisdiction could deny a project, with the potential that a developer could sue. And so there’s this chilling effect now under this new private right of action, right, where a municipality would have to weigh, do we want to deny this project? Do we want to risk getting sued by a project developer?\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>And again, we’re not just talking about projects that are potentially environmentally beneficial, right? You know, new housing in places we want to see it, bike lanes, public transit. We’re talking about some really potentially harmful projects.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>And again, we’re not just talking about projects that are potentially environmentally beneficial, right? You know, new housing in places we want to see it, bike lanes, public transit. We’re talking about some really potentially harmful projects.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jason Elliott:\u003c/strong> Schools, clinics, hospitals, parks.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jordan Grimes:\u003c/strong> Clean energy, clean water facilities.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Laura Klivans:\u003c/strong> Sure, that’s the side that’s a —\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Laura Klivans:\u003c/strong> Sure, that’s the side that’s a —\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>But I’ve also seen the no side saying, well, what about freeway expansion? We’re talking, like, we’re talking —\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>But I’ve also seen the no side saying, well, what about freeway expansion? We’re talking, like, we’re talking —\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jordan Grimes:\u003c/strong> Is that also included? Freeway expansions are absolutely included. We’re talking about CO2 pipelines. We are talking about exurban developments in high-fire areas. There’s a lot of different things that this project allows. Some of them are good. Some of them, I think, deserve that streamlining.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jordan Grimes:\u003c/strong> Is that also included? Freeway expansions are absolutely included. We’re talking about CO2 pipelines. We are talking about exurban developments in high-fire areas. There’s a lot of different things that this project allows. Some of them are good. Some of them, I think, deserve that streamlining.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>What we are looking at is, on net, is this better than the status quo? And our calculation is absolutely not.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>What we are looking at is, on net, is this better than the status quo? And our calculation is absolutely not.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Laura Klivans:\u003c/strong> Okay, okay. We’re gonna go to — we’re going to go to a caller, and then there’s lots of time to talk about these different things.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Laura Klivans:\u003c/strong> Okay, okay. We’re gonna go to — we’re going to go to a caller, and then there’s lots of time to talk about these different things.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Okay. Lisa, we are going to go to you in San Francisco. Lisa, thank you for calling.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>Okay. Lisa, we are going to go to you in San Francisco. Lisa, thank you for calling.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Lisa:\u003c/strong> Good morning. My head is spinning.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Lisa:\u003c/strong> Good morning. My head is spinning.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Laura Klivans:\u003c/strong> You’re not the only one.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Laura Klivans:\u003c/strong> You’re not the only one.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Lisa:\u003c/strong> Yeah. This is a great debate, but I think for me, in this horrific time where, you know, these astroturf super PACs pop up named, you know, Neighborhoods for San Francisco or whatever. And it’s the real estate lobby or the apartment owners association or what have you, or developers, market-rate developers.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Lisa:\u003c/strong> Yeah. This is a great debate, but I think for me, in this horrific time where, you know, these astroturf super PACs pop up named, you know, Neighborhoods for San Francisco or whatever. And it’s the real estate lobby or the apartment owners association or what have you, or developers, market-rate developers.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>What I want to know from both of your guests, the proponent and the opponent, I would like to know who the major sponsors pro and their money, and I would like to know who are the sponsors against? Because we know that organizations like the San Francisco — the Sierra Club has been captured by real estate forces. I mean, everything is through the looking glass now.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>What I want to know from both of your guests, the proponent and the opponent, I would like to know who the major sponsors pro and their money, and I would like to know who are the sponsors against? Because we know that organizations like the San Francisco — the Sierra Club has been captured by real estate forces. I mean, everything is through the looking glass now.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>So who are the funders of this initiative?\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>So who are the funders of this initiative?\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Laura Klivans:\u003c/strong> That’s a great question. Streamline, I’m triggered. Yes, there’s millions of dollars behind this initiative.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Laura Klivans:\u003c/strong> That’s a great question. Streamline, I’m triggered. Yes, there’s millions of dollars behind this initiative.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>So actually, I know you were asking to go to Jason and Jordan. I’m gonna actually see if Ethan, if you could answer this one. Ethan Elkind with UC Berkeley, where’s the money coming from from both sides?\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>So actually, I know you were asking to go to Jason and Jordan. I’m gonna actually see if Ethan, if you could answer this one. Ethan Elkind with UC Berkeley, where’s the money coming from from both sides?\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Ethan Elkind:\u003c/strong> Yeah, I don’t have encyclopedic knowledge, but I have looked at the backers. I mean, you have the Building Industry Association as a major backer of this. They’re the big sprawl developers in the state. You have the Chamber of Commerce supporting this initiative.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Ethan Elkind:\u003c/strong> Yeah, I don’t have encyclopedic knowledge, but I have looked at the backers. I mean, you have the Building Industry Association as a major backer of this. They’re the big sprawl developers in the state. You have the Chamber of Commerce supporting this initiative.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>You basically have a lot of industry groups that are supporting this. On the con side, you’ve got environmental groups, and then you’ve got labor unions that often use CEQA as leverage to try to get project labor agreements, uh… for their union members, uh… And then, you know, it’s a grab bag of other folks, but I’m sure Jordan and Jason could speak in more detail. But that’s the general gist on the yes and the no side.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>You basically have a lot of industry groups that are supporting this. On the con side, you’ve got environmental groups, and then you’ve got labor unions that often use CEQA as leverage to try to get project labor agreements, uh… for their union members, uh… And then, you know, it’s a grab bag of other folks, but I’m sure Jordan and Jason could speak in more detail. But that’s the general gist on the yes and the no side.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Laura Klivans:\u003c/strong> We’re going to come back to that because we’re about to take a break. This is \u003cem>Forum\u003c/em>. I’m Laura Klivans in for Mina Kim. We’re talking about Proposition 45, a ballot measure proposing changes to California’s landmark environmental protection law.\u003c/p>\n",
"innerContent": [
"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Laura Klivans:\u003c/strong> We’re going to come back to that because we’re about to take a break. This is \u003cem>Forum\u003c/em>. I’m Laura Klivans in for Mina Kim. We’re talking about Proposition 45, a ballot measure proposing changes to California’s landmark environmental protection law.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>And we’re joined by Ethan Elkind of UC Berkeley, Jason Elliott, president of the policy consulting firm Versus Solutions, and Jordan Grimes, legislative director with environmental nonprofit Greenbelt Alliance.\u003c/p>\n",
"innerContent": [
"\n\u003cp>And we’re joined by Ethan Elkind of UC Berkeley, Jason Elliott, president of the policy consulting firm Versus Solutions, and Jordan Grimes, legislative director with environmental nonprofit Greenbelt Alliance.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>And we want to hear from you. How are you planning to vote on Prop 45 and why? Email your comments and questions to \u003ca href=\"mailto:forum@kqed.org\">forum@kqed.org\u003c/a>. Find us on Discord, Bluesky, Facebook, and Instagram. We’re at KQED Forum, or give us a call now at 866-733-6786.\u003c/p>\n",
"innerContent": [
"\n\u003cp>And we want to hear from you. How are you planning to vote on Prop 45 and why? Email your comments and questions to \u003ca href=\"mailto:forum@kqed.org\">forum@kqed.org\u003c/a>. Find us on Discord, Bluesky, Facebook, and Instagram. We’re at KQED Forum, or give us a call now at 866-733-6786.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Welcome back to \u003cem>Forum\u003c/em>. I’m Laura Klivans in for Mina Kim. We are talking about Proposition 45. It’s a ballot measure that is proposing changes to California’s landmark environmental protection law called CEQA.\u003c/p>\n",
"innerContent": [
"\n\u003cp>Welcome back to \u003cem>Forum\u003c/em>. I’m Laura Klivans in for Mina Kim. We are talking about Proposition 45. It’s a ballot measure that is proposing changes to California’s landmark environmental protection law called CEQA.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>We are joined by Ethan Elkind, the Director of the Climate Program at UC Berkeley Center for Law, Energy and the Environment; Jason Elliott, President of the policy consulting firm Versus Solutions; and Jordan Grimes, Legislative Director with environmental nonprofit Greenbelt Alliance.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>We are joined by Ethan Elkind, the Director of the Climate Program at UC Berkeley Center for Law, Energy and the Environment; Jason Elliott, President of the policy consulting firm Versus Solutions; and Jordan Grimes, Legislative Director with environmental nonprofit Greenbelt Alliance.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>I want to go to a question that comes from listener Jeff. Jeff writes, “To what extent do the guests believe the passage of Prop 45 will meaningfully change the speed of development, and in what sectors? Is that clean energy, roads, housing?”\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>I want to go to a question that comes from listener Jeff. Jeff writes, “To what extent do the guests believe the passage of Prop 45 will meaningfully change the speed of development, and in what sectors? Is that clean energy, roads, housing?”\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Jason, let’s go to you.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>Jason, let’s go to you.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jason Elliott:\u003c/strong> Sure. Well, we do believe that it will speed up development, and that’s the purpose for crafting this measure. And speeding up development, let me say why that’s important.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jason Elliott:\u003c/strong> Sure. Well, we do believe that it will speed up development, and that’s the purpose for crafting this measure. And speeding up development, let me say why that’s important.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Speed on its own is not necessarily a good thing. But when you have housing and clean energy and clean water projects, hospital projects, school projects that are delivered faster, that creates cost savings for local governments.\u003c/p>\n",
"innerContent": [
"\n\u003cp>Speed on its own is not necessarily a good thing. But when you have housing and clean energy and clean water projects, hospital projects, school projects that are delivered faster, that creates cost savings for local governments.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Of the non-housing projects that this measure covers, 76% of them that we expect would be covered by EIRs are projects that are brought forward by your local government, by your city, by your county. So they’re looking to fix a bridge, they’re looking to improve a public restroom facility, they’re looking to build a new school campus, high school campus, whatever it might be.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>Of the non-housing projects that this measure covers, 76% of them that we expect would be covered by EIRs are projects that are brought forward by your local government, by your city, by your county. So they’re looking to fix a bridge, they’re looking to improve a public restroom facility, they’re looking to build a new school campus, high school campus, whatever it might be.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>These — the overwhelming majority of projects we believe, not housing, we can talk about housing, is a little different because governments don’t build housing. But of the non-housing projects, the overwhelming majority are public projects.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>These — the overwhelming majority of projects we believe, not housing, we can talk about housing, is a little different because governments don’t build housing. But of the non-housing projects, the overwhelming majority are public projects.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>The longer that those delay, the more the cost goes up. And it’s not some greedy developer hiding in a back room that bears that cost. It’s you, the taxpayer. So this really is around taxpayer protection.\u003c/p>\n",
"innerContent": [
"\n\u003cp>The longer that those delay, the more the cost goes up. And it’s not some greedy developer hiding in a back room that bears that cost. It’s you, the taxpayer. So this really is around taxpayer protection.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>In terms of housing, because the housing part of this measure and the non-housing part of the measure are similar, but they operate, they function in different ways in terms of speeding things up.\u003c/p>\n",
"innerContent": [
"\n\u003cp>In terms of housing, because the housing part of this measure and the non-housing part of the measure are similar, but they operate, they function in different ways in terms of speeding things up.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>In terms of housing, the average — we estimate that the average delay from CEQA alone increases the cost when an EIR has to be performed, increases the cost by $75,000 per new home that’s built by the private sector. So reducing time does reduce cost, which makes houses more affordable.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>In terms of housing, the average — we estimate that the average delay from CEQA alone increases the cost when an EIR has to be performed, increases the cost by $75,000 per new home that’s built by the private sector. So reducing time does reduce cost, which makes houses more affordable.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>So this really is all around reducing the cost of living by reducing how expensive it is to build stuff.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>So this really is all around reducing the cost of living by reducing how expensive it is to build stuff.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Laura Klivans:\u003c/strong> California. And this is one of the reasons why it seems like the Cal Chamber wanted to bring this.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Laura Klivans:\u003c/strong> California. And this is one of the reasons why it seems like the Cal Chamber wanted to bring this.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jason Elliott:\u003c/strong> That’s right.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jason Elliott:\u003c/strong> That’s right.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Laura Klivans:\u003c/strong> And so, can you actually give us a number, a year number, like right now it takes an average of this many years to build housing and after this it would, we believe —\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Laura Klivans:\u003c/strong> And so, can you actually give us a number, a year number, like right now it takes an average of this many years to build housing and after this it would, we believe —\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jason Elliott:\u003c/strong> Well, I’ll give you a number that I can stand behind, which is how long CEQA delays projects, because how long it takes to build housing can depend on so many factors.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jason Elliott:\u003c/strong> Well, I’ll give you a number that I can stand behind, which is how long CEQA delays projects, because how long it takes to build housing can depend on so many factors.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>But in terms of housing, housing projects that have to perform this environmental impact report that we’ve been discussing take on average 3.1 years. Non-housing projects that also have to perform an EIR take on an average of 3.0 years, so about three years.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>But in terms of housing, housing projects that have to perform this environmental impact report that we’ve been discussing take on average 3.1 years. Non-housing projects that also have to perform an EIR take on an average of 3.0 years, so about three years.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>We anticipate that our measure would, because of the timelines that Jordan mentioned, conclude in 17 months. So you’re talking about roughly half the time. You’re cutting that roughly in half without diminishing any of the underlying environmental protections.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>We anticipate that our measure would, because of the timelines that Jordan mentioned, conclude in 17 months. So you’re talking about roughly half the time. You’re cutting that roughly in half without diminishing any of the underlying environmental protections.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>And I think that’s just a key point that keeps getting lost here. The underlying legal environmental protections all remain in place under Proposition 45.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>And I think that’s just a key point that keeps getting lost here. The underlying legal environmental protections all remain in place under Proposition 45.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Laura Klivans:\u003c/strong> Okay.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Laura Klivans:\u003c/strong> Okay.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Jordan Grimes from the environmental nonprofit Greenbelt Alliance. What is your take on how much this, if we pass Prop 45, would speed up development? And then I wanna ask you about cost as well.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>Jordan Grimes from the environmental nonprofit Greenbelt Alliance. What is your take on how much this, if we pass Prop 45, would speed up development? And then I wanna ask you about cost as well.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jordan Grimes:\u003c/strong> Yeah, absolutely. I think the concern, the biggest concern to us, is that it will tremendously speed up projects that are going to harm the environment.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jordan Grimes:\u003c/strong> Yeah, absolutely. I think the concern, the biggest concern to us, is that it will tremendously speed up projects that are going to harm the environment.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>I actually don’t think it will do very much at all for projects that are environmentally beneficial, for the projects that I think people care most about. The California legislature last year granted a clean, complete statutory exemption to infill housing projects. It was a watershed moment for the state in acknowledging that environmental review can be used. For infill, the legislature remedied it.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>I actually don’t think it will do very much at all for projects that are environmentally beneficial, for the projects that I think people care most about. The California legislature last year granted a clean, complete statutory exemption to infill housing projects. It was a watershed moment for the state in acknowledging that environmental review can be used. For infill, the legislature remedied it.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>So if you want to build an apartment in Beverly Hills or Palo Alto, you no longer have to go through that environmental review, which will be a huge boon to solving our housing crisis.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>So if you want to build an apartment in Beverly Hills or Palo Alto, you no longer have to go through that environmental review, which will be a huge boon to solving our housing crisis.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Likewise, the legislature has provided statutory exemptions for bike lanes, for bus projects, for public transit, for clean energy. And so, realistically, I think the types of projects that Californians are really demanding — the clean energy, the housing projects that we need — we have already exempted those things.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>Likewise, the legislature has provided statutory exemptions for bike lanes, for bus projects, for public transit, for clean energy. And so, realistically, I think the types of projects that Californians are really demanding — the clean energy, the housing projects that we need — we have already exempted those things.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>And so I do think it will speed up projects, but they’re the projects that we don’t want to see. It’s new subdivisions in high wildfire areas. It’s the CO2 pipelines. It’s potentially data centers, right?\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>And so I do think it will speed up projects, but they’re the projects that we don’t want to see. It’s new subdivisions in high wildfire areas. It’s the CO2 pipelines. It’s potentially data centers, right?\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Laura Klivans:\u003c/strong> Let’s talk about that, just that housing piece. So what you are saying is that because last year California passed what was called AB 130, it is now — housing developments are exempt in urban areas, right? From CEQA, from all this stuff.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Laura Klivans:\u003c/strong> Let’s talk about that, just that housing piece. So what you are saying is that because last year California passed what was called AB 130, it is now — housing developments are exempt in urban areas, right? From CEQA, from all this stuff.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>And so I have seen the no side say, listen, why do we need this if we’ve already gotten that? It’s still rolling out. And that you believe that housing, it would be easier to build housing in wildfire-prone areas. Like a place like Paradise that is, you know, in this gorgeous wooded area, but also very fire-prone, right?\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>And so I have seen the no side say, listen, why do we need this if we’ve already gotten that? It’s still rolling out. And that you believe that housing, it would be easier to build housing in wildfire-prone areas. Like a place like Paradise that is, you know, in this gorgeous wooded area, but also very fire-prone, right?\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>So Jordan, if you could — or excuse me, Jason, can you tell me what is your take on that? Is it gonna be easier to build housing in these places where we don’t necessarily wanna promote it?\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>So Jordan, if you could — or excuse me, Jason, can you tell me what is your take on that? Is it gonna be easier to build housing in these places where we don’t necessarily wanna promote it?\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jason Elliott:\u003c/strong> Yeah, great. And thanks, Jordan, for mentioning Assembly Bill 130. I worked for years when I was inside state government to bring that policy forward, to do the politics and the policy, and thank God for Buffy Wicks and Scott Wiener. Amen. Yeah. And they brought that forward.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jason Elliott:\u003c/strong> Yeah, great. And thanks, Jordan, for mentioning Assembly Bill 130. I worked for years when I was inside state government to bring that policy forward, to do the politics and the policy, and thank God for Buffy Wicks and Scott Wiener. Amen. Yeah. And they brought that forward.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>So that’s a huge win. Really proud of the work on that and Governor Newsom for pushing it through the budget. But he pushed it through the budget. The legislature did that. They found their courage, and thank God for Scott Wiener and Buffy Wicks.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>So that’s a huge win. Really proud of the work on that and Governor Newsom for pushing it through the budget. But he pushed it through the budget. The legislature did that. They found their courage, and thank God for Scott Wiener and Buffy Wicks.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>But, you know, the courage of a couple of legislators is not a statewide housing policy. And in this state, we are millions of units short. I ran housing policy for the state for a number of years. We’re millions of years short, right? Yeah, we’re millions of units short.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>But, you know, the courage of a couple of legislators is not a statewide housing policy. And in this state, we are millions of units short. I ran housing policy for the state for a number of years. We’re millions of years short, right? Yeah, we’re millions of units short.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>And when you have this much of a housing deficit in California, you have to build up, but you also have to build out, right?\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>And when you have this much of a housing deficit in California, you have to build up, but you also have to build out, right?\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>And I think it’s really important that we just acknowledge that reality, the uncomfortable reality that some of our environmental opponents — about 100 organizations who opposed AB 130 — we met in the hall, and I know that’s not you, but 100-plus environmental organizations that opposed Assembly Bill 130 last year, that streamlining we were just talking about, they called it, quote, “the worst anti-environmental law in recent history.”\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>And I think it’s really important that we just acknowledge that reality, the uncomfortable reality that some of our environmental opponents — about 100 organizations who opposed AB 130 — we met in the hall, and I know that’s not you, but 100-plus environmental organizations that opposed Assembly Bill 130 last year, that streamlining we were just talking about, they called it, quote, “the worst anti-environmental law in recent history.”\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>That exact same coalition is now opposing Proposition 45. And I’m not trying to put this on you, Jordan, we just met. You seem like you’re a pro-housing guy, and I appreciate your leadership on that. But let’s talk about who’s behind the opposition to this measure.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>That exact same coalition is now opposing Proposition 45. And I’m not trying to put this on you, Jordan, we just met. You seem like you’re a pro-housing guy, and I appreciate your leadership on that. But let’s talk about who’s behind the opposition to this measure.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>It is the same anti-housing environmental groups that for decades, decades, have been blocking the kinds of housing we need.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>It is the same anti-housing environmental groups that for decades, decades, have been blocking the kinds of housing we need.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Because here’s the thing about Proposition 45. I think it’s another important point to make. Jordan keeps mentioning, and some of the opponents of the measure talk about, well, it’s not just housing. It’s all these other things.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>Because here’s the thing about Proposition 45. I think it’s another important point to make. Jordan keeps mentioning, and some of the opponents of the measure talk about, well, it’s not just housing. It’s all these other things.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>All those other things are what make housing complete neighborhoods. A housing unit is just a housing unit until you attach it to water, until you build a school nearby, so forth.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>All those other things are what make housing complete neighborhoods. A housing unit is just a housing unit until you attach it to water, until you build a school nearby, so forth.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>And, you know, I see housing — just last point I wanna make on this — you know I’ve been working on these issues for years and years, and the way that I see housing development, it’s like a complicated safe in, like, one of those safe-cracking movies where you gotta get every little pin lined up.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>And, you know, I see housing — just last point I wanna make on this — you know I’ve been working on these issues for years and years, and the way that I see housing development, it’s like a complicated safe in, like, one of those safe-cracking movies where you gotta get every little pin lined up.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>And if you don’t have the water and the electricity, you know, one of the big problems we have in this state is interconnection. A new building gets built, but you can’t get power to it, so it just stays empty.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>And if you don’t have the water and the electricity, you know, one of the big problems we have in this state is interconnection. A new building gets built, but you can’t get power to it, so it just stays empty.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>You gotta get all these pins, and if one of these pins is just a hair off, you can’t unlock that new neighborhood, you can’t move families in.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>You gotta get all these pins, and if one of these pins is just a hair off, you can’t unlock that new neighborhood, you can’t move families in.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>So Proposition 45 absolutely does streamline a number of those other things that are necessary. People drive on highways, right? People need to turn on the lights and have clean energy, power their microwaves and so forth.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>So Proposition 45 absolutely does streamline a number of those other things that are necessary. People drive on highways, right? People need to turn on the lights and have clean energy, power their microwaves and so forth.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>So yes, Proposition 45 is about building those complete neighborhoods because a housing unit is just a paper promise until we connect it to all that infrastructure. Then it becomes a home.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>So yes, Proposition 45 is about building those complete neighborhoods because a housing unit is just a paper promise until we connect it to all that infrastructure. Then it becomes a home.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Laura Klivans:\u003c/strong> I want to bring in Ethan Elkind. He’s from UC Berkeley, a legal expert.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Laura Klivans:\u003c/strong> I want to bring in Ethan Elkind. He’s from UC Berkeley, a legal expert.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Ethan, from your legal standpoint, you have seen that AB 130 passed last year. It’s begun to be implemented. How much Prop 45 changes housing development compared to the reforms of the past?\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>Ethan, from your legal standpoint, you have seen that AB 130 passed last year. It’s begun to be implemented. How much Prop 45 changes housing development compared to the reforms of the past?\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Ethan Elkind:\u003c/strong> Well, I think, as Jordan said, infill housing — the kinds of environmentally beneficial housing that we want to see — basically got a free pass under CEQA.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Ethan Elkind:\u003c/strong> Well, I think, as Jordan said, infill housing — the kinds of environmentally beneficial housing that we want to see — basically got a free pass under CEQA.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>And the reality is — and Jason basically described this — there are so many barriers to all sorts of projects in the state that go well beyond where environmental review comes into the process, that, you know, by blaming CEQA for all the delays that we have, we’re taking our eye off the ball of all these other problems.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>And the reality is — and Jason basically described this — there are so many barriers to all sorts of projects in the state that go well beyond where environmental review comes into the process, that, you know, by blaming CEQA for all the delays that we have, we’re taking our eye off the ball of all these other problems.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>I mean, Jason described how CEQA does not [involve] local land-use decision-making, but that’s exactly why we’re not really getting at the heart of the problem as to why there are so many delays for projects in the state. We have a lot of different local governments, special districts, utilities, all of which could create a lot of delays for projects that CEQA does not touch.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>I mean, Jason described how CEQA does not [involve] local land-use decision-making, but that’s exactly why we’re not really getting at the heart of the problem as to why there are so many delays for projects in the state. We have a lot of different local governments, special districts, utilities, all of which could create a lot of delays for projects that CEQA does not touch.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>And so your question around how housing is affected, because we’ve already carved out an exemption that really just went into effect for all infill housing projects: the beneficiaries of Prop 45, by narrowing the scope of environmental review, by narrowing the alternatives, by dramatically shortening the shot clock for any sort of challenges, by raising the bar to judicial challenges, the only beneficiaries of that are going to be these sort of large subdivision projects, because all other types of housing in the state is now essentially exempted.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>And so your question around how housing is affected, because we’ve already carved out an exemption that really just went into effect for all infill housing projects: the beneficiaries of Prop 45, by narrowing the scope of environmental review, by narrowing the alternatives, by dramatically shortening the shot clock for any sort of challenges, by raising the bar to judicial challenges, the only beneficiaries of that are going to be these sort of large subdivision projects, because all other types of housing in the state is now essentially exempted.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>So those are the beneficiaries. It’s going to be a lot harder for the public to be able to hold to account decision-makers who are approving these large subdivisions. We’re going to lose the ability to require mitigation and analyze those impacts really adequately in advance.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>So those are the beneficiaries. It’s going to be a lot harder for the public to be able to hold to account decision-makers who are approving these large subdivisions. We’re going to lose the ability to require mitigation and analyze those impacts really adequately in advance.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jason Elliott:\u003c/strong> That’s not true that we lose the ability. I’m sorry, but that’s a mischaracterization of the measure.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jason Elliott:\u003c/strong> That’s not true that we lose the ability. I’m sorry, but that’s a mischaracterization of the measure.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Ethan Elkind:\u003c/strong> Well, but by dramatically reducing the scope of the impacts, by reducing the alternatives, and by putting a really dramatically increased shot clock, you’re limiting the ability of the public to understand what the impacts are and to challenge them because they’re not going to have the time and the information to be able to do so.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Ethan Elkind:\u003c/strong> Well, but by dramatically reducing the scope of the impacts, by reducing the alternatives, and by putting a really dramatically increased shot clock, you’re limiting the ability of the public to understand what the impacts are and to challenge them because they’re not going to have the time and the information to be able to do so.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>And if they do want to challenge them in court, the bar to challenging them in the court has now been raised dramatically by Prop 45.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>And if they do want to challenge them in court, the bar to challenging them in the court has now been raised dramatically by Prop 45.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Laura Klivans:\u003c/strong> I’m going to interrupt this one because we’re going to go to a caller. I want to remind us all this is \u003cem>Forum\u003c/em>. I’m Laura Klivans, I’m in for Mina Kim.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Laura Klivans:\u003c/strong> I’m going to interrupt this one because we’re going to go to a caller. I want to remind us all this is \u003cem>Forum\u003c/em>. I’m Laura Klivans, I’m in for Mina Kim.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>We are talking about Proposition 45, which you can tell is contentious. It’s a ballot measure proposing changes to California’s landmark environmental protection law. We are joined with Ethan Elkind, Jason Elliott, Jordan Grimes, and we want to hear from you.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>We are talking about Proposition 45, which you can tell is contentious. It’s a ballot measure proposing changes to California’s landmark environmental protection law. We are joined with Ethan Elkind, Jason Elliott, Jordan Grimes, and we want to hear from you.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Are there — were you in California when CEQA got started in the ’60s and ’70s? What do you make of the way it’s evolved over the decades? Email us your comments and questions to \u003ca href=\"mailto:forum@kqed.org\">forum@kqed.org\u003c/a>. You can find us on all the online things. You can call us at 1-866-733-6786.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>Are there — were you in California when CEQA got started in the ’60s and ’70s? What do you make of the way it’s evolved over the decades? Email us your comments and questions to \u003ca href=\"mailto:forum@kqed.org\">forum@kqed.org\u003c/a>. You can find us on all the online things. You can call us at 1-866-733-6786.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>I wanna go now to a caller, Douglas in San Leandro. Thank you so much for joining us, Douglas. What’s your question?\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>I wanna go now to a caller, Douglas in San Leandro. Thank you so much for joining us, Douglas. What’s your question?\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Douglas:\u003c/strong> Uh… Good morning. It may be, uh… more of a comment. I’d like to bring data centers back to the conversation, with the data centers, which are huge energy and water demand for exactly the kind of thing that CEQA was intended to address.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Douglas:\u003c/strong> Uh… Good morning. It may be, uh… more of a comment. I’d like to bring data centers back to the conversation, with the data centers, which are huge energy and water demand for exactly the kind of thing that CEQA was intended to address.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Uh… And yet, uh… you know, what’s happening at 70% or more the public has indicated they’re really not in favor, is that the independent developers are rushing, rushing, rushing to get stuff done.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>Uh… And yet, uh… you know, what’s happening at 70% or more the public has indicated they’re really not in favor, is that the independent developers are rushing, rushing, rushing to get stuff done.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>And, you know, the idea that, well, we can just go to the city council and get them to defeat it, or we can look at our zoning codes and say, well, it’s not zoned for data centers — it’s not true.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>And, you know, the idea that, well, we can just go to the city council and get them to defeat it, or we can look at our zoning codes and say, well, it’s not zoned for data centers — it’s not true.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>What just happened in the city of Hayward next door to me is, right, the Planning Commission approved a humongous data center, more than 300,000 square feet. It never went to the City Council. The people of Hayward never knew about it. It was approved as office space, and we’re faced with the same thing here in San Leandro, where our Planning Commission just approved a conditional use permit for a similarly sized place, and it looks like it’s primed to be a data center.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>What just happened in the city of Hayward next door to me is, right, the Planning Commission approved a humongous data center, more than 300,000 square feet. It never went to the City Council. The people of Hayward never knew about it. It was approved as office space, and we’re faced with the same thing here in San Leandro, where our Planning Commission just approved a conditional use permit for a similarly sized place, and it looks like it’s primed to be a data center.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Nowhere are there any codes about data centers. It would be good if there were because then it would flag us for it.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>Nowhere are there any codes about data centers. It would be good if there were because then it would flag us for it.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>So the problem about shortening the timeline is we don’t know what’s going on. And it’s these data center developers are, you know, they’re having our official sign non-disclosure agreements, so what the heck is happening in closed session? We don’t know.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>So the problem about shortening the timeline is we don’t know what’s going on. And it’s these data center developers are, you know, they’re having our official sign non-disclosure agreements, so what the heck is happening in closed session? We don’t know.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>So the time is actually really quite an important protection for us, the public.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>So the time is actually really quite an important protection for us, the public.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Laura Klivans:\u003c/strong> And given what Ethan Elkind said earlier in the hour is that he believes from his legal perspective that data centers could be included in this proposition, Prop 45.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Laura Klivans:\u003c/strong> And given what Ethan Elkind said earlier in the hour is that he believes from his legal perspective that data centers could be included in this proposition, Prop 45.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Jordan Grimes from the Greenbelt Alliance, why do you consider data centers as potentially part of this legislation?\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jordan Grimes:\u003c/strong> Yeah, well, I’ll say it’s not just me. It’s attorneys and legal scholars from UC Berkeley, from UC Davis. But essentially, the way the provision is drafted, right? “Essential broadband internet access project.”\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jordan Grimes:\u003c/strong> Yeah, well, I’ll say it’s not just me. It’s attorneys and legal scholars from UC Berkeley, from UC Davis. But essentially, the way the provision is drafted, right? “Essential broadband internet access project.”\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Laura Klivans:\u003c/strong> Um —\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jordan Grimes:\u003c/strong> What that language means and the broad applicability of that, we absolutely believe covers data centers.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jordan Grimes:\u003c/strong> What that language means and the broad applicability of that, we absolutely believe covers data centers.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Laura Klivans:\u003c/strong> There’s also a provision — why do you think that? Because it says broadband access, right?\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Laura Klivans:\u003c/strong> There’s also a provision — why do you think that? Because it says broadband access, right?\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jordan Grimes:\u003c/strong> I think fundamentally that could absolutely — broadband access could, given the legal definition, be applied to data centers.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jordan Grimes:\u003c/strong> I think fundamentally that could absolutely — broadband access could, given the legal definition, be applied to data centers.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Laura Klivans:\u003c/strong> Okay. There’s a co-location of a broadband center and a data center, and that would get —\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Laura Klivans:\u003c/strong> Okay. There’s a co-location of a broadband center and a data center, and that would get —\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jordan Grimes:\u003c/strong> Potentially. There’s also the provision in the measure that allows for the provisions of the measure to apply to ancillary infrastructure. So if you’re locating a broadband internet access project in a facility that houses multiple tenants, there is that aspect, but there’s the aspect that you could apply this would be required to furnish those things.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jordan Grimes:\u003c/strong> Potentially. There’s also the provision in the measure that allows for the provisions of the measure to apply to ancillary infrastructure. So if you’re locating a broadband internet access project in a facility that houses multiple tenants, there is that aspect, but there’s the aspect that you could apply this would be required to furnish those things.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Laura Klivans:\u003c/strong> That’s okay.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Uh… Merit matters. I think it is about time to hear — if you want to hear your response.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>Uh… Merit matters. I think it is about time to hear — if you want to hear your response.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jason Elliott:\u003c/strong> Yeah, data centers are not covered by Proposition 45, and I appreciate that the opponents of this measure, as you’ve heard, want to assert that they are.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jason Elliott:\u003c/strong> Yeah, data centers are not covered by Proposition 45, and I appreciate that the opponents of this measure, as you’ve heard, want to assert that they are.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>We have a former CPUC Public Utilities Commissioner, former FCC Commissioner, a bunch of lawyers who are not affiliated with the campaign who have published opinions that they don’t think data centers are covered, so we can go lawyer for lawyer, I suppose.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>We have a former CPUC Public Utilities Commissioner, former FCC Commissioner, a bunch of lawyers who are not affiliated with the campaign who have published opinions that they don’t think data centers are covered, so we can go lawyer for lawyer, I suppose.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>But, you know, the data center coalition itself, the sort of industry arm, mouthpiece of the data center industry, has declined to support the measure because they say that data centers — this measure doesn’t help data centers. So I suppose that’s probably the greatest validation of all.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>But, you know, the data center coalition itself, the sort of industry arm, mouthpiece of the data center industry, has declined to support the measure because they say that data centers — this measure doesn’t help data centers. So I suppose that’s probably the greatest validation of all.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>But look, this question around data centers… I’ve been doing campaigns a long time. I get why the opponents are using data centers. I have seen polling too. We have our own polling. Data centers are profoundly unpopular. It’s why we didn’t include them in the measure.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>But look, this question around data centers… I’ve been doing campaigns a long time. I get why the opponents are using data centers. I have seen polling too. We have our own polling. Data centers are profoundly unpopular. It’s why we didn’t include them in the measure.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Laura Klivans:\u003c/strong> Right. The measure does have carve-outs, right? It says, okay, clean energy projects are included, but not nuclear. So why did it say, but not —\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Laura Klivans:\u003c/strong> Right. The measure does have carve-outs, right? It says, okay, clean energy projects are included, but not nuclear. So why did it say, but not —\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jason Elliott:\u003c/strong> Data centers. It’s a great question. Let’s take high-speed rail, for example.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jason Elliott:\u003c/strong> Data centers. It’s a great question. Let’s take high-speed rail, for example.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Laura Klivans:\u003c/strong> Yeah, but why does it say not data centers?\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Laura Klivans:\u003c/strong> Yeah, but why does it say not data centers?\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jason Elliott:\u003c/strong> I’m going to explain why using high-speed rail. So high-speed rail was excluded or carved out, as you said, because transportation projects otherwise are included. So had we not carved out high-speed rail or the Delta Tunnel, as was mentioned earlier, that would be covered under existing central project definitions.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jason Elliott:\u003c/strong> I’m going to explain why using high-speed rail. So high-speed rail was excluded or carved out, as you said, because transportation projects otherwise are included. So had we not carved out high-speed rail or the Delta Tunnel, as was mentioned earlier, that would be covered under existing central project definitions.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Data centers just don’t factor into this because despite Jordan’s best attempts, a data center is not a broadband line. They’re just different things.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>Data centers just don’t factor into this because despite Jordan’s best attempts, a data center is not a broadband line. They’re just different things.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>And if you read the text of the measure, you will see that they are, just by plain reading, different things. Will someone somewhere try to make some argument? Sure, but the text of the measure is absolutely clear that data centers are just simply not covered, right?\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>And if you read the text of the measure, you will see that they are, just by plain reading, different things. Will someone somewhere try to make some argument? Sure, but the text of the measure is absolutely clear that data centers are just simply not covered, right?\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>The list of things that are not covered is quite literally infinite. I mean, you could just keep going and going and doing, but we excluded things that would have otherwise been covered.\u003c/p>\n",
"innerContent": [
"\n\u003cp>The list of things that are not covered is quite literally infinite. I mean, you could just keep going and going and doing, but we excluded things that would have otherwise been covered.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>And, you know, I just like — I think that there’s a key point here. Campaigns, you can basically say anything you want with a glossy mailer or like on a social media ad, right? Here’s where you can’t say anything. You can’t say anything you want in the official ballot argument that you actually have to submit to the Secretary of State.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>And, you know, I just like — I think that there’s a key point here. Campaigns, you can basically say anything you want with a glossy mailer or like on a social media ad, right? Here’s where you can’t say anything. You can’t say anything you want in the official ballot argument that you actually have to submit to the Secretary of State.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>That’s where there’s a legal bar for truthfulness and veracity, right? Because you can litigate those, right? Guess where data centers does not appear in the official ballot argument. The opponents of this measure know that it’s a specious argument, and so they didn’t put it in their official ballot arguments, and that’s kind of all you need to know.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>That’s where there’s a legal bar for truthfulness and veracity, right? Because you can litigate those, right? Guess where data centers does not appear in the official ballot argument. The opponents of this measure know that it’s a specious argument, and so they didn’t put it in their official ballot arguments, and that’s kind of all you need to know.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>They’re using it because it polls. Well, I would do the same thing if I were in their shoes, but let’s not use scare tactics. Let’s talk about what’s actually in the —\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>They’re using it because it polls. Well, I would do the same thing if I were in their shoes, but let’s not use scare tactics. Let’s talk about what’s actually in the —\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jordan Grimes:\u003c/strong> I do really want to push back on the idea that these are scare tactics.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jordan Grimes:\u003c/strong> I do really want to push back on the idea that these are scare tactics.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>You have data center developers who are donating to this campaign. You have Prologis, who, by the way… Prologis builds solar. Prologis is building five data centers right now in San Jose.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>You have data center developers who are donating to this campaign. You have Prologis, who, by the way… Prologis builds solar. Prologis is building five data centers right now in San Jose.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Laura Klivans:\u003c/strong> And then the campaign finance rate, isn’t there something around $15 million that has been donated by a PAC that does have representatives from data centers?\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Laura Klivans:\u003c/strong> And then the campaign finance rate, isn’t there something around $15 million that has been donated by a PAC that does have representatives from data centers?\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jordan Grimes:\u003c/strong> Absolutely.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jordan Grimes:\u003c/strong> Absolutely.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Laura Klivans:\u003c/strong> For the pro side.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Laura Klivans:\u003c/strong> For the pro side.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jordan Grimes:\u003c/strong> Absolutely. And again, the Prologis — the PUC expert that was cited, you know, is a board member of Prologis, right? You have them giving half a million dollars to the campaign.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jordan Grimes:\u003c/strong> Absolutely. And again, the Prologis — the PUC expert that was cited, you know, is a board member of Prologis, right? You have them giving half a million dollars to the campaign.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Okay, I don’t think they would be doing that, quite frankly, if they, you know, weren’t getting something pretty significant.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>Okay, I don’t think they would be doing that, quite frankly, if they, you know, weren’t getting something pretty significant.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jason Elliott:\u003c/strong> The no side has received $16 million in contributions from one billionaire. Okay, so, like, if we’re gonna have a discussion about funding, I’ll tell you where our money comes from and our support. The infill builders have supported our measure.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jason Elliott:\u003c/strong> The no side has received $16 million in contributions from one billionaire. Okay, so, like, if we’re gonna have a discussion about funding, I’ll tell you where our money comes from and our support. The infill builders have supported our measure.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Laura Klivans:\u003c/strong> I’m so sorry, we are gonna have to leave it there. There is so much to talk about. The time goes very quickly. Let’s do another hour.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Laura Klivans:\u003c/strong> I’m so sorry, we are gonna have to leave it there. There is so much to talk about. The time goes very quickly. Let’s do another hour.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>This is \u003cem>Forum\u003c/em>. I’m Laura Klivans. I’m in for Mina Kim. We’ve been talking about Prop 45. We’ve been joined by Ethan Elkind, the director of the Climate Program at UC Berkeley Center for Law, Energy, and the Environment; Jason Elliott of Versus Solutions; Jordan Grimes from the Greenbelt Alliance.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>This is \u003cem>Forum\u003c/em>. I’m Laura Klivans. I’m in for Mina Kim. We’ve been talking about Prop 45. We’ve been joined by Ethan Elkind, the director of the Climate Program at UC Berkeley Center for Law, Energy, and the Environment; Jason Elliott of Versus Solutions; Jordan Grimes from the Greenbelt Alliance.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Thank you so much for joining us. Have a great day.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jason Elliott:\u003c/strong> Thanks so much.\u003c/p>\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\n\u003ch2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Airdate: Wednesday, October 7, 2026 at 10 AM\u003c/h2>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>The California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA), which requires most proposed public and private development projects to go through a thorough environmental impact review process, has long been blamed for slowing or stopping the development of new construction in the state. This November, Californians will vote on Proposition 45, which attempts to streamline CEQA review for certain “essential” projects. We’ll look at how changes could impact housing, data centers and more.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Guests:\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n\u003cli>\u003cstrong>Ethan Elkind,\u003c/strong> director of the Climate Program at the Center for Law, Energy and the Environment, UC Berkeley School of Law; podcast host, Climate Break\u003c/li>\n\n\n\n\u003cli>\u003cstrong>Jason Elliott,\u003c/strong> president, Versus Solutions; former deputy chief of staff to Governor Gavin Newsom, helped craft Prop 45\u003c/li>\n\n\n\n\u003cli>\u003cstrong>Jordan Grimes,\u003c/strong> legislative director, Greenbelt Alliance\u003c/li>\n\u003c/ul>\n\n\n\n\u003ch2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Episode Transcript\u003c/h2>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cem>\u003cstrong>This is a computer-generated transcript. While our team has reviewed it, there may be errors.\u003c/strong>\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Laura Klivans:\u003c/strong> Welcome to \u003cem>Forum\u003c/em>. I’m Laura Klivans in for Mina Kim. When then-Governor Ronald Reagan signed the California Environmental Quality Act in 1970, it was meant to keep bulldozers from tearing up sensitive ecosystems. Fifty-six years later, CEQA is one of the most fiercely debated laws in the state. Its champions say it gives marginalized communities a means to stop harmful development. Critics say it’s been weaponized to block housing and drive up costs.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>For decades, politicians wouldn’t go near CEQA reform, but as California’s housing crisis has deepened and clean energy projects must roll out at a faster pace, the calculation has shifted. Legislation passed last year made huge changes to the law, and this year, potentially more could come in the form of Proposition 45.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>We’re going to hear from the people who’ve brought this initiative and those who oppose it, and we’ll talk about how unexpected players — data centers — have entered the conversation. But first, we’re joined by Ethan Elkind, Director of the Climate Program at UC Berkeley Center for Law, Energy, and the Environment. Welcome, Ethan.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Ethan Elkind:\u003c/strong> Thank you, Laura. Good to be with you.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Laura Klivans:\u003c/strong> Well, thanks for joining us, Ethan. I’ve spoken to you a lot. I’m a climate reporter here at KQED. Today we are talking about CEQA, which is, of course, the California Environmental Quality Act. Tell us, what is actually in this? What does it mean?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Ethan Elkind:\u003c/strong> Yes. Well, as you mentioned, it was signed by Ronald Reagan, and it was originally just proposed to apply to major public infrastructure projects. And the point of the law was to require decision-makers, in advance of deciding on a big project, to figure out what are the likely environmental impacts of that project. And if there are significant negative environmental impacts, then decision-makers would have to mitigate those impacts if it’s feasible to do so.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Now, if it is not feasible, the project is just going to have a lot of impacts and there’s nothing you can really do, then the project could proceed. But basically, it was a way to inform decision-makers and inform the public about the project’s scope of impacts, and also potential alternatives to the project.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Now, the courts have dramatically expanded it. And there was a big decision in 1972 that basically said now all projects that require some sort of public approval, which is basically all projects, now have to go through the CEQA process. So it has been greatly expanded by the courts based on what Ronald Reagan thought he was signing — I’m assuming what he thought he was signing in 1970.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Laura Klivans:\u003c/strong> So it started out as something that’s like, this is about, you know, dams. And then now it’s like, this is about your neighbor’s house.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Ethan Elkind:\u003c/strong> Yes, although many projects are exempt or face very streamlined review. Now, the biggest projects have to undergo what’s called an environmental impact report. And these can be like multiple phone-book-sized documents that look at all types of impacts. But that’s really just a very small percentage of projects.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And then once those environmental impact reports come out, and really almost all steps in the process of CEQA, there’s opportunities for the public to sue if they feel like decision-makers have done an inadequate job in analyzing those impacts. And that’s really where a lot of the controversy around CEQA has come into play, that it provides members of the public with opportunities to have pretty extreme leverage in some cases over particularly large projects.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Laura Klivans:\u003c/strong> And so talk me through that. CEQA has been criticized for stunting development. So take us through the process of what a developer actually must do to comply with it.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Ethan Elkind:\u003c/strong> Well, like I say, it really depends on how big the project is. Many projects are completely exempt. If a project just has a very narrow set of likely impacts, then often it’s very easy to just come up with some simple mitigation measures, and then the developer can move forward.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>But for big projects that have a lot of impacts — think of, like, a big industrial project, maybe a large subdivision out on green space, farmland, maybe transmission lines, logging projects, et cetera. Those kinds of projects have multiple types of impacts. They’ll impact the air quality, they’ll impact endangered species habitat, they will impact noise, visual aesthetics, archaeological resources, historical resources. All of these types of impacts have to be analyzed for these large projects and mitigated where feasible.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And at that point, the public, if there’s maybe an economic competitor, if they’re neighbors, uh… There’s environmental groups — they have the ability to sue if those impacts are not analyzed properly and the mitigation measures aren’t adequate, uh… And so that’s really where the leverage comes into play, and it’s often at the very end of the process when a developer’s already sort of lined up a lot of their financing, figured out where legally they’re allowed to proceed under the land-use laws.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And so for developers, for industry, they hate this law because it injects a huge amount of uncertainty really right at the end of the process. And by delaying projects, that costs money. I mean, time is money for developers. And while the law is not meant to stop any projects, it can effectively do so if there’s litigation that draws out the timelines by many years.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Laura Klivans:\u003c/strong> Okay. And then, so how long does CEQA review actually take in some of those instances? On average, maybe, and then in the worst-case scenarios.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Ethan Elkind:\u003c/strong> Yeah, I haven’t really looked at the data on this. I mean, anecdotally, what you hear is that if it does go to an environmental impact report and is litigated, it can take a couple of years sometimes. I mean, in some cases, there have been some high-profile cases that have lasted decades. Those are very controversial, very large projects. And usually, there’s other factors involved. But I would guess that’s probably a year or two to resolve.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Laura Klivans:\u003c/strong> And then CEQA — you know, we see CEQA come up again for folks who are just tuning in, the California Environmental Quality Act. So Ethan Elkind, people are often critical of CEQA saying, like, look at what happened at Berkeley with student housing. Can you sort of spell out what was that example for us, and what is — how common is that kind of thing to happen?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Ethan Elkind:\u003c/strong> Well, this is the issue that there are these high-profile lawsuits that just look kind of ridiculous on their face, and then people throw up their hands and say CEQA is being abused and it really should go away.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>So in this particular case, you had student housing proposed at People’s Park in Berkeley, and the courts ruled that essentially students were an environmental impact. I mean, I’m sort of saying this a little superficially here, but the result of it was to hold up a really badly needed student housing project that the university wanted to move forward on.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And the legislature immediately stepped in in response to the negative publicity, and they amended the law in an emergency statute so that it would go into effect right away instead of in the next year to overrule what the court had decided.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>But in reality, there are less than 200 lawsuits a year. This has been very well tracked by multiple sources. So litigation is actually quite infrequent. But when it does happen, it makes a lot of headlines. And so you get a sort of anecdotally driven debate on CEQA. We’re not really looking at the actual numbers, which are quite rare.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Although I will say that the threat of lawsuits is very — has a really chilling effect. It’s a big deterrent for a lot of developers. A lot of developers I spoke to, if they think there’s any risk of a CEQA lawsuit for a project, they won’t move forward. They’ll choose a different area or they’ll design the project differently. So even though litigation is rare, I do acknowledge that it has a chilling effect on a lot of developers.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Laura Klivans:\u003c/strong> Okay.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>So now let’s talk about Prop 45. Californians are going to see that on our ballots this year. If you’ve already received yours in the mail, it’s right there. What is Prop 45 proposing?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Ethan Elkind:\u003c/strong> Well, Prop 45 would dramatically scale back the scope and timeline of environmental review for what its backers have called essential projects. And these are high-impact, often very polluting types of projects.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>So housing, which would mean all types of subdivisions, large-scale subdivisions over open space that generate a lot of traffic and can eat up a lot of endangered species habitat. Renewable energy projects. All types of transportation projects, with the exception of high-speed rail, so freeways, freeway widening. Uh… Dams and irrigation projects, logging projects. Broadband infrastructure projects, which some have interpreted to potentially cover data centers as well.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>So it’s a wide swath of projects. These are backed by some of the big industry groups in the state. This proposition is backed by some big industry groups in the state. And it would essentially allow the developer to define the scope of the impact. So it would be a greatly narrowed set of impacts.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>There would be a dramatically reduced shot clock on deeming the CEQA review complete, so just 90 days, with some exceptions. And it will be really hard for the public to be able to challenge any of these CEQA decisions. It raises the bar for any sort of judicial attacks on what decision-makers have done on CEQA. It’s hard and will make it hard for the legislature to amend this proposition. It would require a two-thirds majority of the legislature to amend itself.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Basically, for some of the biggest projects in the state, it would dramatically scale back the type of review, the shot clock, and the ability of the public to challenge any decision-making under CEQA.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Laura Klivans:\u003c/strong> Okay, and then I want to talk about data centers because that has really come into this conversation in the last few months, and we are already getting lots of comments on that. So, okay, talk about why people are concerned that data centers might be part of this proposition.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Ethan Elkind:\u003c/strong> Well, the issue is that they’re not explicitly excluded. This project — this proposition — does explicitly exclude high-speed rail, as I mentioned. It also excludes a Delta conveyance tunnel, but it did not exclude data centers, and the way that they’ve written what an essential project is for broadband infrastructure could arguably include data centers.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>I don’t think it’s an open-and-shut case, but I think you’re gonna see developers of all types of projects try to argue that their projects are essential. And we don’t know how courts would decide on this. They’re supposed to be giving a lot of deference to industry under this proposition. And so I don’t think we have any assurance that data centers wouldn’t qualify for the benefits that Prop 45 would offer.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Laura Klivans:\u003c/strong> Interesting, because a lot of this debate about data centers is looking into the future and saying, well, maybe a lawsuit could happen. And from your position, Ethan Elkind, at UC Berkeley as a lawyer, it potentially could.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Ethan Elkind:\u003c/strong> Absolutely. That’s the whole issue with this. It’s going to create a lot of judicial uncertainty because there’s a lot of vagueness in how essential projects are defined. You’re going to want to see every single project developer argue that their project is essential.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Because of the way this proposition is written, we don’t know how courts are going to come out on this. So it does inject a lot of uncertainty. Like I said, they knew they could have excluded data centers. When they wrote this proposition, data centers were unpopular at the time. There’s a reason they excluded high-speed rail and Delta conveyance and some other things. They chose not to exclude data centers. So that, I think, is very telling on its face.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Laura Klivans:\u003c/strong> All right, well, briefly, when CEQA is at its best, what does it do?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Ethan Elkind:\u003c/strong> Well, I think it allows the public to have some information about what a project is going to do to the environment, to their community. It gives the public an opportunity to weigh in, and it gives decision-makers an opportunity to understand what they’re approving.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And more importantly than all of this is that when there are impacts, they’re required to be mitigated, again, when feasible. And so it not only gives the public and decision-makers information, it makes sure that we try to lessen the environmental impacts of big projects.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Laura Klivans:\u003c/strong> Thank you.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>All right, this is \u003cem>Forum\u003c/em>. I’m Laura Klivans in for Mina Kim. We are talking about Proposition 45, a ballot measure proposing changes to California’s landmark environmental protection law, known as CEQA. And we are joined by Ethan Elkind, Director of the Climate Program at UC Berkeley Center for Law, Energy, and the Environment.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And we want to hear from you. What are your questions about Prop 45 and the California Environmental Quality Act? Give us a call. Or email your comments and questions to \u003ca href=\"mailto:forum@kqed.org\">forum@kqed.org\u003c/a>. Find us on Discord, Bluesky, Facebook, and Instagram. All those places, we’re at KQED Forum. Or give us a call now at 866-733-6786.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>This is \u003cem>Forum\u003c/em>. I’m Laura Klivans in for Mina Kim. We’re talking about Proposition 45, a ballot measure proposing changes to California’s landmark environmental protection law, which is called CEQA. That just rolls off the tongue.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And we’re joined by Ethan Elkind. He’s the director of the Climate Program at UC Berkeley Center for Law, Energy, and the Environment. And we are now welcoming in two additional people.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>We have Jason Elliott. He is the president of policy consulting firm Versus Solutions. He helped craft Prop 45. And we also have Jordan Grimes. He’s the legislative director with the environmental nonprofit Greenbelt Alliance. He’s part of the Know on Prop 45 campaign.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>So you have heard Ethan. He shared his interpretations of CEQA and Prop 45. Jason, I saw that you were shaking your head a bit on some of that stuff. Give us what that shaking of a head was about.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jason Elliott:\u003c/strong> First of all, thanks for hosting this \u003cem>Forum\u003c/em> today. I think that everyone wants to talk for an hour about the intricacies of environmental review law.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Laura Klivans:\u003c/strong> So stick with us, folks. That and Taylor Swift.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jason Elliott:\u003c/strong> I can get Taylor Swift in here somehow.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>So I appreciate the professor’s blessings upon Ethan for explaining CEQA, which is one of the most complicated laws in California. I do take a little bit of exception to some of the characterization of Prop 45, because I’ve heard some of those talking points, and they’re the talking points of our opponents.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>But let’s talk about what is happening here. Look, California has decided what it wants. It wants cleaner air. It wants clean water. It wants affordable and clean energy. It wants housing you can afford.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Frankly, over the years, voters have voted on and the legislature has passed a number of bills to move us towards those goals. We funded it, we’ve passed bonds, we’ve done spending programs, but what we haven’t done is we haven’t built those things. We haven’t provided housing you could afford. We haven’t provided abundant clean energy at the level we need.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Prop 45 is on the ballot because a state that can’t build what it promises isn’t protecting the environment. It’s not creating cleaner water. It’s protecting the status quo. And that’s really what Prop 45 was about. It’s about shaking up that status quo.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>We have the toughest environmental rules in America, in California. I worked in government for 18 years. I helped craft a number of those environmental rules. I’m very proud of those.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Proposition 45 leaves every single environmental protection that’s in law today — leaves it intact. That’s true for laws that protect against paving over prime agricultural land. It’s true about laws that protect against paving over wetlands. It’s true about laws that protect against clear-cutting in our forests. All of those laws continue to exist untouched by Proposition 45.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>What Proposition 45 does do is it ends the acceptance of endless delay as the status quo. As I said, I’ve worked in California politics and state and local government for 17, 18 years before I left and founded my firm. No one ever once said to me, California builds things way too fast. That’s never been the problem, right?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Our inability to execute against our own environmental and housing goals erodes our credibility to lead on environmentalism and inclusion. Prop 45 speeds up schools. It speeds up electricity projects and water without sacrificing any environmental review.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>I just want to make one sort of clarification. This is less an argument about Prop 45 and more just a thing that I think would maybe be helpful for the listeners.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>CEQA, as Ethan described it, he described what CEQA is, I think, very well. CEQA is environmental review. What CEQA is not is land-use decision-making or environmental regulation setting.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>So in California, the state government and local governments decide where they wanna put housing, and then they zone for it. They decide how much new electricity infrastructure and where they want schools, and they zone for those things. The state has planning processes around providing clean water to people. They decide how to deploy money.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>All of those processes, all of the land-use processes and the law-setting processes, are different than CEQA. Those happen through public process with public comment, publicly noticed meetings, and so forth, and years of council hearings. That’s a totally different thing than CEQA.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>CEQA is the environmental review that occurs after a community has decided, we think this is where housing should go. We wanna get water infrastructure, we wanna get a new hospital built here.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Once the community has decided we’re gonna zone this parcel of land over here for a hospital, developers do their thing or public agencies do their thing and bring a project forward. And then CEQA is the safety review at the end of that planning process.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>So I think it’s really important for people to understand that Proposition 45 doesn’t touch, or purport to touch in any way, the land-use planning powers that state and local governments have. They — every data center was mentioned in the intro. Proposition 45 does not cover data centers, period. We can have a longer conversation about that.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Laura Klivans:\u003c/strong> Yeah, we’ll talk about that in a little bit.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jason Elliott:\u003c/strong> But just to make the point, and I won’t fight that fight right now because I’m sure it’ll come up. If a community doesn’t want a data center in their city, just don’t zone for one, just don’t approve one. And then CEQA is irrelevant because the underlying land use won’t allow for that data center.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And I think that’s a key point to make, is that we’re gonna keep differentiating because opponents of this measure obscure that line to try to be hyperbolic. I think it’s important to pull those things apart.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Land-use authority, what goes in your community, remains the power of your mayor, your city council, your board of supervisors. Prop 45 doesn’t impact that.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Laura Klivans:\u003c/strong> We’re hearing from Jason Elliott. He’s the president of policy consulting firm Versus Solutions. We also have Jordan Grimes here, the legislative director with environmental nonprofit Greenbelt Alliance.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Jordan, what we’ve just heard is largely an argument around streamlining CEQA. It is not about the decision around land use, as Jason’s telling us. What about Prop 45 concerns you? You’re part of the Know on Prop 45 campaign.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jordan Grimes:\u003c/strong> Yes, thank you so much for having me back. Great to be here.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>You know, there are many, I would say, problematic aspects with the measure. It’s hard to know where to start with, I think, the things that are most concerning.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>You know, to step back, as we are discussing both with Jason and with Ethan, the Environmental Quality Act is fundamentally this law that provides protection to communities. It’s not about delay, although certainly that has been a tactic that bad actors have used. But fundamentally, it is about review. It is about looking at and analyzing whether or not there’s potential for environmental harm and then requiring mitigation of that harm.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And so it is the first line of defense for many communities. And ultimately, what Prop 45 does is strip away many of the protections inherent in that law.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>The timelines, I think, are some of the most reasonable pieces of the initiative, although, again, it doesn’t differentiate between size of projects. It doesn’t differentiate, I think, between geography, where a project is, if it’s in a greenfield, if you’re paving over open space, or if you are in a city, for example. So I think that is inherently problematic in the initiative.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Laura Klivans:\u003c/strong> Will Jordan tell us what those timelines are?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jordan Grimes:\u003c/strong> Yeah, the explicit timelines in the initiative are, generally speaking, 365 days for a full environmental impact report. Okay. You know, there are other timelines dependent on the type of environmental review, some jargony acronyms that we won’t get into too much, as we sort of discussed.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jason Elliott:\u003c/strong> Basically —\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Laura Klivans:\u003c/strong> Jargon for this.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>It’s basically putting a time limit on the environmental review and then also curtailing lawsuits around it, right? But it’s not just letting them go on for an indefinite period of time.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jordan Grimes:\u003c/strong> Exactly. And we’ve talked about that, but it’s actually quite a bit more than that.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Laura Klivans:\u003c/strong> What are the other concerns you have with it?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jordan Grimes:\u003c/strong> Quite a few. I think the most concerning one for me is a new private right of action for developers to be able to sue municipalities if they deny a project or if they require sort of different mitigations that the developer views as unlawful.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>That’s something that is a huge change to CEQA, that is to the Environmental Quality Act, that isn’t there right now. There’s also a provision that basically says if there is a conflict between other environmental laws, that the initiative provisions prevail.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>There are provisions that severely limit what a court can consider and that severely limits what a court can consider even after — even if environmental harm has been found. The court is very limited in its remedies under the initiative.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>So there are, I think, a litany of different things with this measure that go far beyond the timelines, many of which I think would be reasonable for certain projects. If we are talking about an apartment building in San Francisco, for example, the timelines that the initiative have in place might even be too long. It might not even make sense to do a year for an apartment project in Hayes Valley.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Laura Klivans:\u003c/strong> Okay.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jordan Grimes:\u003c/strong> Um, but if you’re talking about, uh, a new, you know, exurban development in the wildland-urban interface in a high-fire area, um, one of your, uh, I would say probably wouldn’t be enough.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Laura Klivans:\u003c/strong> I want to go to a caller now. We have Jim in Richmond. Jim, welcome to \u003cem>Forum\u003c/em>. Thanks for calling in.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jim:\u003c/strong> Yeah, thank you, and thank you for holding the show. As somebody who has read CEQA documents here in the Bay Area on really, frankly, bad projects, I want to tell you that as a citizen, we will — and even the city will — approach a developer to try to cause less damage to habitat or traffic, and without CEQA, or without the ability to challenge it, this really feels like one of those TV shows where you’re running across a lake and you’re competing against people, you know, jumping across these rubber balls or whatever.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>It’s so many obstacles. It just seems impossible at this point. It really feels undemocratic. And I’d like you to address the cost of this as reported in the state pamphlet. Thank you.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Laura Klivans:\u003c/strong> Thank you. Jason, can you address this? Does it take away someone’s ability to challenge?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jason Elliott:\u003c/strong> And thanks for the call, Jim. I appreciate your advocacy.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>No, it doesn’t take away someone’s ability to challenge it. Let me draw an analogy. I mean, I could go through the provision measure by measure, but this show isn’t long enough. So let me draw an analogy.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>If you think about CEQA and the environmental impact report, so CEQA requires big projects to do the environmental impact report, which is what Ethan had laid out at the top of the hour. Think about the environmental impact report like the SAT test that we probably all endured when we were high schoolers.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>The question — Prop 45 doesn’t make the questions on the SAT easier. It doesn’t allow you to skip the SAT and go straight to college. Proposition 45 doesn’t limit any of those things.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>What Proposition 45 does is say, once you’ve done the SAT, the grader — the state, the city — has a timeline in which they have to grade the SAT and give you your score back, so you can go ahead and apply to college in a timely fashion.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>It’s a timeline, right? It also says that while the grader’s grading your SAT test, the grader can’t say, well, you know, we don’t think that that’s how calculus works anymore. We’re gonna just, like, change one of the rules about log functions. And so you kind of have — you have to start over on the SAT.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>That’s how CEQA works today. The way CEQA works is you can finish your environmental impact report with mitigations to make sure that you’re having that conversation with community and local government, get rid of the worst parts of a project that are the most harmful to communities, right?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>All of that stays intact. All of the mitigation processes, all of that public feedback all stays intact. But once you’re done with that EIR, with that SAT test, it gets graded in a timely fashion, so you can build your project.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>In our case, we estimate that it will cut the time for projects with EIRs in half, from about 3.1 years to about one and a half years. So it’s half the time, but all the protections.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And I think that’s the key point: it doesn’t strip away any protections. It doesn’t eliminate CEQA. So what I heard in Jim’s question was, Prop 45 would eliminate the public’s ability to raise these concerns. It won’t eliminate it. That’s a misconception, so I want to address that.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>But it does say that let’s get this stuff done in a timely fashion, so that we can get good projects approved.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And last point I’ll make on this, Proposition 45 leaves intact every local government’s ability to reject an EIR and reject the project. There are no automatic approvals anywhere in Proposition 45. So if a developer brings forward a truly bad environmental project, the city council could just go ahead and reject it and reject the EIR and/or reject the underlying project.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Laura Klivans:\u003c/strong> Jordan, how does this sound for you when we’re thinking about what Jim is saying, the ability to challenge a project? Do you feel like it would be harder when Prop 45, if it passes?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jordan Grimes:\u003c/strong> Absolutely. A hundred percent. You’re significantly limiting in terms of what the public is allowed to comment on, right? There are provisions that severely limit public comment. You are limiting the timelines in which the public comments are made.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Laura Klivans:\u003c/strong> Do it for —\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jason Elliott:\u003c/strong> It’s a time limitation. It’s not a qualitative limitation, so let’s make sure we’re accurate about what the measure does.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Laura Klivans:\u003c/strong> Right, but it does put a date —\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jason Elliott:\u003c/strong> Like the amount of days, okay?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Laura Klivans:\u003c/strong> Yes, it’s a time limit, not a subjective limit.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jordan Grimes:\u003c/strong> You are limited in terms of vesting. If environmental conditions change on the ground, you are locked into a certain vesting schedule. So basically, things would go — everything would shift.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>So, for example, right now, if an EIR was being conducted and conditions changed —\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Laura Klivans:\u003c/strong> That’s the environmental impact report.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jordan Grimes:\u003c/strong> Yes. Sorry about the jargon. If an environmental impact report was being conducted and conditions on the ground shifted in terms of habitat, in terms of various other things, right now, as the process works, those things can be considered.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>The way the initiative would change the Environmental Quality Act would mean that you could not consider those. The conditions on the ground at the time of the project application would be locked in.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Laura Klivans:\u003c/strong> Like, read the very start.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jordan Grimes:\u003c/strong> Exactly. And then the last thing I’ll just say is, yes, a city council or local jurisdiction could deny a project, with the potential that a developer could sue. And so there’s this chilling effect now under this new private right of action, right, where a municipality would have to weigh, do we want to deny this project? Do we want to risk getting sued by a project developer?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And again, we’re not just talking about projects that are potentially environmentally beneficial, right? You know, new housing in places we want to see it, bike lanes, public transit. We’re talking about some really potentially harmful projects.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jason Elliott:\u003c/strong> Schools, clinics, hospitals, parks.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jordan Grimes:\u003c/strong> Clean energy, clean water facilities.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Laura Klivans:\u003c/strong> Sure, that’s the side that’s a —\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>But I’ve also seen the no side saying, well, what about freeway expansion? We’re talking, like, we’re talking —\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jordan Grimes:\u003c/strong> Is that also included? Freeway expansions are absolutely included. We’re talking about CO2 pipelines. We are talking about exurban developments in high-fire areas. There’s a lot of different things that this project allows. Some of them are good. Some of them, I think, deserve that streamlining.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>What we are looking at is, on net, is this better than the status quo? And our calculation is absolutely not.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Laura Klivans:\u003c/strong> Okay, okay. We’re gonna go to — we’re going to go to a caller, and then there’s lots of time to talk about these different things.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Okay. Lisa, we are going to go to you in San Francisco. Lisa, thank you for calling.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Lisa:\u003c/strong> Good morning. My head is spinning.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Laura Klivans:\u003c/strong> You’re not the only one.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Lisa:\u003c/strong> Yeah. This is a great debate, but I think for me, in this horrific time where, you know, these astroturf super PACs pop up named, you know, Neighborhoods for San Francisco or whatever. And it’s the real estate lobby or the apartment owners association or what have you, or developers, market-rate developers.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>What I want to know from both of your guests, the proponent and the opponent, I would like to know who the major sponsors pro and their money, and I would like to know who are the sponsors against? Because we know that organizations like the San Francisco — the Sierra Club has been captured by real estate forces. I mean, everything is through the looking glass now.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>So who are the funders of this initiative?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Laura Klivans:\u003c/strong> That’s a great question. Streamline, I’m triggered. Yes, there’s millions of dollars behind this initiative.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>So actually, I know you were asking to go to Jason and Jordan. I’m gonna actually see if Ethan, if you could answer this one. Ethan Elkind with UC Berkeley, where’s the money coming from from both sides?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Ethan Elkind:\u003c/strong> Yeah, I don’t have encyclopedic knowledge, but I have looked at the backers. I mean, you have the Building Industry Association as a major backer of this. They’re the big sprawl developers in the state. You have the Chamber of Commerce supporting this initiative.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>You basically have a lot of industry groups that are supporting this. On the con side, you’ve got environmental groups, and then you’ve got labor unions that often use CEQA as leverage to try to get project labor agreements, uh… for their union members, uh… And then, you know, it’s a grab bag of other folks, but I’m sure Jordan and Jason could speak in more detail. But that’s the general gist on the yes and the no side.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Laura Klivans:\u003c/strong> We’re going to come back to that because we’re about to take a break. This is \u003cem>Forum\u003c/em>. I’m Laura Klivans in for Mina Kim. We’re talking about Proposition 45, a ballot measure proposing changes to California’s landmark environmental protection law.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And we’re joined by Ethan Elkind of UC Berkeley, Jason Elliott, president of the policy consulting firm Versus Solutions, and Jordan Grimes, legislative director with environmental nonprofit Greenbelt Alliance.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And we want to hear from you. How are you planning to vote on Prop 45 and why? Email your comments and questions to \u003ca href=\"mailto:forum@kqed.org\">forum@kqed.org\u003c/a>. Find us on Discord, Bluesky, Facebook, and Instagram. We’re at KQED Forum, or give us a call now at 866-733-6786.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Welcome back to \u003cem>Forum\u003c/em>. I’m Laura Klivans in for Mina Kim. We are talking about Proposition 45. It’s a ballot measure that is proposing changes to California’s landmark environmental protection law called CEQA.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>We are joined by Ethan Elkind, the Director of the Climate Program at UC Berkeley Center for Law, Energy and the Environment; Jason Elliott, President of the policy consulting firm Versus Solutions; and Jordan Grimes, Legislative Director with environmental nonprofit Greenbelt Alliance.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>I want to go to a question that comes from listener Jeff. Jeff writes, “To what extent do the guests believe the passage of Prop 45 will meaningfully change the speed of development, and in what sectors? Is that clean energy, roads, housing?”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Jason, let’s go to you.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jason Elliott:\u003c/strong> Sure. Well, we do believe that it will speed up development, and that’s the purpose for crafting this measure. And speeding up development, let me say why that’s important.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Speed on its own is not necessarily a good thing. But when you have housing and clean energy and clean water projects, hospital projects, school projects that are delivered faster, that creates cost savings for local governments.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Of the non-housing projects that this measure covers, 76% of them that we expect would be covered by EIRs are projects that are brought forward by your local government, by your city, by your county. So they’re looking to fix a bridge, they’re looking to improve a public restroom facility, they’re looking to build a new school campus, high school campus, whatever it might be.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>These — the overwhelming majority of projects we believe, not housing, we can talk about housing, is a little different because governments don’t build housing. But of the non-housing projects, the overwhelming majority are public projects.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>The longer that those delay, the more the cost goes up. And it’s not some greedy developer hiding in a back room that bears that cost. It’s you, the taxpayer. So this really is around taxpayer protection.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>In terms of housing, because the housing part of this measure and the non-housing part of the measure are similar, but they operate, they function in different ways in terms of speeding things up.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>In terms of housing, the average — we estimate that the average delay from CEQA alone increases the cost when an EIR has to be performed, increases the cost by $75,000 per new home that’s built by the private sector. So reducing time does reduce cost, which makes houses more affordable.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>So this really is all around reducing the cost of living by reducing how expensive it is to build stuff.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Laura Klivans:\u003c/strong> California. And this is one of the reasons why it seems like the Cal Chamber wanted to bring this.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jason Elliott:\u003c/strong> That’s right.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Laura Klivans:\u003c/strong> And so, can you actually give us a number, a year number, like right now it takes an average of this many years to build housing and after this it would, we believe —\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jason Elliott:\u003c/strong> Well, I’ll give you a number that I can stand behind, which is how long CEQA delays projects, because how long it takes to build housing can depend on so many factors.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>But in terms of housing, housing projects that have to perform this environmental impact report that we’ve been discussing take on average 3.1 years. Non-housing projects that also have to perform an EIR take on an average of 3.0 years, so about three years.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>We anticipate that our measure would, because of the timelines that Jordan mentioned, conclude in 17 months. So you’re talking about roughly half the time. You’re cutting that roughly in half without diminishing any of the underlying environmental protections.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And I think that’s just a key point that keeps getting lost here. The underlying legal environmental protections all remain in place under Proposition 45.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Laura Klivans:\u003c/strong> Okay.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Jordan Grimes from the environmental nonprofit Greenbelt Alliance. What is your take on how much this, if we pass Prop 45, would speed up development? And then I wanna ask you about cost as well.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jordan Grimes:\u003c/strong> Yeah, absolutely. I think the concern, the biggest concern to us, is that it will tremendously speed up projects that are going to harm the environment.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>I actually don’t think it will do very much at all for projects that are environmentally beneficial, for the projects that I think people care most about. The California legislature last year granted a clean, complete statutory exemption to infill housing projects. It was a watershed moment for the state in acknowledging that environmental review can be used. For infill, the legislature remedied it.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>So if you want to build an apartment in Beverly Hills or Palo Alto, you no longer have to go through that environmental review, which will be a huge boon to solving our housing crisis.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Likewise, the legislature has provided statutory exemptions for bike lanes, for bus projects, for public transit, for clean energy. And so, realistically, I think the types of projects that Californians are really demanding — the clean energy, the housing projects that we need — we have already exempted those things.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And so I do think it will speed up projects, but they’re the projects that we don’t want to see. It’s new subdivisions in high wildfire areas. It’s the CO2 pipelines. It’s potentially data centers, right?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Laura Klivans:\u003c/strong> Let’s talk about that, just that housing piece. So what you are saying is that because last year California passed what was called AB 130, it is now — housing developments are exempt in urban areas, right? From CEQA, from all this stuff.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And so I have seen the no side say, listen, why do we need this if we’ve already gotten that? It’s still rolling out. And that you believe that housing, it would be easier to build housing in wildfire-prone areas. Like a place like Paradise that is, you know, in this gorgeous wooded area, but also very fire-prone, right?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>So Jordan, if you could — or excuse me, Jason, can you tell me what is your take on that? Is it gonna be easier to build housing in these places where we don’t necessarily wanna promote it?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jason Elliott:\u003c/strong> Yeah, great. And thanks, Jordan, for mentioning Assembly Bill 130. I worked for years when I was inside state government to bring that policy forward, to do the politics and the policy, and thank God for Buffy Wicks and Scott Wiener. Amen. Yeah. And they brought that forward.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>So that’s a huge win. Really proud of the work on that and Governor Newsom for pushing it through the budget. But he pushed it through the budget. The legislature did that. They found their courage, and thank God for Scott Wiener and Buffy Wicks.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>But, you know, the courage of a couple of legislators is not a statewide housing policy. And in this state, we are millions of units short. I ran housing policy for the state for a number of years. We’re millions of years short, right? Yeah, we’re millions of units short.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And when you have this much of a housing deficit in California, you have to build up, but you also have to build out, right?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And I think it’s really important that we just acknowledge that reality, the uncomfortable reality that some of our environmental opponents — about 100 organizations who opposed AB 130 — we met in the hall, and I know that’s not you, but 100-plus environmental organizations that opposed Assembly Bill 130 last year, that streamlining we were just talking about, they called it, quote, “the worst anti-environmental law in recent history.”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>That exact same coalition is now opposing Proposition 45. And I’m not trying to put this on you, Jordan, we just met. You seem like you’re a pro-housing guy, and I appreciate your leadership on that. But let’s talk about who’s behind the opposition to this measure.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>It is the same anti-housing environmental groups that for decades, decades, have been blocking the kinds of housing we need.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Because here’s the thing about Proposition 45. I think it’s another important point to make. Jordan keeps mentioning, and some of the opponents of the measure talk about, well, it’s not just housing. It’s all these other things.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>All those other things are what make housing complete neighborhoods. A housing unit is just a housing unit until you attach it to water, until you build a school nearby, so forth.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And, you know, I see housing — just last point I wanna make on this — you know I’ve been working on these issues for years and years, and the way that I see housing development, it’s like a complicated safe in, like, one of those safe-cracking movies where you gotta get every little pin lined up.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And if you don’t have the water and the electricity, you know, one of the big problems we have in this state is interconnection. A new building gets built, but you can’t get power to it, so it just stays empty.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>You gotta get all these pins, and if one of these pins is just a hair off, you can’t unlock that new neighborhood, you can’t move families in.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>So Proposition 45 absolutely does streamline a number of those other things that are necessary. People drive on highways, right? People need to turn on the lights and have clean energy, power their microwaves and so forth.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>So yes, Proposition 45 is about building those complete neighborhoods because a housing unit is just a paper promise until we connect it to all that infrastructure. Then it becomes a home.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Laura Klivans:\u003c/strong> I want to bring in Ethan Elkind. He’s from UC Berkeley, a legal expert.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Ethan, from your legal standpoint, you have seen that AB 130 passed last year. It’s begun to be implemented. How much Prop 45 changes housing development compared to the reforms of the past?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Ethan Elkind:\u003c/strong> Well, I think, as Jordan said, infill housing — the kinds of environmentally beneficial housing that we want to see — basically got a free pass under CEQA.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And the reality is — and Jason basically described this — there are so many barriers to all sorts of projects in the state that go well beyond where environmental review comes into the process, that, you know, by blaming CEQA for all the delays that we have, we’re taking our eye off the ball of all these other problems.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>I mean, Jason described how CEQA does not [involve] local land-use decision-making, but that’s exactly why we’re not really getting at the heart of the problem as to why there are so many delays for projects in the state. We have a lot of different local governments, special districts, utilities, all of which could create a lot of delays for projects that CEQA does not touch.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And so your question around how housing is affected, because we’ve already carved out an exemption that really just went into effect for all infill housing projects: the beneficiaries of Prop 45, by narrowing the scope of environmental review, by narrowing the alternatives, by dramatically shortening the shot clock for any sort of challenges, by raising the bar to judicial challenges, the only beneficiaries of that are going to be these sort of large subdivision projects, because all other types of housing in the state is now essentially exempted.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>So those are the beneficiaries. It’s going to be a lot harder for the public to be able to hold to account decision-makers who are approving these large subdivisions. We’re going to lose the ability to require mitigation and analyze those impacts really adequately in advance.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jason Elliott:\u003c/strong> That’s not true that we lose the ability. I’m sorry, but that’s a mischaracterization of the measure.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Ethan Elkind:\u003c/strong> Well, but by dramatically reducing the scope of the impacts, by reducing the alternatives, and by putting a really dramatically increased shot clock, you’re limiting the ability of the public to understand what the impacts are and to challenge them because they’re not going to have the time and the information to be able to do so.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And if they do want to challenge them in court, the bar to challenging them in the court has now been raised dramatically by Prop 45.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Laura Klivans:\u003c/strong> I’m going to interrupt this one because we’re going to go to a caller. I want to remind us all this is \u003cem>Forum\u003c/em>. I’m Laura Klivans, I’m in for Mina Kim.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>We are talking about Proposition 45, which you can tell is contentious. It’s a ballot measure proposing changes to California’s landmark environmental protection law. We are joined with Ethan Elkind, Jason Elliott, Jordan Grimes, and we want to hear from you.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Are there — were you in California when CEQA got started in the ’60s and ’70s? What do you make of the way it’s evolved over the decades? Email us your comments and questions to \u003ca href=\"mailto:forum@kqed.org\">forum@kqed.org\u003c/a>. You can find us on all the online things. You can call us at 1-866-733-6786.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>I wanna go now to a caller, Douglas in San Leandro. Thank you so much for joining us, Douglas. What’s your question?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Douglas:\u003c/strong> Uh… Good morning. It may be, uh… more of a comment. I’d like to bring data centers back to the conversation, with the data centers, which are huge energy and water demand for exactly the kind of thing that CEQA was intended to address.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Uh… And yet, uh… you know, what’s happening at 70% or more the public has indicated they’re really not in favor, is that the independent developers are rushing, rushing, rushing to get stuff done.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And, you know, the idea that, well, we can just go to the city council and get them to defeat it, or we can look at our zoning codes and say, well, it’s not zoned for data centers — it’s not true.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>What just happened in the city of Hayward next door to me is, right, the Planning Commission approved a humongous data center, more than 300,000 square feet. It never went to the City Council. The people of Hayward never knew about it. It was approved as office space, and we’re faced with the same thing here in San Leandro, where our Planning Commission just approved a conditional use permit for a similarly sized place, and it looks like it’s primed to be a data center.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Nowhere are there any codes about data centers. It would be good if there were because then it would flag us for it.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>So the problem about shortening the timeline is we don’t know what’s going on. And it’s these data center developers are, you know, they’re having our official sign non-disclosure agreements, so what the heck is happening in closed session? We don’t know.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>So the time is actually really quite an important protection for us, the public.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Laura Klivans:\u003c/strong> And given what Ethan Elkind said earlier in the hour is that he believes from his legal perspective that data centers could be included in this proposition, Prop 45.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Jordan Grimes from the Greenbelt Alliance, why do you consider data centers as potentially part of this legislation?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jordan Grimes:\u003c/strong> Yeah, well, I’ll say it’s not just me. It’s attorneys and legal scholars from UC Berkeley, from UC Davis. But essentially, the way the provision is drafted, right? “Essential broadband internet access project.”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Laura Klivans:\u003c/strong> Um —\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jordan Grimes:\u003c/strong> What that language means and the broad applicability of that, we absolutely believe covers data centers.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Laura Klivans:\u003c/strong> There’s also a provision — why do you think that? Because it says broadband access, right?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jordan Grimes:\u003c/strong> I think fundamentally that could absolutely — broadband access could, given the legal definition, be applied to data centers.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Laura Klivans:\u003c/strong> Okay. There’s a co-location of a broadband center and a data center, and that would get —\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jordan Grimes:\u003c/strong> Potentially. There’s also the provision in the measure that allows for the provisions of the measure to apply to ancillary infrastructure. So if you’re locating a broadband internet access project in a facility that houses multiple tenants, there is that aspect, but there’s the aspect that you could apply this would be required to furnish those things.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Laura Klivans:\u003c/strong> That’s okay.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Uh… Merit matters. I think it is about time to hear — if you want to hear your response.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jason Elliott:\u003c/strong> Yeah, data centers are not covered by Proposition 45, and I appreciate that the opponents of this measure, as you’ve heard, want to assert that they are.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>We have a former CPUC Public Utilities Commissioner, former FCC Commissioner, a bunch of lawyers who are not affiliated with the campaign who have published opinions that they don’t think data centers are covered, so we can go lawyer for lawyer, I suppose.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>But, you know, the data center coalition itself, the sort of industry arm, mouthpiece of the data center industry, has declined to support the measure because they say that data centers — this measure doesn’t help data centers. So I suppose that’s probably the greatest validation of all.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>But look, this question around data centers… I’ve been doing campaigns a long time. I get why the opponents are using data centers. I have seen polling too. We have our own polling. Data centers are profoundly unpopular. It’s why we didn’t include them in the measure.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Laura Klivans:\u003c/strong> Right. The measure does have carve-outs, right? It says, okay, clean energy projects are included, but not nuclear. So why did it say, but not —\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jason Elliott:\u003c/strong> Data centers. It’s a great question. Let’s take high-speed rail, for example.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Laura Klivans:\u003c/strong> Yeah, but why does it say not data centers?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jason Elliott:\u003c/strong> I’m going to explain why using high-speed rail. So high-speed rail was excluded or carved out, as you said, because transportation projects otherwise are included. So had we not carved out high-speed rail or the Delta Tunnel, as was mentioned earlier, that would be covered under existing central project definitions.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Data centers just don’t factor into this because despite Jordan’s best attempts, a data center is not a broadband line. They’re just different things.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And if you read the text of the measure, you will see that they are, just by plain reading, different things. Will someone somewhere try to make some argument? Sure, but the text of the measure is absolutely clear that data centers are just simply not covered, right?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>The list of things that are not covered is quite literally infinite. I mean, you could just keep going and going and doing, but we excluded things that would have otherwise been covered.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And, you know, I just like — I think that there’s a key point here. Campaigns, you can basically say anything you want with a glossy mailer or like on a social media ad, right? Here’s where you can’t say anything. You can’t say anything you want in the official ballot argument that you actually have to submit to the Secretary of State.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>That’s where there’s a legal bar for truthfulness and veracity, right? Because you can litigate those, right? Guess where data centers does not appear in the official ballot argument. The opponents of this measure know that it’s a specious argument, and so they didn’t put it in their official ballot arguments, and that’s kind of all you need to know.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>They’re using it because it polls. Well, I would do the same thing if I were in their shoes, but let’s not use scare tactics. Let’s talk about what’s actually in the —\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jordan Grimes:\u003c/strong> I do really want to push back on the idea that these are scare tactics.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>You have data center developers who are donating to this campaign. You have Prologis, who, by the way… Prologis builds solar. Prologis is building five data centers right now in San Jose.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Laura Klivans:\u003c/strong> And then the campaign finance rate, isn’t there something around $15 million that has been donated by a PAC that does have representatives from data centers?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jordan Grimes:\u003c/strong> Absolutely.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Laura Klivans:\u003c/strong> For the pro side.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jordan Grimes:\u003c/strong> Absolutely. And again, the Prologis — the PUC expert that was cited, you know, is a board member of Prologis, right? You have them giving half a million dollars to the campaign.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Okay, I don’t think they would be doing that, quite frankly, if they, you know, weren’t getting something pretty significant.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jason Elliott:\u003c/strong> The no side has received $16 million in contributions from one billionaire. Okay, so, like, if we’re gonna have a discussion about funding, I’ll tell you where our money comes from and our support. The infill builders have supported our measure.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Laura Klivans:\u003c/strong> I’m so sorry, we are gonna have to leave it there. There is so much to talk about. The time goes very quickly. Let’s do another hour.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>This is \u003cem>Forum\u003c/em>. I’m Laura Klivans. I’m in for Mina Kim. We’ve been talking about Prop 45. We’ve been joined by Ethan Elkind, the director of the Climate Program at UC Berkeley Center for Law, Energy, and the Environment; Jason Elliott of Versus Solutions; Jordan Grimes from the Greenbelt Alliance.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Thank you so much for joining us. Have a great day.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jason Elliott:\u003c/strong> Thanks so much.\u003c/p>\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"content": "\n\u003ch2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Airdate: Thursday, September 24, 2026 at 10am\u003c/h2>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>From the White House ballroom to the Kennedy Center to a proposed triumphal arch along the Potomac, President Trump has taken a special interest in creating physical markers of his legacy. We’ll look at how he’s largely escaped oversight, including by designating these projects as central to national security. Why are monuments such a priority for Trump, and what does this tell us about the growing reach of executive power?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Guests:\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n\u003cli>\u003cstrong>Tom Nichols,\u003c/strong> staff writer, The Atlantic, professor emeritus of national security affairs, U.S. Naval War College\u003c/li>\n\n\n\n\u003cli>\u003cstrong>Erin Thompson\u003c/strong>, professor of art crime, CUNY, author of \u003cem>Smashing Statues: The Rise and Fall of America’s Public Monuments\u003c/em>\u003c/li>\n\u003c/ul>\n\n\n\n\u003ch2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Episode Transcript\u003c/h2>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cem>\u003cstrong>This is a computer-generated transcript. While our team has reviewed it, there may be errors.\u003c/strong>\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Welcome to \u003cem>Forum\u003c/em>, I’m Mina Kim. Of all the things the president has on his plate — the war in Iran, high fuel and food prices, steep potential losses for his party in the midterms — what seems to animate Trump the most are his building projects. The latest announcement this week is that his proposed triumphal arch on D.C.’s Memorial Circle will now be a military complex, complete with snipers and drones for national security reasons. And for all the skepticism and unpopularity of the idea, it continues to move forward for now.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>This hour, we look at how Trump’s construction projects are changing the landscape and the reach of executive power and the role of monuments in shaping a collective narrative. Starting us off is Tom Nichols, whose latest piece for \u003cem>The Atlantic\u003c/em> is called “Trump’s Monumental Obsession.” Good to have you back, Tom.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Tom Nichols:\u003c/strong> Thanks. Thanks for having me.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> So first, talk about why the idea of militarizing the arch has drawn fresh skepticism and pushback from not only you, but retired generals, preservationists, others.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Tom Nichols:\u003c/strong> Because it’s crazy. You’re talking about putting an arch in the middle of a busy traffic circle, and anybody who’s ever been to Washington has probably experienced that particular area between the cemetery and the Lincoln Memorial and downtown D.C. And the idea of filling it with weapons while cars sit in traffic around it every day. And airplanes, by the way, this is another problem, as airplanes fly over it because it’s right in the approach path for Reagan National Airport. It’s a stupid and dangerous idea.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>But I also don’t think that the president is serious about it. He’s saying this because he knows that national security arguments tend to prevail in court, as he did with the ballroom. When people sued to stop him from demolishing the East Wing and building the ballroom, some of his opponents won in court and there was a tussle back and forth. Then Trump said, no, this is a national security project. It’s to build a bunker and an operation center, and the ballroom is just a kind of a hat we’re putting on top of that national security stuff. The courts bought it. Supreme Court, all the way down, you know. Well, you know, the president gets his way on national security issues.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Yeah. Why did the courts buy it? What does recasting the building project as military infrastructure and therefore a national security asset, right, help Trump do with the courts and with Congress as well?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Tom Nichols:\u003c/strong> The courts have always — I should say always since the end of World War II, since the Cold War, when national security became a thing, became a phrase. You know, before World War Two, very rare to actually see the phrase “national security” used anywhere. And during the Cold War, we created a national security state and we prioritized national security above a lot of things, including civil liberties. And we did it again after 9/11.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>So when presidents invoke national security, courts kind of wrap that under the president’s Article II powers. And they become very hesitant to interfere with that because they don’t want to interfere with what they think is the president’s legitimate sphere of competence and power on that issue.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>So it’s become a thing where presidents, not just Donald Trump, but presidents in the past, have said, well, to get through a policy I really want to get to, matter of national security. And that’s kind of meant to snuff out debate about whether the thing involved is actually important or worth the money or even legal. So that’s why it happens.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> This does also undermine Congress’s authority to constrain it at all in a substantive way.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Tom Nichols:\u003c/strong> Yeah, it always has. I mean, the national security argument has always been part of the shift, the migration in power from Congress to an imperial presidency. Presidents over the course of the Cold War and then during the war on terror, executive power has expanded vastly beyond what I think the founders envisioned in the Constitution.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>But the president has become, you know, the vicar of national security, and it’s a very effective argument to make. And sometimes, you know — let’s be fair about this — sometimes it’s a legitimate argument. There are things that the executive branch has to do in the name of national security, like build bunkers under the White House.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>But when that gets applied to things like tariffs, for example, you know, Trump at one point claimed that tariffs were a matter of national security. Pretty soon everything becomes a matter of national security because presidents, and this president in particular, just like the fact that it sort of, you know, just kind of shuts down opposition and legal challenges to whatever it is he wants to do.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Yes. I mean, Trump argued that the ban on CNN, MS NOW, and Politico from White House grounds was because they were a threat to our national security.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>I want to invite listeners into the conversation. What questions do you have about President Trump’s militarized arch? You know, why do you think these construction projects are so important to the president? Do these things bother you? Why or why not?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>You can tell us by emailing \u003ca href=\"mailto:forum@kqed.org\">forum@kqed.org\u003c/a>, finding us on Discord, Bluesky, Facebook, or Instagram at KQED Forum, or by calling 866-733-6786. Again, that’s 866-733-6786.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Those are on Discord, right? “Trump’s building projects are a frustrating waste of money and grotesque display of ego. But honestly, I prioritize his D.C. monuments pretty low compared to other damage he’s doing to the country and world. Everything built can be disassembled.” Do you think that? The types of things he’s building now could easily be disassembled?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Tom Nichols:\u003c/strong> I think some of them can be. I personally, as a former Washington resident — I should say a former suburban resident. I used to work on the Hill and spent my graduate years at Georgetown and all that. I think that these are atrocious and garish projects, and I would happily support any president who says the ballroom’s got to go and we’re going to rebuild the East Wing and not put up an armed platform in the middle of, in front of Arlington Cemetery.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>I think Donald Trump has proven one thing, that if you can put these things up through sheer willpower, a president can take them down through sheer willpower.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>I think your listener, I agree with your listener who said, hey, this isn’t the biggest problem in the world except for two things, I would say. One is that Donald Trump is establishing that presidents can just spend money at will simply by chanting “national security” over even trivial and dumb things, like putting up this kind of, you know, bit of militaristic bombast.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>I referred to the victory arch that he wants to put up as something that looks like it was found in the bottom desk drawer of, you know, Albert Speer’s desk. And it’s just ugly. But he can just build it because he’s — national security, and he snaps his fingers and people start digging.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>So once you establish that, you’re setting a lot of bad precedents here.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>The other is that I think symbolism matters. I think, I think, you know, the president, the White House in particular, is meant to be dignified and austere, but not bombastic and overwhelming. And I think it’s an affront to the culture of democracy to put up a Tsarist ballroom that would make a King Louis of France blush in the middle of the place that’s meant to be the people’s house.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>So I, while it’s not the most important thing in the world, it’s more important than it may seem.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Yeah, I know. And also I think in the context of all the other things that are happening in the country, as you point out in your piece and as I mentioned in the intro, I think it’s concerning to have that be the main focus of the president. Is there any chance at all that because he noted that it was at the military’s request, is there a chance at all, as someone who knows the military well, that he would have found people in the military to say, yes, this is something that could be meaningful for national security?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Tom Nichols:\u003c/strong> I would — this again, my personal view here is that I will file that under things that didn’t happen. He may well have turned to Pete Hegseth and said, Pete, maybe we should build a big arch. And he said, good idea, sir. And that was the source of saying the military has asked for it.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>But I cannot imagine that, you know, anybody in the uniformed military was sitting around and saying, hey, you know what would really improve that arch? Snipers.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Is it possible in this administration? Again, he may have turned to some hapless colonel and said, Colonel, you think that’s a good idea, right? And the guy’s going to say, oh, whatever you think, Mr. President.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>But I just don’t believe that people walked into his office and said, Mr. President, you got to build this armed platform right next to Reagan National. Uh… Because, you know, it’s a matter of national security. I, I just — it can — I could be wrong, but I just don’t believe that happened.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> You noted costs as well. Do you know who is paying for these monuments and what kind of cost we are looking at, or maybe costs across things like the arch and the ballroom?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Tom Nichols:\u003c/strong> I’m sorry. Are you insisting on transparency and how millions of dollars are being spent in Washington? That sounds like communism. I don’t know.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>That’s another part of this problem. I mean, the president changes stories every other day on — you saw this with the ballroom. Well, it’s only going to cost this much and we’re going to get donations and it’s not going to be a big deal. And then the costs balloon and then it turns out we are using government money. Don’t hurt! But again, only for national security, because there’s going to be a thing under it.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>In the end, the president — this is a personalized cult of personality regime inside the White House, where the president says, I want a victory arch. And a bunch of people look at each other and say, well, yes, okay. And we’ll figure out who’s paying for it and how all that’s going to happen later.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And if we had a Congress that cared about oversight… You would know. But because this Congress currently is controlled by a Republican majority that is mostly terrified of Trump because nobody wants to end up, you know, primaried like John Cornyn or, you know, Cassidy or Tom Tillis or any of these people that are leaving, they simply kind of keep their head down and they’re just waiting for this.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>I mean, it’s been almost 10 years of some Republicans just waiting this to blow over, but obviously it’s not gonna blow over. And Trump’s gonna spend this money and nobody’s gonna really ask why.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> We’re talking with \u003cem>Atlantic\u003c/em> staff writer Tom Nichols about Trump’s triumphal arch and his special interest in creating physical markers of his legacy and why neither Congress nor the courts right now have been able to end these projects, especially when the administration cites national security.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>We’ll have more after the break. Stay with us.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>I’m Mina Kim. Welcome back to \u003cem>Forum\u003c/em>. I’m Mina Kim. We’re talking this hour about Trump’s triumphal arch, the White House ballroom, and other building projects that have drawn the president’s attention and how these construction projects are extending the reach of executive power, even if on the face of them they don’t seem as much of an issue for the country as, say, things like the war in Iran and high fuel and food prices.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>We’re talking about this with Tom Nichols. With you, our listeners, join the conversation by emailing \u003ca href=\"mailto:forum@kqed.org\">forum@kqed.org\u003c/a>, finding us on Discord, Bluesky, Facebook, or Instagram at KQED Forum. Call us at 866-733-6786, 866-733-6786.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>What questions do you have about the president’s efforts to push building projects through D.C.? Why do you think he wants to do this? And do they bother you? Why or why not? How do you think these projects will inform how we remember President Trump?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Let me go to caller Susan in Marin. Hi, Susan. Go ahead, you’re on.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Susan:\u003c/strong> I think, uh… I hold Congress as responsible for the ballroom as I hold Trump. Uh… They’re the part of our government that’s supposed to be able to spend money, and the fact that they’re allowing him to take money out of, uh… common bank is just, it just makes me furious. They’ve done nothing for an awful long time, and this is nothing that is going to cost us millions and millions and billions of money.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Well, thanks for sharing how you feel about this, Susan. Let me go to Colin next in San Francisco. Colin, go ahead. You’re on.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Colin:\u003c/strong> Good morning. I’m not as concerned about the proposed, um, victory arch or Arc de Triomphe, whatever we want to call it, because it’s very unlikely that it will be completed within Trump’s lifetime. It’s likely going to be abandoned just as soon as he’s out of office.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>The original Arc de Triomphe took about 30 years from, uh, inception under Napoleon Bonaparte to completion in 1836. Um, it’s also my, you know, it could jinx this country too. You know, after the Arch of Triumph was built, the Germans were able to stage two victory parades in 1871 and 1940 under or by the arch.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Well, thanks for sharing where you’re at and what you think in terms of jinxing. That’s an interesting point.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>I do want to bring Erin Thompson into the conversation now, professor of art crime at City University, New York, and also the author of the book \u003cem>Smashing Statues: The Rise and Fall of America’s Public Monuments\u003c/em>. Erin, thanks so much for being with us.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Erin Thompson:\u003c/strong> Happy to be here.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> So stepping back a bit, you know, help us understand the power of monuments as people sort of grapple with how significant this moment is with regards to Trump. How could they affect us generally, the public?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Erin Thompson:\u003c/strong> Well, monuments are really about capturing the future. They’re about shaping the memory of the past. So I think it will be very difficult to get rid of any monuments, really, but Trump’s monuments in particular, and they’re going to keep shaping what we value about America. So it…\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> It’s interesting that you say they have that type of power because they feel, you know, sort of very limiting in some ways of sending a message. Can you talk about how or where their power lies? I guess maybe even in their simplicity.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Erin Thompson:\u003c/strong> Exactly. Monuments don’t actually teach history. There’s not enough space for that. They just tell us who should you literally look up to, who is large, who should be honored and hold power.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Say there’s a certain power in the way we sort of get used to them, how they fade into the background. How so?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Erin Thompson:\u003c/strong> Yeah, their power is in their boringness. We accept them, we take them for granted. Something like 90% of the public monuments in the U.S. honor white men, for example. So that constant message about who deserves to hold power in the U.S., I think, has a continuing effect.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Yeah. Tom, you know, Trump was quoted as saying, out of the 59 top cities and capitals, Washington, D.C. is the only one in the world that does not have a triumphal arch. And you were noting earlier, you that sort of Americans have a certain dislike of those kinds of things, or generally does not do this in our capitals for, for good reason. What are those reasons?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Tom Nichols:\u003c/strong> Well, for one, we tend to celebrate the citizen soldier, the people among us who fought and died, which is why our war memorials, especially in the modern era, tend to be more muted.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>You do have some big monuments that came after the Civil War to the Union. There’s one in New York, there’s actually very few of them in Boston, but a lot of statues. But by and large, Americans view going to war as something they’ve been dragged into. One of my late colleagues used to call it the avenging angel syndrome that, well, you know, by God, we didn’t start this thing, but we’ll get in there and finish it.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And then we kind of come home and realize that, you know, war takes a toll on a democracy. So we don’t build these Napoleonic arches. We don’t build these, you know, Germany, these these kind of Nazi, you know, winged angels or Soviet, you know, the big Soviet Mother of Russia with the sword and the shield and all that stuff. We were just not that kind of culture.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>So when Trump says, you know, we’re the only country in the world that doesn’t have one of these things, that’s, I think, the right answer to that is that’s right. And that’s good. And that one of the things that’s good about America, that we don’t do that.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>But Trump is very much — you can see it in his taste, which is vulgar and deeply affected by the grandeur that he sees in other cities. And he thinks that this makes America and him somehow less of a player, less majestic on the world scene not to have one of these big arteries.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And I always think of what your caller, your most recent caller, said. You know, the Arc de Triomphe in Paris has been a mixed blessing. It was meant to honor the French victory in the Battle of Austerlitz in a war that eventually Napoleon lost and ended up exiled and dead for conducting.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>So maybe it’s not a good thing to put these things up. Maybe things like the Vietnam Memorial, the World War II Memorial, and others are much more thoughtful and much more in line with the American character.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> I think listener Eric would agree with you in terms of taste. Eric writes, “Trump uses emergency when there is none. He breaks the law faster than the law can apply remedies. Also, he has horrible taste in design.”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Erin, I understand you recently visited D.C. and tried to visit many of the locations that President Trump is trying to change or build. What did you notice about the aesthetic?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Erin Thompson:\u003c/strong> Well, first that they’re even worse in person. So the $5 million have recently been spent on re-gilding four statues on the Arlington Memorial Bridge between the Lincoln Memorial and Arlington Cemetery. And they now look like they should be unwrapped and have chocolate inside. They’re so shiny and ridiculous looking.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And it was also a no-bid contract, his favorite form of using government money. But much more disturbing to me was the fact that so little was visible. There is a giant fence around the White House and Lafayette Park, which is a public space, preventing you from seeing where the East Wing used to be, where the construction is.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And so I agree in a way that monuments are not the most important things, but I think they’re the gilded canary in the coal mine. And if he’s able to hide what he’s doing with these construction projects, what else is he not telling us?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Hmm. Well, let me go to caller Charlotte next in Menlo Park. Charlotte, go ahead.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Charlotte:\u003c/strong> Yes, hi. Thank you so much for the program. Uh… I’ve wanted to just chime in about it, actually, just that that’s what, uh… And she said just now about the White House. I have very strong feelings of love of the monuments of Washington, D.C., and, uh… I am wondering, can people actually still fit at the White House the way that they could before, or what it — what is the policy? Is it — has it changed? Are people banned from even visiting anymore?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Hmm, Erin?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Erin Thompson:\u003c/strong> Thanks, Charlotte. I think it’s been greatly reduced. It is still, in theory, available, but Lafayette Park, for example, which is a popular pedestrian place to see the White House, is now closed more and more frequently. And the Trump administration has just proposed putting up a permanent fence to replace the janky-looking tarp construction they’ve got happening now.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Erin, what do you think is the overall message of this? We did a show on aesthetics in the past when Trump was sort of adorning the Oval Office with gold and so on. So this combination of sort of a gilded and what I think you’re describing feels like a gilded fortress.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Erin Thompson:\u003c/strong> Exactly. And another reason that D.C. hasn’t had a triumphal arch is that those arches celebrate a single leader. That’s not democracy. It’s a little less aesthetically unified to have monuments celebrating a whole host of people, but that’s what we need to do in a democracy.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>What the redesign of D.C. is doing is suggesting to visitors for potentially generations to come that power should be and is concentrated in the hands of the few or even one person, and that wealth should be the requirement of power. Whereas that is something that since the very beginnings of official congressional, national, federal arts has been fought against.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Well, I think this on Discord is echoing some of your points. The listener writes, “This is a symptom of a weak and vulnerable form of government that can be so easily taken over by one person. One person has corrupted all three branches of government. The power and self-interest of those around him have allowed Trump to seemingly do whatever he wants without meaningful challenges or accountability. He doesn’t ask permission. His reign ends in two years. But what does this say about the future of democracy?”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Tom, do you want to weigh in on that too?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Tom Nichols:\u003c/strong> Yeah, I think people should beware talking about the flaws of the system when what we’re really talking about are the flaws in the American people.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>James Madison warned us during the debate on ratifying the Constitution. He was asked, you know, will these checks and balances really work? Are these institutions that you’re asking us here in Virginia — it was during the debate in Virginia — are these, you know, institutions really going to protect us in the you’re promising?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And Madison, I think with a certain amount of exasperation, said, none of these things work if we are not decent people. The way he put it, he said, “Is there no virtue among us? If not, then we are in a wretched situation.”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>That, I think, is part of what’s happening. The problem is not the design of the system, it’s not the Constitution or the branches of government. It’s that you have tens of millions of people who think this is okay, and some of them even think it’s more than okay. They like it, and they vote for it.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And I think that’s a problem with our society, that there’s a kind of decadence on we that’s overtaken our society where millions of people just shrug and say, well, he’s going to build a ballroom. What are you going to do?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And I think that in an earlier time — and when I say earlier, I don’t mean 100 years ago, I mean like 20 years ago, 15 years ago — any one of these things would have been the source of a huge outcry.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>I think Donald Trump has, by firehosing us with these crazy projects and ideas and wars and other things that he’s been doing, has just kind of worn people down into numbness to say, well, I guess we’re going to build this drone platform with a big winged victory statue on it. And what can we do about it?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And that’s in part, again, because of the cowardice of his party, which now depends — the elected officials of his party depend on surviving primary challenges in which maybe 15 or 20% of the party votes. And that very small number of people has basically put a stranglehold on a party and on the legislature.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Now, hopefully that can change if people get mad enough and vote. But I guess I would just caution everyone against saying, well, somehow the design of this system is flawed. This system was never meant to work if people did not have some kind of civic affection and involvement in it. And that, I think, is the source of our real problem here.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Yeah. Interestingly, you know, we had Sarah Longwell on not that long ago, and she seemed to think that this issue may actually be breaking through with some of his voters, just because the contrast is so stark, Tom, between Americans struggling, right, with economic pressures from the war, very much as a result of the war that he started, and these gilded statues and arches that he seems very fixated on.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Do you see that as actually being a place where maybe there will be pushback by the very electorate that has voted him in?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Tom Nichols:\u003c/strong> Yeah. And I think you’re seeing that happen. I mean, for Donald Trump to be hovering now around 30, 32% popularity is really quite remarkable considering that he came back into office. I won a discontinuous election and managed to ride back into office.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Sarah, I think Sarah’s right about this, and she of course is the one who has sat with hundreds of focus groups to hear it.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And I think what breaks through is not necessarily the monuments as an issue per se. I don’t think anybody’s gonna get out there and vote and say, you know, I really don’t like this ballroom. But they’re standing there at the gas pump saying, you know, I’m paying four and a half bucks, or if you’re a farmer or trucker or something, you say, I’m payin’ you know six and a huff bucks for diesel, and this guy is running around like Goldfinger, you know, painting everything in gold.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Who’s thinking about me, and why is he putting up gold statues and sticking gold appliques on everything when I can’t afford to keep filling my car to take my kids to school?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>I think that has broken through. I think it’s been a really important part of the nosedive in his popularity. He really does come across as a callous, uncaring king who basically tells the people to eat cake and that expensive gas is a small price to pay for having a great president like him.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Well, Lorraine writes, “The expense of all these projects is deeply offensive in view that he tore healthcare away from millions of Americans through his big ugly bill.”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Erin, can you think of a historical analog as well of a leader fixated on building monuments in the face of much more pressing problems?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Erin Thompson:\u003c/strong> Well, and I just want to say, too, that thousands of people came out last weekend to protest his threats to close the Kennedy Center. So he’s attacking what people love.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And yeah, looking at Trump’s actions now made me think of the Colosseum. Right? In Rome, it’s named the Coliseum after the Colossus, a gigantic statue that stood beside it that was — he was one of the worst rulers of all history and was obsessed with trying to beautify Rome because he saw what was coming. He wanted to fix his reputation and it did not work.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> He fiddled while Rome burned, right?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>We’re talking with Erin Thompson, Professor of Art Crime at City University of New York, author of \u003cem>Smashing Statues\u003c/em>, and Tom Nichols, staff writer at \u003cem>The Atlantic\u003c/em>, about Trump’s focus on monuments and monuments, in many ways, to himself, the difficulties in curbing those actions by Congress and the courts, at least as they’re currently constituted, and what broader impact that has.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>You can join the conversation, listeners, with your questions about his recent announcement of the militarized arch, which Tom Nichols wrote about, and also just how you feel about these construction projects. Do they matter to you? Do they bother you? Why or why not? What kinds of messages do you think they will send? And what would you like to see happen to them going forward, especially after the president’s presidency?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>You can email Forum at kqed.org, find us on Discord, Bluesky, Facebook or Instagram at KQED Forum, or call us at 866-733-6786, 866-733-6786.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And Lorraine also writes, “Trump thinks that by splashing gold everywhere projects an image of wealth and power. The truth is an excess of gold makes those things look tawdry and cheap. As for the victory arch, where’s the victory? I hope I’m wrong, but the bunker under the ballroom combined with the militarization of the art paints a picture of a man who’s preparing to dig in after the 2028 election, if things don’t go his way.”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>We’ll have more after the break. This is \u003cem>Forum\u003c/em>.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Welcome back to \u003cem>Forum\u003c/em>. I’m Mina Kim. We’re talking this hour about Trump’s building projects, his monument, which he did say, in fact, that the triumphal arch early when he was announcing it was in honor of him.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>“Trump’s Monumental Obsession” is the piece by Tom Nichols, our guest today, a staff writer at \u003cem>The Atlantic\u003c/em>, and Erin Thompson is author of \u003cem>Smashing Statues\u003c/em> and professor of art crime at City University in New York.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And listeners, you’re joining the conversation with your questions about President Trump’s building projects, why you think he’s doing them and whether or not they bother you and why. 866-733-6786, the number. Discord, Bluesky, Facebook or Instagram is where you can post your comments. You can also email \u003ca href=\"mailto:forum@kqed.org\">forum@kqed.org\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And this listener on Discord writes, “What about this spending in the context of the total national debt? After all, DOGE’s purpose was to cut spending, right? How can the spending on these monuments be reconciled with that purpose?”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Erin, we talked with Tom earlier about whether or not we really have a good sense of how much these projects are costing. I mean, Trump once promised to finance the building of his own giant ballroom himself or with private donors as well. And I was struck by how you have noted that actually often the kinds of monuments we see across this country are not put up by state or federal governments, that they’re actually put up…\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Erin Thompson:\u003c/strong> By private donors? Yes, we think of them as public monuments, but they’re not public in that the public has any say into what they look like or where they go or whether they should come down. Public monuments are usually only put up by those with enough power to find a place for them and enough money to pay for them.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Yeah. So what does that then mean with regard to, you know, who gets to deliver whatever message they’re trying to deliver, as you were saying earlier, a monument does?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Erin Thompson:\u003c/strong> The history of monuments in the U.S. shows, at least I argue in my book, that they’re often meant to show the rest of us our place.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>So, for example, a lot of Confederate memorials went up not in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War, but in the 20th century and were often associated with interracial unionization efforts. So if people started to threaten to strike, a monument would be put up by, say, the mine owners or the factory owners to remind white workers, don’t cross the color line, to ally yourself with your fellow workers. You need to respect the work of your Confederate forefathers.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>So I think that the autocratic monuments we’re seeing today are also meant to remind us as voters, as citizens, you know, just sit tight. Let the elite make the decisions for you.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> After the murder of George Floyd, though, suddenly all over the country, you start seeing monuments being taken down or graffitied. Why do you think that happened?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Erin Thompson:\u003c/strong> Well, that’s the power of monuments to make concrete intangible ideas about justice, equality, et cetera. So they were places to rally ourselves, to think about, to protest inequality and power. And they were in the news a lot, but only about 200 monuments left their pedestals after the murder of George Floyd, which is far, far less than 1% of the public monuments in the U.S., something like a tenth of a percent. And many of those were removed by official actions; only about 20 were taken down by protesters. So we still have a lot to think about.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Yeah, they’re very hard to bring down, aren’t they? Can you talk about that and why?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Erin Thompson:\u003c/strong> Yeah, there’s the law. So in almost all former Confederate states, it’s simply impossible to remove an established public monument. They knew when they were especially putting those laws into place to protect Confederate monuments.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And even in states where there’s not an explicit prohibition, there’s just simply no procedure to follow to ask questions about a monument.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>So part of what’s so infuriating about what the president is currently doing is that he’s ignoring all of these laws that future administrations might not be so willing to ignore, and thus it will become — it will be difficult to take down what he’s put up because we’ll be respecting laws that he is not.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Yeah, you tell the story of an Indigenous activist in Minnesota who was trying to get a monument down. Can you talk about that and what ultimately he had to do?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Erin Thompson:\u003c/strong> So Mike Forcia, an Indigenous activist in St. Paul, Minnesota, had been trying for decades, his entire adult life, to question a monument of Christopher Columbus in front of the state capitol. He wanted to know, in this city, which is the largest urban population of Indigenous people in the U.S., why is a man who many blame with great reason for unleashing a genocide honored on the statehouse lawn?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>But every time he filed a petition, it essentially ended up thrown away because there was no procedure to question that monument.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>So finally, he heard that others were planning to tear down the statue during the middle of the night in August of 2020. And he decided that he was going to go out in the middle of the day, invite people to witness him because he said the monument went up in front of crowds of people and it needed to come down in the same way. And so he took responsibility for tearing down that monument.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Ultimately, did he face jail time?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Erin Thompson:\u003c/strong> He was charged, and prosecutors agreed to divert his case to a special restorative justice process. So he, instead of going into a court, was put in front of talking circles, they called it, of people who were affected by the removal, but also people who are affected by this statue being there in the first place, and he was sentenced to community service.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And one of my favorite parts of this case is that he only had a rope from Home Depot that he threw around the statue and tugged it down, but it turns out it came down so easily because no one had bolted it to the pedestal. It was just assumed no one would ever question the erection of Columbus on top of that pedestal, so it was very easy in the end to topple it.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Hmm. Well, let me go to Sasha in Berkeley next. Sasha, go ahead.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Sasha:\u003c/strong> Good morning. Well, I look at this as Humpty Dumpty that we have to put back together again after Trump is gone. And I’m curious why what I’m going to suggest next couldn’t be done.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>I would take down all the gold in the White House and anywhere else that’s been plastered and melt it down for money we could put into the Treasury. And in terms of the art, take it down and the ballroom — if there is no need for a huge room like that, currently called the ballroom, I would take at least half of it down if the other half is to be made into useful offices or replace, I forget what it was, the East or the West Wing that he tore down.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>You know, but the biggest problem is how do we put the government back together again? And I have no answers for that because clearly all of our departments have been stripped of staff, and what have they been replaced for, or what it remains are people with political agendas to destroy.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Well, Sasha, thanks for weighing in.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Sasha:\u003c/strong> I’m curious about whether we can melt it all down or not.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Well, we were hearing from Erin, you know, just what kinds of potential consequences you could face for that. I don’t know if you want to add anything to Sasha’s point.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Erin Thompson:\u003c/strong> Well, I’ll just say that I think that a lot of the stuff that got stuck up around the White House might not be actual gold, so melting it down might produce a lot of plastic fumes.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> That was a suspicion. Let me go to David in Indiana next. David, go ahead. You’re on.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>David:\u003c/strong> Well, since, uh… arches tend to commemorate something specific, and one of the biggest, if not the biggest, concern of Americans right now is affordability, maybe it should be named the Arch of Affordability, the Triumph of Affordability, or at least nicknamed that.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Well, David, thanks. Yeah, if you can’t take it down, maybe you just reimagine and reconstitute its purpose. That could be one way to handle it.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>So RJ writes, “How can judges be so gullible and not see through claims that these projects are for national security?”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>I wanna ask you about this, Tom. What is the status of the legal challenge, right? What can you tell us about the arch in particular?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Tom Nichols:\u003c/strong> Well, there are lawsuits pending, but to your listener’s point, it’s not that judges are gullible. It’s that they don’t think they have the power to contradict the executive on what constitutes national security, which is why this keeps getting kicked up further and further because there are some judges that say, okay, fine, I’m not buying that argument.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>But, you know, precedence, precedent and history tend to be on the side of presidents when they say national security. The courts basically say someone besides us has to adjudicate what the answer — usually be in Congress, since we don’t actually have a function in Congress right now.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>So it’s not that the judges are gullible, it’s that I think some of them feel that their hands are tied.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And I wanted to make, if I could, I just wanna make a quick note about what monuments are for, because Erin’s point is very important. But I think it depends on where you live.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>I lived and worked in Boston for years. And monuments can also be really important reminders about what’s good in us and what we should remember about ourselves.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>If you walked from my old office in the State House on Beacon Hill, all the way down through the garden and the Boston Common and the Public Garden, you would pass a plaque, a sculpture dedicated to Robert Gould Shaw, for example, the commander of the Massachusetts 54th, the first Black Army unit. You go further down, you pass statues of abolitionists. You walk out of the Public Garden under the gaze of George Washington.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>The problem is that Donald Trump is cheapening our notion of what a memorial is by taking them and basically admitting, as he did — he was interviewed last summer and basically someone said, are you putting these up because they’re afraid they won’t put them up for you when you’re gone? And he said, yeah, this is what I want. And no one will do this once I’m gone.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Well, in a democracy, if you’re saying, I want to put these up because no one wants them but me, that’s a really kind of revealing and dysfunctional thing.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>So yes, it’s true that memorials can be these awful attempts to intimidate people. Trump’s efforts, by the way, remind me not of — although I think Colosseum is a great example — I spent a lot of time in the old Soviet Union, and his projects remind me of these outsized Soviet war memorials that were everywhere in Moscow and Leningrad and Kiev and other places in the Old Soviet Union.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>That’s just not the kind of country we are, but that doesn’t mean that we should forget how memorials can really inspire us and make us better people just by seeing them.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Well, Barbara writes, “Trump builds these illegal monuments to himself because he knows others will not. They need to be torn down at the earliest opportunity. We cannot let these un-American monuments to a cruel, lawless, corrupt leader stand. Symbols matter.”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Let me remind listeners, you’re listening to \u003cem>Forum\u003c/em>. I’m Mina Kim.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>What do you think — and I know I’m asking you to sort of get into the mind, but I imagine, Erin, you have some thoughts on this. Is the simplistic message he wants to send with these monuments to himself — what do you think he’s hoping people will associate with him? Wealth.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Erin Thompson:\u003c/strong> Our goodness. Yeah, it’s not too complicated, I think. And it has been the same in monuments throughout time. Bigger is better, is permanent.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And I think it’s interesting that we do tend to think of monuments as permanent, but they really aren’t. America is very strange in that we’ve had the same set of monuments for so long, but almost every other culture, country in the world has seen waves of monuments go up and down every time power changes.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>So yeah, I think we should get used to the idea, thinking of our monuments as lovely but temporary.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> I think we think of them as so permanent just because of the way that they’re built, and like marble and stone. Yeah, that’s just — that’s why they’re so big, you can’t ignore them. Yeah, and you have to look up at them and so on.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Well, in the short term, can it serve the political purpose of distraction, say, from the things that he hasn’t been able to keep his promises on in this particular presidency? Erin or Tom. Yeah.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Tom Nichols:\u003c/strong> Oh, sorry. Yes, but I think it’s backfiring in the way that we discussed earlier.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>If we were winning the war in Iran, and we are not, you could almost see people making an argument to say, well, we’ve toppled a terrible regime. We’ve been at each other’s throats for nearly a half century. And the people of Iran are going to be free. And who? You know, whatever argument you want to make, and therefore we should put up something.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>The problem is that everything that he would want to commemorate, including himself — I mean, who puts up a monument to himself when he’s at 30%? You know, that’s the kind of, I suppose, grim and laughable part of this.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>He’s losing war, the economy is tumbling off the rails, his party is about to be clobbered. Um, you know, in, in, um, at least by all indications that we can see so far, his party’s going to get obliterated in the midterms. His — he’s at historic, he’s reaching, he has fallen below, uh, what our friend Sarah Longwell calls the Bush line, the George W. Bush line. And he’s now heading for Nixon territory.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And you know who’s, who’s response to that is to say, you don’t — we need a memorial, a statue, a ballroom.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Um, and I think that’s the kind of shock that hits people. If things were going well, you would have a lot of people defending this or at least ignoring it. And instead he’s doing this at a time that I think a lot of ordinary Americans who don’t usually pay a lot of attention to the news are getting home from the grocery store and saying, you know, you’ve got to be kidding me. Well, what is this about?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And I think it is breaking through.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Well, Gregory in Oakland writes, “I appreciate the point that it’s not just the system, but also the people who keep enabling this behavior from our leaders. These projects ultimately distract us from issues that matter even more.”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Trish writes, “He knows that nobody is going to honor him in such a grand manner once he’s out of the picture. So he has to honor himself given the atrocities that he and his administration have perpetrated upon the nation and the world. I suspect that one day there will be a move to tear down all of his creations just as we are doing nowadays for those who have been revealed for their atrocities.”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Trump’s name has been taken down for now from the Kennedy Center. Tom, can you just remind us of the status of all that? Because I know you’ve also recently reported on it.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Tom Nichols:\u003c/strong> Oh, yeah, this is, I mean, I think another place where people are starting to pay attention in a way that they didn’t before is looking at him and saying, with all the things going on in the world, he’s fixated on this, that he has to have his name next to Jack Kennedy for some reason, you know, in a city.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And I think we should also stipulate here what George — excuse me, Donald Trump hates Washington. I mean, it’s not a city where he is popular. He doesn’t like it there. When he first came to — in his first term, he actually tried to figure out if he could govern the country from New York instead of having to move to Washington.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And the city kind of hates him back. I mean, he is tremendously unpopular there.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>So he’s been trying to get this done. The courts have told him that he cannot put his name on it. Then he said, well, if I renovate it — well, can we put a big plaque? This is all done through his trustees, by the way, who are all basically his cronies. If I renovate it, can you put a plaque on it that said, renovated by the Trump Kennedy Center Foundation or some damn thing.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And the courts again said, nice try, very funny, but no.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And so now the trustees have said, well, if we can’t rename it and the president won’t help us fundraise to rebuild it, we’re going to have to tear it down. Which was Trump event, essentially. I wrote a piece about it saying this is basically blackmail. This is the Dane-geld, as Kipling called it. He wants a payoff, he wants his name on it, or he’s going to destroy this beloved national icon.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And my argument is that we ought to let him. I think in full view of the American people, if this is who he is and the kind of administration he’s running, then I think Americans ought to see the John F. Kennedy Center torn down because the president had a temper tantrum.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>But that’s where it stands now. He can’t get his name on it. The courts have stopped him at every turn, and his threat now is, it’s so decrepit that without my money, you know, without me raising money, it’ll have to be torn down.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Well, as we’ve talked about, this issue with the monuments is very much a metaphor for his presidency. Thanks for digging through it with us. Tom Nichols of \u003cem>The Atlantic\u003c/em> and Erin Thompson of City University of New York, author of \u003cem>Smashing Statues\u003c/em>, and also thank you for doing that with us, our listeners.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And my thanks as well for Ana de Amaral for producing this segment.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>This is \u003cem>Forum\u003c/em>. I’m Mina Kim.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>From the White House ballroom to the Kennedy Center to a proposed triumphal arch along the Potomac, President Trump has taken a special interest in creating physical markers of his legacy. We’ll look at how he’s largely escaped oversight, including by designating these projects as central to national security. Why are monuments such a priority for Trump, and what does this tell us about the growing reach of executive power?\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Welcome to \u003cem>Forum\u003c/em>, I’m Mina Kim. Of all the things the president has on his plate — the war in Iran, high fuel and food prices, steep potential losses for his party in the midterms — what seems to animate Trump the most are his building projects. The latest announcement this week is that his proposed triumphal arch on D.C.’s Memorial Circle will now be a military complex, complete with snipers and drones for national security reasons. And for all the skepticism and unpopularity of the idea, it continues to move forward for now.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Welcome to \u003cem>Forum\u003c/em>, I’m Mina Kim. Of all the things the president has on his plate — the war in Iran, high fuel and food prices, steep potential losses for his party in the midterms — what seems to animate Trump the most are his building projects. The latest announcement this week is that his proposed triumphal arch on D.C.’s Memorial Circle will now be a military complex, complete with snipers and drones for national security reasons. And for all the skepticism and unpopularity of the idea, it continues to move forward for now.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>This hour, we look at how Trump’s construction projects are changing the landscape and the reach of executive power and the role of monuments in shaping a collective narrative. Starting us off is Tom Nichols, whose latest piece for \u003cem>The Atlantic\u003c/em> is called “Trump’s Monumental Obsession.” Good to have you back, Tom.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>This hour, we look at how Trump’s construction projects are changing the landscape and the reach of executive power and the role of monuments in shaping a collective narrative. Starting us off is Tom Nichols, whose latest piece for \u003cem>The Atlantic\u003c/em> is called “Trump’s Monumental Obsession.” Good to have you back, Tom.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Tom Nichols:\u003c/strong> Thanks. Thanks for having me.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> So first, talk about why the idea of militarizing the arch has drawn fresh skepticism and pushback from not only you, but retired generals, preservationists, others.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> So first, talk about why the idea of militarizing the arch has drawn fresh skepticism and pushback from not only you, but retired generals, preservationists, others.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Tom Nichols:\u003c/strong> Because it’s crazy. You’re talking about putting an arch in the middle of a busy traffic circle, and anybody who’s ever been to Washington has probably experienced that particular area between the cemetery and the Lincoln Memorial and downtown D.C. And the idea of filling it with weapons while cars sit in traffic around it every day. And airplanes, by the way, this is another problem, as airplanes fly over it because it’s right in the approach path for Reagan National Airport. It’s a stupid and dangerous idea.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Tom Nichols:\u003c/strong> Because it’s crazy. You’re talking about putting an arch in the middle of a busy traffic circle, and anybody who’s ever been to Washington has probably experienced that particular area between the cemetery and the Lincoln Memorial and downtown D.C. And the idea of filling it with weapons while cars sit in traffic around it every day. And airplanes, by the way, this is another problem, as airplanes fly over it because it’s right in the approach path for Reagan National Airport. It’s a stupid and dangerous idea.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>But I also don’t think that the president is serious about it. He’s saying this because he knows that national security arguments tend to prevail in court, as he did with the ballroom. When people sued to stop him from demolishing the East Wing and building the ballroom, some of his opponents won in court and there was a tussle back and forth. Then Trump said, no, this is a national security project. It’s to build a bunker and an operation center, and the ballroom is just a kind of a hat we’re putting on top of that national security stuff. The courts bought it. Supreme Court, all the way down, you know. Well, you know, the president gets his way on national security issues.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>But I also don’t think that the president is serious about it. He’s saying this because he knows that national security arguments tend to prevail in court, as he did with the ballroom. When people sued to stop him from demolishing the East Wing and building the ballroom, some of his opponents won in court and there was a tussle back and forth. Then Trump said, no, this is a national security project. It’s to build a bunker and an operation center, and the ballroom is just a kind of a hat we’re putting on top of that national security stuff. The courts bought it. Supreme Court, all the way down, you know. Well, you know, the president gets his way on national security issues.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Yeah. Why did the courts buy it? What does recasting the building project as military infrastructure and therefore a national security asset, right, help Trump do with the courts and with Congress as well?\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Tom Nichols:\u003c/strong> The courts have always — I should say always since the end of World War II, since the Cold War, when national security became a thing, became a phrase. You know, before World War Two, very rare to actually see the phrase “national security” used anywhere. And during the Cold War, we created a national security state and we prioritized national security above a lot of things, including civil liberties. And we did it again after 9/11.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>So when presidents invoke national security, courts kind of wrap that under the president’s Article II powers. And they become very hesitant to interfere with that because they don’t want to interfere with what they think is the president’s legitimate sphere of competence and power on that issue.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>So it’s become a thing where presidents, not just Donald Trump, but presidents in the past, have said, well, to get through a policy I really want to get to, matter of national security. And that’s kind of meant to snuff out debate about whether the thing involved is actually important or worth the money or even legal. So that’s why it happens.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> This does also undermine Congress’s authority to constrain it at all in a substantive way.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Tom Nichols:\u003c/strong> Yeah, it always has. I mean, the national security argument has always been part of the shift, the migration in power from Congress to an imperial presidency. Presidents over the course of the Cold War and then during the war on terror, executive power has expanded vastly beyond what I think the founders envisioned in the Constitution.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Tom Nichols:\u003c/strong> Yeah, it always has. I mean, the national security argument has always been part of the shift, the migration in power from Congress to an imperial presidency. Presidents over the course of the Cold War and then during the war on terror, executive power has expanded vastly beyond what I think the founders envisioned in the Constitution.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>But the president has become, you know, the vicar of national security, and it’s a very effective argument to make. And sometimes, you know — let’s be fair about this — sometimes it’s a legitimate argument. There are things that the executive branch has to do in the name of national security, like build bunkers under the White House.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>But the president has become, you know, the vicar of national security, and it’s a very effective argument to make. And sometimes, you know — let’s be fair about this — sometimes it’s a legitimate argument. There are things that the executive branch has to do in the name of national security, like build bunkers under the White House.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>But when that gets applied to things like tariffs, for example, you know, Trump at one point claimed that tariffs were a matter of national security. Pretty soon everything becomes a matter of national security because presidents, and this president in particular, just like the fact that it sort of, you know, just kind of shuts down opposition and legal challenges to whatever it is he wants to do.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>But when that gets applied to things like tariffs, for example, you know, Trump at one point claimed that tariffs were a matter of national security. Pretty soon everything becomes a matter of national security because presidents, and this president in particular, just like the fact that it sort of, you know, just kind of shuts down opposition and legal challenges to whatever it is he wants to do.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Yes. I mean, Trump argued that the ban on CNN, MS NOW, and Politico from White House grounds was because they were a threat to our national security.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Yes. I mean, Trump argued that the ban on CNN, MS NOW, and Politico from White House grounds was because they were a threat to our national security.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>I want to invite listeners into the conversation. What questions do you have about President Trump’s militarized arch? You know, why do you think these construction projects are so important to the president? Do these things bother you? Why or why not?\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>I want to invite listeners into the conversation. What questions do you have about President Trump’s militarized arch? You know, why do you think these construction projects are so important to the president? Do these things bother you? Why or why not?\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>You can tell us by emailing \u003ca href=\"mailto:forum@kqed.org\">forum@kqed.org\u003c/a>, finding us on Discord, Bluesky, Facebook, or Instagram at KQED Forum, or by calling 866-733-6786. Again, that’s 866-733-6786.\u003c/p>\n",
"innerContent": [
"\n\u003cp>You can tell us by emailing \u003ca href=\"mailto:forum@kqed.org\">forum@kqed.org\u003c/a>, finding us on Discord, Bluesky, Facebook, or Instagram at KQED Forum, or by calling 866-733-6786. Again, that’s 866-733-6786.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Those are on Discord, right? “Trump’s building projects are a frustrating waste of money and grotesque display of ego. But honestly, I prioritize his D.C. monuments pretty low compared to other damage he’s doing to the country and world. Everything built can be disassembled.” Do you think that? The types of things he’s building now could easily be disassembled?\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>Those are on Discord, right? “Trump’s building projects are a frustrating waste of money and grotesque display of ego. But honestly, I prioritize his D.C. monuments pretty low compared to other damage he’s doing to the country and world. Everything built can be disassembled.” Do you think that? The types of things he’s building now could easily be disassembled?\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Tom Nichols:\u003c/strong> I think some of them can be. I personally, as a former Washington resident — I should say a former suburban resident. I used to work on the Hill and spent my graduate years at Georgetown and all that. I think that these are atrocious and garish projects, and I would happily support any president who says the ballroom’s got to go and we’re going to rebuild the East Wing and not put up an armed platform in the middle of, in front of Arlington Cemetery.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Tom Nichols:\u003c/strong> I think some of them can be. I personally, as a former Washington resident — I should say a former suburban resident. I used to work on the Hill and spent my graduate years at Georgetown and all that. I think that these are atrocious and garish projects, and I would happily support any president who says the ballroom’s got to go and we’re going to rebuild the East Wing and not put up an armed platform in the middle of, in front of Arlington Cemetery.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>I think Donald Trump has proven one thing, that if you can put these things up through sheer willpower, a president can take them down through sheer willpower.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>I think Donald Trump has proven one thing, that if you can put these things up through sheer willpower, a president can take them down through sheer willpower.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>I think your listener, I agree with your listener who said, hey, this isn’t the biggest problem in the world except for two things, I would say. One is that Donald Trump is establishing that presidents can just spend money at will simply by chanting “national security” over even trivial and dumb things, like putting up this kind of, you know, bit of militaristic bombast.\u003c/p>\n",
"innerContent": [
"\n\u003cp>I think your listener, I agree with your listener who said, hey, this isn’t the biggest problem in the world except for two things, I would say. One is that Donald Trump is establishing that presidents can just spend money at will simply by chanting “national security” over even trivial and dumb things, like putting up this kind of, you know, bit of militaristic bombast.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>I referred to the victory arch that he wants to put up as something that looks like it was found in the bottom desk drawer of, you know, Albert Speer’s desk. And it’s just ugly. But he can just build it because he’s — national security, and he snaps his fingers and people start digging.\u003c/p>\n",
"innerContent": [
"\n\u003cp>I referred to the victory arch that he wants to put up as something that looks like it was found in the bottom desk drawer of, you know, Albert Speer’s desk. And it’s just ugly. But he can just build it because he’s — national security, and he snaps his fingers and people start digging.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>So once you establish that, you’re setting a lot of bad precedents here.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>So once you establish that, you’re setting a lot of bad precedents here.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>The other is that I think symbolism matters. I think, I think, you know, the president, the White House in particular, is meant to be dignified and austere, but not bombastic and overwhelming. And I think it’s an affront to the culture of democracy to put up a Tsarist ballroom that would make a King Louis of France blush in the middle of the place that’s meant to be the people’s house.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>The other is that I think symbolism matters. I think, I think, you know, the president, the White House in particular, is meant to be dignified and austere, but not bombastic and overwhelming. And I think it’s an affront to the culture of democracy to put up a Tsarist ballroom that would make a King Louis of France blush in the middle of the place that’s meant to be the people’s house.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>So I, while it’s not the most important thing in the world, it’s more important than it may seem.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>So I, while it’s not the most important thing in the world, it’s more important than it may seem.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Yeah, I know. And also I think in the context of all the other things that are happening in the country, as you point out in your piece and as I mentioned in the intro, I think it’s concerning to have that be the main focus of the president. Is there any chance at all that because he noted that it was at the military’s request, is there a chance at all, as someone who knows the military well, that he would have found people in the military to say, yes, this is something that could be meaningful for national security?\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Yeah, I know. And also I think in the context of all the other things that are happening in the country, as you point out in your piece and as I mentioned in the intro, I think it’s concerning to have that be the main focus of the president. Is there any chance at all that because he noted that it was at the military’s request, is there a chance at all, as someone who knows the military well, that he would have found people in the military to say, yes, this is something that could be meaningful for national security?\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Tom Nichols:\u003c/strong> I would — this again, my personal view here is that I will file that under things that didn’t happen. He may well have turned to Pete Hegseth and said, Pete, maybe we should build a big arch. And he said, good idea, sir. And that was the source of saying the military has asked for it.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Tom Nichols:\u003c/strong> I would — this again, my personal view here is that I will file that under things that didn’t happen. He may well have turned to Pete Hegseth and said, Pete, maybe we should build a big arch. And he said, good idea, sir. And that was the source of saying the military has asked for it.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>But I cannot imagine that, you know, anybody in the uniformed military was sitting around and saying, hey, you know what would really improve that arch? Snipers.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>But I cannot imagine that, you know, anybody in the uniformed military was sitting around and saying, hey, you know what would really improve that arch? Snipers.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Is it possible in this administration? Again, he may have turned to some hapless colonel and said, Colonel, you think that’s a good idea, right? And the guy’s going to say, oh, whatever you think, Mr. President.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>Is it possible in this administration? Again, he may have turned to some hapless colonel and said, Colonel, you think that’s a good idea, right? And the guy’s going to say, oh, whatever you think, Mr. President.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>But I just don’t believe that people walked into his office and said, Mr. President, you got to build this armed platform right next to Reagan National. Uh… Because, you know, it’s a matter of national security. I, I just — it can — I could be wrong, but I just don’t believe that happened.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>But I just don’t believe that people walked into his office and said, Mr. President, you got to build this armed platform right next to Reagan National. Uh… Because, you know, it’s a matter of national security. I, I just — it can — I could be wrong, but I just don’t believe that happened.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> You noted costs as well. Do you know who is paying for these monuments and what kind of cost we are looking at, or maybe costs across things like the arch and the ballroom?\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> You noted costs as well. Do you know who is paying for these monuments and what kind of cost we are looking at, or maybe costs across things like the arch and the ballroom?\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Tom Nichols:\u003c/strong> I’m sorry. Are you insisting on transparency and how millions of dollars are being spent in Washington? That sounds like communism. I don’t know.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Tom Nichols:\u003c/strong> I’m sorry. Are you insisting on transparency and how millions of dollars are being spent in Washington? That sounds like communism. I don’t know.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>That’s another part of this problem. I mean, the president changes stories every other day on — you saw this with the ballroom. Well, it’s only going to cost this much and we’re going to get donations and it’s not going to be a big deal. And then the costs balloon and then it turns out we are using government money. Don’t hurt! But again, only for national security, because there’s going to be a thing under it.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>That’s another part of this problem. I mean, the president changes stories every other day on — you saw this with the ballroom. Well, it’s only going to cost this much and we’re going to get donations and it’s not going to be a big deal. And then the costs balloon and then it turns out we are using government money. Don’t hurt! But again, only for national security, because there’s going to be a thing under it.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>In the end, the president — this is a personalized cult of personality regime inside the White House, where the president says, I want a victory arch. And a bunch of people look at each other and say, well, yes, okay. And we’ll figure out who’s paying for it and how all that’s going to happen later.\u003c/p>\n",
"innerContent": [
"\n\u003cp>In the end, the president — this is a personalized cult of personality regime inside the White House, where the president says, I want a victory arch. And a bunch of people look at each other and say, well, yes, okay. And we’ll figure out who’s paying for it and how all that’s going to happen later.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>And if we had a Congress that cared about oversight… You would know. But because this Congress currently is controlled by a Republican majority that is mostly terrified of Trump because nobody wants to end up, you know, primaried like John Cornyn or, you know, Cassidy or Tom Tillis or any of these people that are leaving, they simply kind of keep their head down and they’re just waiting for this.\u003c/p>\n",
"innerContent": [
"\n\u003cp>And if we had a Congress that cared about oversight… You would know. But because this Congress currently is controlled by a Republican majority that is mostly terrified of Trump because nobody wants to end up, you know, primaried like John Cornyn or, you know, Cassidy or Tom Tillis or any of these people that are leaving, they simply kind of keep their head down and they’re just waiting for this.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>I mean, it’s been almost 10 years of some Republicans just waiting this to blow over, but obviously it’s not gonna blow over. And Trump’s gonna spend this money and nobody’s gonna really ask why.\u003c/p>\n",
"innerContent": [
"\n\u003cp>I mean, it’s been almost 10 years of some Republicans just waiting this to blow over, but obviously it’s not gonna blow over. And Trump’s gonna spend this money and nobody’s gonna really ask why.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> We’re talking with \u003cem>Atlantic\u003c/em> staff writer Tom Nichols about Trump’s triumphal arch and his special interest in creating physical markers of his legacy and why neither Congress nor the courts right now have been able to end these projects, especially when the administration cites national security.\u003c/p>\n",
"innerContent": [
"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> We’re talking with \u003cem>Atlantic\u003c/em> staff writer Tom Nichols about Trump’s triumphal arch and his special interest in creating physical markers of his legacy and why neither Congress nor the courts right now have been able to end these projects, especially when the administration cites national security.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>We’ll have more after the break. Stay with us.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>We’ll have more after the break. Stay with us.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>I’m Mina Kim. Welcome back to \u003cem>Forum\u003c/em>. I’m Mina Kim. We’re talking this hour about Trump’s triumphal arch, the White House ballroom, and other building projects that have drawn the president’s attention and how these construction projects are extending the reach of executive power, even if on the face of them they don’t seem as much of an issue for the country as, say, things like the war in Iran and high fuel and food prices.\u003c/p>\n",
"innerContent": [
"\n\u003cp>I’m Mina Kim. Welcome back to \u003cem>Forum\u003c/em>. I’m Mina Kim. We’re talking this hour about Trump’s triumphal arch, the White House ballroom, and other building projects that have drawn the president’s attention and how these construction projects are extending the reach of executive power, even if on the face of them they don’t seem as much of an issue for the country as, say, things like the war in Iran and high fuel and food prices.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>We’re talking about this with Tom Nichols. With you, our listeners, join the conversation by emailing \u003ca href=\"mailto:forum@kqed.org\">forum@kqed.org\u003c/a>, finding us on Discord, Bluesky, Facebook, or Instagram at KQED Forum. Call us at 866-733-6786, 866-733-6786.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>We’re talking about this with Tom Nichols. With you, our listeners, join the conversation by emailing \u003ca href=\"mailto:forum@kqed.org\">forum@kqed.org\u003c/a>, finding us on Discord, Bluesky, Facebook, or Instagram at KQED Forum. Call us at 866-733-6786, 866-733-6786.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>What questions do you have about the president’s efforts to push building projects through D.C.? Why do you think he wants to do this? And do they bother you? Why or why not? How do you think these projects will inform how we remember President Trump?\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>What questions do you have about the president’s efforts to push building projects through D.C.? Why do you think he wants to do this? And do they bother you? Why or why not? How do you think these projects will inform how we remember President Trump?\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Let me go to caller Susan in Marin. Hi, Susan. Go ahead, you’re on.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>Let me go to caller Susan in Marin. Hi, Susan. Go ahead, you’re on.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Susan:\u003c/strong> I think, uh… I hold Congress as responsible for the ballroom as I hold Trump. Uh… They’re the part of our government that’s supposed to be able to spend money, and the fact that they’re allowing him to take money out of, uh… common bank is just, it just makes me furious. They’ve done nothing for an awful long time, and this is nothing that is going to cost us millions and millions and billions of money.\u003c/p>\n",
"innerContent": [
"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Susan:\u003c/strong> I think, uh… I hold Congress as responsible for the ballroom as I hold Trump. Uh… They’re the part of our government that’s supposed to be able to spend money, and the fact that they’re allowing him to take money out of, uh… common bank is just, it just makes me furious. They’ve done nothing for an awful long time, and this is nothing that is going to cost us millions and millions and billions of money.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Well, thanks for sharing how you feel about this, Susan. Let me go to Colin next in San Francisco. Colin, go ahead. You’re on.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Well, thanks for sharing how you feel about this, Susan. Let me go to Colin next in San Francisco. Colin, go ahead. You’re on.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Colin:\u003c/strong> Good morning. I’m not as concerned about the proposed, um, victory arch or Arc de Triomphe, whatever we want to call it, because it’s very unlikely that it will be completed within Trump’s lifetime. It’s likely going to be abandoned just as soon as he’s out of office.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Colin:\u003c/strong> Good morning. I’m not as concerned about the proposed, um, victory arch or Arc de Triomphe, whatever we want to call it, because it’s very unlikely that it will be completed within Trump’s lifetime. It’s likely going to be abandoned just as soon as he’s out of office.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>The original Arc de Triomphe took about 30 years from, uh, inception under Napoleon Bonaparte to completion in 1836. Um, it’s also my, you know, it could jinx this country too. You know, after the Arch of Triumph was built, the Germans were able to stage two victory parades in 1871 and 1940 under or by the arch.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>The original Arc de Triomphe took about 30 years from, uh, inception under Napoleon Bonaparte to completion in 1836. Um, it’s also my, you know, it could jinx this country too. You know, after the Arch of Triumph was built, the Germans were able to stage two victory parades in 1871 and 1940 under or by the arch.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Well, thanks for sharing where you’re at and what you think in terms of jinxing. That’s an interesting point.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Well, thanks for sharing where you’re at and what you think in terms of jinxing. That’s an interesting point.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>I do want to bring Erin Thompson into the conversation now, professor of art crime at City University, New York, and also the author of the book \u003cem>Smashing Statues: The Rise and Fall of America’s Public Monuments\u003c/em>. Erin, thanks so much for being with us.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>I do want to bring Erin Thompson into the conversation now, professor of art crime at City University, New York, and also the author of the book \u003cem>Smashing Statues: The Rise and Fall of America’s Public Monuments\u003c/em>. Erin, thanks so much for being with us.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Erin Thompson:\u003c/strong> Happy to be here.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Erin Thompson:\u003c/strong> Happy to be here.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> So stepping back a bit, you know, help us understand the power of monuments as people sort of grapple with how significant this moment is with regards to Trump. How could they affect us generally, the public?\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> So stepping back a bit, you know, help us understand the power of monuments as people sort of grapple with how significant this moment is with regards to Trump. How could they affect us generally, the public?\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Erin Thompson:\u003c/strong> Well, monuments are really about capturing the future. They’re about shaping the memory of the past. So I think it will be very difficult to get rid of any monuments, really, but Trump’s monuments in particular, and they’re going to keep shaping what we value about America. So it…\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Erin Thompson:\u003c/strong> Well, monuments are really about capturing the future. They’re about shaping the memory of the past. So I think it will be very difficult to get rid of any monuments, really, but Trump’s monuments in particular, and they’re going to keep shaping what we value about America. So it…\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> It’s interesting that you say they have that type of power because they feel, you know, sort of very limiting in some ways of sending a message. Can you talk about how or where their power lies? I guess maybe even in their simplicity.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> It’s interesting that you say they have that type of power because they feel, you know, sort of very limiting in some ways of sending a message. Can you talk about how or where their power lies? I guess maybe even in their simplicity.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Erin Thompson:\u003c/strong> Exactly. Monuments don’t actually teach history. There’s not enough space for that. They just tell us who should you literally look up to, who is large, who should be honored and hold power.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Erin Thompson:\u003c/strong> Exactly. Monuments don’t actually teach history. There’s not enough space for that. They just tell us who should you literally look up to, who is large, who should be honored and hold power.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Say there’s a certain power in the way we sort of get used to them, how they fade into the background. How so?\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Say there’s a certain power in the way we sort of get used to them, how they fade into the background. How so?\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Erin Thompson:\u003c/strong> Yeah, their power is in their boringness. We accept them, we take them for granted. Something like 90% of the public monuments in the U.S. honor white men, for example. So that constant message about who deserves to hold power in the U.S., I think, has a continuing effect.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Erin Thompson:\u003c/strong> Yeah, their power is in their boringness. We accept them, we take them for granted. Something like 90% of the public monuments in the U.S. honor white men, for example. So that constant message about who deserves to hold power in the U.S., I think, has a continuing effect.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Yeah. Tom, you know, Trump was quoted as saying, out of the 59 top cities and capitals, Washington, D.C. is the only one in the world that does not have a triumphal arch. And you were noting earlier, you that sort of Americans have a certain dislike of those kinds of things, or generally does not do this in our capitals for, for good reason. What are those reasons?\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Yeah. Tom, you know, Trump was quoted as saying, out of the 59 top cities and capitals, Washington, D.C. is the only one in the world that does not have a triumphal arch. And you were noting earlier, you that sort of Americans have a certain dislike of those kinds of things, or generally does not do this in our capitals for, for good reason. What are those reasons?\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Tom Nichols:\u003c/strong> Well, for one, we tend to celebrate the citizen soldier, the people among us who fought and died, which is why our war memorials, especially in the modern era, tend to be more muted.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Tom Nichols:\u003c/strong> Well, for one, we tend to celebrate the citizen soldier, the people among us who fought and died, which is why our war memorials, especially in the modern era, tend to be more muted.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>You do have some big monuments that came after the Civil War to the Union. There’s one in New York, there’s actually very few of them in Boston, but a lot of statues. But by and large, Americans view going to war as something they’ve been dragged into. One of my late colleagues used to call it the avenging angel syndrome that, well, you know, by God, we didn’t start this thing, but we’ll get in there and finish it.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>You do have some big monuments that came after the Civil War to the Union. There’s one in New York, there’s actually very few of them in Boston, but a lot of statues. But by and large, Americans view going to war as something they’ve been dragged into. One of my late colleagues used to call it the avenging angel syndrome that, well, you know, by God, we didn’t start this thing, but we’ll get in there and finish it.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>And then we kind of come home and realize that, you know, war takes a toll on a democracy. So we don’t build these Napoleonic arches. We don’t build these, you know, Germany, these these kind of Nazi, you know, winged angels or Soviet, you know, the big Soviet Mother of Russia with the sword and the shield and all that stuff. We were just not that kind of culture.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>And then we kind of come home and realize that, you know, war takes a toll on a democracy. So we don’t build these Napoleonic arches. We don’t build these, you know, Germany, these these kind of Nazi, you know, winged angels or Soviet, you know, the big Soviet Mother of Russia with the sword and the shield and all that stuff. We were just not that kind of culture.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>So when Trump says, you know, we’re the only country in the world that doesn’t have one of these things, that’s, I think, the right answer to that is that’s right. And that’s good. And that one of the things that’s good about America, that we don’t do that.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>So when Trump says, you know, we’re the only country in the world that doesn’t have one of these things, that’s, I think, the right answer to that is that’s right. And that’s good. And that one of the things that’s good about America, that we don’t do that.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>But Trump is very much — you can see it in his taste, which is vulgar and deeply affected by the grandeur that he sees in other cities. And he thinks that this makes America and him somehow less of a player, less majestic on the world scene not to have one of these big arteries.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>But Trump is very much — you can see it in his taste, which is vulgar and deeply affected by the grandeur that he sees in other cities. And he thinks that this makes America and him somehow less of a player, less majestic on the world scene not to have one of these big arteries.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>And I always think of what your caller, your most recent caller, said. You know, the Arc de Triomphe in Paris has been a mixed blessing. It was meant to honor the French victory in the Battle of Austerlitz in a war that eventually Napoleon lost and ended up exiled and dead for conducting.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>And I always think of what your caller, your most recent caller, said. You know, the Arc de Triomphe in Paris has been a mixed blessing. It was meant to honor the French victory in the Battle of Austerlitz in a war that eventually Napoleon lost and ended up exiled and dead for conducting.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>So maybe it’s not a good thing to put these things up. Maybe things like the Vietnam Memorial, the World War II Memorial, and others are much more thoughtful and much more in line with the American character.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>So maybe it’s not a good thing to put these things up. Maybe things like the Vietnam Memorial, the World War II Memorial, and others are much more thoughtful and much more in line with the American character.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> I think listener Eric would agree with you in terms of taste. Eric writes, “Trump uses emergency when there is none. He breaks the law faster than the law can apply remedies. Also, he has horrible taste in design.”\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> I think listener Eric would agree with you in terms of taste. Eric writes, “Trump uses emergency when there is none. He breaks the law faster than the law can apply remedies. Also, he has horrible taste in design.”\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Erin, I understand you recently visited D.C. and tried to visit many of the locations that President Trump is trying to change or build. What did you notice about the aesthetic?\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>Erin, I understand you recently visited D.C. and tried to visit many of the locations that President Trump is trying to change or build. What did you notice about the aesthetic?\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Erin Thompson:\u003c/strong> Well, first that they’re even worse in person. So the $5 million have recently been spent on re-gilding four statues on the Arlington Memorial Bridge between the Lincoln Memorial and Arlington Cemetery. And they now look like they should be unwrapped and have chocolate inside. They’re so shiny and ridiculous looking.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Erin Thompson:\u003c/strong> Well, first that they’re even worse in person. So the $5 million have recently been spent on re-gilding four statues on the Arlington Memorial Bridge between the Lincoln Memorial and Arlington Cemetery. And they now look like they should be unwrapped and have chocolate inside. They’re so shiny and ridiculous looking.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>And it was also a no-bid contract, his favorite form of using government money. But much more disturbing to me was the fact that so little was visible. There is a giant fence around the White House and Lafayette Park, which is a public space, preventing you from seeing where the East Wing used to be, where the construction is.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>And it was also a no-bid contract, his favorite form of using government money. But much more disturbing to me was the fact that so little was visible. There is a giant fence around the White House and Lafayette Park, which is a public space, preventing you from seeing where the East Wing used to be, where the construction is.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>And so I agree in a way that monuments are not the most important things, but I think they’re the gilded canary in the coal mine. And if he’s able to hide what he’s doing with these construction projects, what else is he not telling us?\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>And so I agree in a way that monuments are not the most important things, but I think they’re the gilded canary in the coal mine. And if he’s able to hide what he’s doing with these construction projects, what else is he not telling us?\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Hmm. Well, let me go to caller Charlotte next in Menlo Park. Charlotte, go ahead.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Hmm. Well, let me go to caller Charlotte next in Menlo Park. Charlotte, go ahead.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Charlotte:\u003c/strong> Yes, hi. Thank you so much for the program. Uh… I’ve wanted to just chime in about it, actually, just that that’s what, uh… And she said just now about the White House. I have very strong feelings of love of the monuments of Washington, D.C., and, uh… I am wondering, can people actually still fit at the White House the way that they could before, or what it — what is the policy? Is it — has it changed? Are people banned from even visiting anymore?\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Charlotte:\u003c/strong> Yes, hi. Thank you so much for the program. Uh… I’ve wanted to just chime in about it, actually, just that that’s what, uh… And she said just now about the White House. I have very strong feelings of love of the monuments of Washington, D.C., and, uh… I am wondering, can people actually still fit at the White House the way that they could before, or what it — what is the policy? Is it — has it changed? Are people banned from even visiting anymore?\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Hmm, Erin?\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Hmm, Erin?\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Erin Thompson:\u003c/strong> Thanks, Charlotte. I think it’s been greatly reduced. It is still, in theory, available, but Lafayette Park, for example, which is a popular pedestrian place to see the White House, is now closed more and more frequently. And the Trump administration has just proposed putting up a permanent fence to replace the janky-looking tarp construction they’ve got happening now.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Erin Thompson:\u003c/strong> Thanks, Charlotte. I think it’s been greatly reduced. It is still, in theory, available, but Lafayette Park, for example, which is a popular pedestrian place to see the White House, is now closed more and more frequently. And the Trump administration has just proposed putting up a permanent fence to replace the janky-looking tarp construction they’ve got happening now.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Erin, what do you think is the overall message of this? We did a show on aesthetics in the past when Trump was sort of adorning the Oval Office with gold and so on. So this combination of sort of a gilded and what I think you’re describing feels like a gilded fortress.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Erin, what do you think is the overall message of this? We did a show on aesthetics in the past when Trump was sort of adorning the Oval Office with gold and so on. So this combination of sort of a gilded and what I think you’re describing feels like a gilded fortress.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Erin Thompson:\u003c/strong> Exactly. And another reason that D.C. hasn’t had a triumphal arch is that those arches celebrate a single leader. That’s not democracy. It’s a little less aesthetically unified to have monuments celebrating a whole host of people, but that’s what we need to do in a democracy.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Erin Thompson:\u003c/strong> Exactly. And another reason that D.C. hasn’t had a triumphal arch is that those arches celebrate a single leader. That’s not democracy. It’s a little less aesthetically unified to have monuments celebrating a whole host of people, but that’s what we need to do in a democracy.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>What the redesign of D.C. is doing is suggesting to visitors for potentially generations to come that power should be and is concentrated in the hands of the few or even one person, and that wealth should be the requirement of power. Whereas that is something that since the very beginnings of official congressional, national, federal arts has been fought against.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>What the redesign of D.C. is doing is suggesting to visitors for potentially generations to come that power should be and is concentrated in the hands of the few or even one person, and that wealth should be the requirement of power. Whereas that is something that since the very beginnings of official congressional, national, federal arts has been fought against.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Well, I think this on Discord is echoing some of your points. The listener writes, “This is a symptom of a weak and vulnerable form of government that can be so easily taken over by one person. One person has corrupted all three branches of government. The power and self-interest of those around him have allowed Trump to seemingly do whatever he wants without meaningful challenges or accountability. He doesn’t ask permission. His reign ends in two years. But what does this say about the future of democracy?”\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Well, I think this on Discord is echoing some of your points. The listener writes, “This is a symptom of a weak and vulnerable form of government that can be so easily taken over by one person. One person has corrupted all three branches of government. The power and self-interest of those around him have allowed Trump to seemingly do whatever he wants without meaningful challenges or accountability. He doesn’t ask permission. His reign ends in two years. But what does this say about the future of democracy?”\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Tom, do you want to weigh in on that too?\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>Tom, do you want to weigh in on that too?\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Tom Nichols:\u003c/strong> Yeah, I think people should beware talking about the flaws of the system when what we’re really talking about are the flaws in the American people.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Tom Nichols:\u003c/strong> Yeah, I think people should beware talking about the flaws of the system when what we’re really talking about are the flaws in the American people.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>James Madison warned us during the debate on ratifying the Constitution. He was asked, you know, will these checks and balances really work? Are these institutions that you’re asking us here in Virginia — it was during the debate in Virginia — are these, you know, institutions really going to protect us in the you’re promising?\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>James Madison warned us during the debate on ratifying the Constitution. He was asked, you know, will these checks and balances really work? Are these institutions that you’re asking us here in Virginia — it was during the debate in Virginia — are these, you know, institutions really going to protect us in the you’re promising?\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>And Madison, I think with a certain amount of exasperation, said, none of these things work if we are not decent people. The way he put it, he said, “Is there no virtue among us? If not, then we are in a wretched situation.”\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>And Madison, I think with a certain amount of exasperation, said, none of these things work if we are not decent people. The way he put it, he said, “Is there no virtue among us? If not, then we are in a wretched situation.”\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>That, I think, is part of what’s happening. The problem is not the design of the system, it’s not the Constitution or the branches of government. It’s that you have tens of millions of people who think this is okay, and some of them even think it’s more than okay. They like it, and they vote for it.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>That, I think, is part of what’s happening. The problem is not the design of the system, it’s not the Constitution or the branches of government. It’s that you have tens of millions of people who think this is okay, and some of them even think it’s more than okay. They like it, and they vote for it.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>And I think that’s a problem with our society, that there’s a kind of decadence on we that’s overtaken our society where millions of people just shrug and say, well, he’s going to build a ballroom. What are you going to do?\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>And I think that’s a problem with our society, that there’s a kind of decadence on we that’s overtaken our society where millions of people just shrug and say, well, he’s going to build a ballroom. What are you going to do?\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>And I think that in an earlier time — and when I say earlier, I don’t mean 100 years ago, I mean like 20 years ago, 15 years ago — any one of these things would have been the source of a huge outcry.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>And I think that in an earlier time — and when I say earlier, I don’t mean 100 years ago, I mean like 20 years ago, 15 years ago — any one of these things would have been the source of a huge outcry.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>I think Donald Trump has, by firehosing us with these crazy projects and ideas and wars and other things that he’s been doing, has just kind of worn people down into numbness to say, well, I guess we’re going to build this drone platform with a big winged victory statue on it. And what can we do about it?\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>I think Donald Trump has, by firehosing us with these crazy projects and ideas and wars and other things that he’s been doing, has just kind of worn people down into numbness to say, well, I guess we’re going to build this drone platform with a big winged victory statue on it. And what can we do about it?\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>And that’s in part, again, because of the cowardice of his party, which now depends — the elected officials of his party depend on surviving primary challenges in which maybe 15 or 20% of the party votes. And that very small number of people has basically put a stranglehold on a party and on the legislature.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>And that’s in part, again, because of the cowardice of his party, which now depends — the elected officials of his party depend on surviving primary challenges in which maybe 15 or 20% of the party votes. And that very small number of people has basically put a stranglehold on a party and on the legislature.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Now, hopefully that can change if people get mad enough and vote. But I guess I would just caution everyone against saying, well, somehow the design of this system is flawed. This system was never meant to work if people did not have some kind of civic affection and involvement in it. And that, I think, is the source of our real problem here.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>Now, hopefully that can change if people get mad enough and vote. But I guess I would just caution everyone against saying, well, somehow the design of this system is flawed. This system was never meant to work if people did not have some kind of civic affection and involvement in it. And that, I think, is the source of our real problem here.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Yeah. Interestingly, you know, we had Sarah Longwell on not that long ago, and she seemed to think that this issue may actually be breaking through with some of his voters, just because the contrast is so stark, Tom, between Americans struggling, right, with economic pressures from the war, very much as a result of the war that he started, and these gilded statues and arches that he seems very fixated on.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Yeah. Interestingly, you know, we had Sarah Longwell on not that long ago, and she seemed to think that this issue may actually be breaking through with some of his voters, just because the contrast is so stark, Tom, between Americans struggling, right, with economic pressures from the war, very much as a result of the war that he started, and these gilded statues and arches that he seems very fixated on.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Do you see that as actually being a place where maybe there will be pushback by the very electorate that has voted him in?\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>Do you see that as actually being a place where maybe there will be pushback by the very electorate that has voted him in?\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Tom Nichols:\u003c/strong> Yeah. And I think you’re seeing that happen. I mean, for Donald Trump to be hovering now around 30, 32% popularity is really quite remarkable considering that he came back into office. I won a discontinuous election and managed to ride back into office.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Tom Nichols:\u003c/strong> Yeah. And I think you’re seeing that happen. I mean, for Donald Trump to be hovering now around 30, 32% popularity is really quite remarkable considering that he came back into office. I won a discontinuous election and managed to ride back into office.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Sarah, I think Sarah’s right about this, and she of course is the one who has sat with hundreds of focus groups to hear it.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>Sarah, I think Sarah’s right about this, and she of course is the one who has sat with hundreds of focus groups to hear it.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>And I think what breaks through is not necessarily the monuments as an issue per se. I don’t think anybody’s gonna get out there and vote and say, you know, I really don’t like this ballroom. But they’re standing there at the gas pump saying, you know, I’m paying four and a half bucks, or if you’re a farmer or trucker or something, you say, I’m payin’ you know six and a huff bucks for diesel, and this guy is running around like Goldfinger, you know, painting everything in gold.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>And I think what breaks through is not necessarily the monuments as an issue per se. I don’t think anybody’s gonna get out there and vote and say, you know, I really don’t like this ballroom. But they’re standing there at the gas pump saying, you know, I’m paying four and a half bucks, or if you’re a farmer or trucker or something, you say, I’m payin’ you know six and a huff bucks for diesel, and this guy is running around like Goldfinger, you know, painting everything in gold.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Who’s thinking about me, and why is he putting up gold statues and sticking gold appliques on everything when I can’t afford to keep filling my car to take my kids to school?\u003c/p>\n",
"innerContent": [
"\n\u003cp>Who’s thinking about me, and why is he putting up gold statues and sticking gold appliques on everything when I can’t afford to keep filling my car to take my kids to school?\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>I think that has broken through. I think it’s been a really important part of the nosedive in his popularity. He really does come across as a callous, uncaring king who basically tells the people to eat cake and that expensive gas is a small price to pay for having a great president like him.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>I think that has broken through. I think it’s been a really important part of the nosedive in his popularity. He really does come across as a callous, uncaring king who basically tells the people to eat cake and that expensive gas is a small price to pay for having a great president like him.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Well, Lorraine writes, “The expense of all these projects is deeply offensive in view that he tore healthcare away from millions of Americans through his big ugly bill.”\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Well, Lorraine writes, “The expense of all these projects is deeply offensive in view that he tore healthcare away from millions of Americans through his big ugly bill.”\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Erin, can you think of a historical analog as well of a leader fixated on building monuments in the face of much more pressing problems?\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>Erin, can you think of a historical analog as well of a leader fixated on building monuments in the face of much more pressing problems?\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Erin Thompson:\u003c/strong> Well, and I just want to say, too, that thousands of people came out last weekend to protest his threats to close the Kennedy Center. So he’s attacking what people love.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Erin Thompson:\u003c/strong> Well, and I just want to say, too, that thousands of people came out last weekend to protest his threats to close the Kennedy Center. So he’s attacking what people love.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>And yeah, looking at Trump’s actions now made me think of the Colosseum. Right? In Rome, it’s named the Coliseum after the Colossus, a gigantic statue that stood beside it that was — he was one of the worst rulers of all history and was obsessed with trying to beautify Rome because he saw what was coming. He wanted to fix his reputation and it did not work.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>And yeah, looking at Trump’s actions now made me think of the Colosseum. Right? In Rome, it’s named the Coliseum after the Colossus, a gigantic statue that stood beside it that was — he was one of the worst rulers of all history and was obsessed with trying to beautify Rome because he saw what was coming. He wanted to fix his reputation and it did not work.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> He fiddled while Rome burned, right?\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> He fiddled while Rome burned, right?\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>We’re talking with Erin Thompson, Professor of Art Crime at City University of New York, author of \u003cem>Smashing Statues\u003c/em>, and Tom Nichols, staff writer at \u003cem>The Atlantic\u003c/em>, about Trump’s focus on monuments and monuments, in many ways, to himself, the difficulties in curbing those actions by Congress and the courts, at least as they’re currently constituted, and what broader impact that has.\u003c/p>\n",
"innerContent": [
"\n\u003cp>We’re talking with Erin Thompson, Professor of Art Crime at City University of New York, author of \u003cem>Smashing Statues\u003c/em>, and Tom Nichols, staff writer at \u003cem>The Atlantic\u003c/em>, about Trump’s focus on monuments and monuments, in many ways, to himself, the difficulties in curbing those actions by Congress and the courts, at least as they’re currently constituted, and what broader impact that has.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>You can join the conversation, listeners, with your questions about his recent announcement of the militarized arch, which Tom Nichols wrote about, and also just how you feel about these construction projects. Do they matter to you? Do they bother you? Why or why not? What kinds of messages do you think they will send? And what would you like to see happen to them going forward, especially after the president’s presidency?\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>You can join the conversation, listeners, with your questions about his recent announcement of the militarized arch, which Tom Nichols wrote about, and also just how you feel about these construction projects. Do they matter to you? Do they bother you? Why or why not? What kinds of messages do you think they will send? And what would you like to see happen to them going forward, especially after the president’s presidency?\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>You can email Forum at kqed.org, find us on Discord, Bluesky, Facebook or Instagram at KQED Forum, or call us at 866-733-6786, 866-733-6786.\u003c/p>\n",
"innerContent": [
"\n\u003cp>You can email Forum at kqed.org, find us on Discord, Bluesky, Facebook or Instagram at KQED Forum, or call us at 866-733-6786, 866-733-6786.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>And Lorraine also writes, “Trump thinks that by splashing gold everywhere projects an image of wealth and power. The truth is an excess of gold makes those things look tawdry and cheap. As for the victory arch, where’s the victory? I hope I’m wrong, but the bunker under the ballroom combined with the militarization of the art paints a picture of a man who’s preparing to dig in after the 2028 election, if things don’t go his way.”\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>And Lorraine also writes, “Trump thinks that by splashing gold everywhere projects an image of wealth and power. The truth is an excess of gold makes those things look tawdry and cheap. As for the victory arch, where’s the victory? I hope I’m wrong, but the bunker under the ballroom combined with the militarization of the art paints a picture of a man who’s preparing to dig in after the 2028 election, if things don’t go his way.”\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>We’ll have more after the break. This is \u003cem>Forum\u003c/em>.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>We’ll have more after the break. This is \u003cem>Forum\u003c/em>.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Welcome back to \u003cem>Forum\u003c/em>. I’m Mina Kim. We’re talking this hour about Trump’s building projects, his monument, which he did say, in fact, that the triumphal arch early when he was announcing it was in honor of him.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>Welcome back to \u003cem>Forum\u003c/em>. I’m Mina Kim. We’re talking this hour about Trump’s building projects, his monument, which he did say, in fact, that the triumphal arch early when he was announcing it was in honor of him.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>“Trump’s Monumental Obsession” is the piece by Tom Nichols, our guest today, a staff writer at \u003cem>The Atlantic\u003c/em>, and Erin Thompson is author of \u003cem>Smashing Statues\u003c/em> and professor of art crime at City University in New York.\u003c/p>\n",
"innerContent": [
"\n\u003cp>“Trump’s Monumental Obsession” is the piece by Tom Nichols, our guest today, a staff writer at \u003cem>The Atlantic\u003c/em>, and Erin Thompson is author of \u003cem>Smashing Statues\u003c/em> and professor of art crime at City University in New York.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>And listeners, you’re joining the conversation with your questions about President Trump’s building projects, why you think he’s doing them and whether or not they bother you and why. 866-733-6786, the number. Discord, Bluesky, Facebook or Instagram is where you can post your comments. You can also email \u003ca href=\"mailto:forum@kqed.org\">forum@kqed.org\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>And listeners, you’re joining the conversation with your questions about President Trump’s building projects, why you think he’s doing them and whether or not they bother you and why. 866-733-6786, the number. Discord, Bluesky, Facebook or Instagram is where you can post your comments. You can also email \u003ca href=\"mailto:forum@kqed.org\">forum@kqed.org\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>And this listener on Discord writes, “What about this spending in the context of the total national debt? After all, DOGE’s purpose was to cut spending, right? How can the spending on these monuments be reconciled with that purpose?”\u003c/p>\n",
"innerContent": [
"\n\u003cp>And this listener on Discord writes, “What about this spending in the context of the total national debt? After all, DOGE’s purpose was to cut spending, right? How can the spending on these monuments be reconciled with that purpose?”\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Erin, we talked with Tom earlier about whether or not we really have a good sense of how much these projects are costing. I mean, Trump once promised to finance the building of his own giant ballroom himself or with private donors as well. And I was struck by how you have noted that actually often the kinds of monuments we see across this country are not put up by state or federal governments, that they’re actually put up…\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>Erin, we talked with Tom earlier about whether or not we really have a good sense of how much these projects are costing. I mean, Trump once promised to finance the building of his own giant ballroom himself or with private donors as well. And I was struck by how you have noted that actually often the kinds of monuments we see across this country are not put up by state or federal governments, that they’re actually put up…\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Erin Thompson:\u003c/strong> By private donors? Yes, we think of them as public monuments, but they’re not public in that the public has any say into what they look like or where they go or whether they should come down. Public monuments are usually only put up by those with enough power to find a place for them and enough money to pay for them.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Erin Thompson:\u003c/strong> By private donors? Yes, we think of them as public monuments, but they’re not public in that the public has any say into what they look like or where they go or whether they should come down. Public monuments are usually only put up by those with enough power to find a place for them and enough money to pay for them.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Yeah. So what does that then mean with regard to, you know, who gets to deliver whatever message they’re trying to deliver, as you were saying earlier, a monument does?\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Yeah. So what does that then mean with regard to, you know, who gets to deliver whatever message they’re trying to deliver, as you were saying earlier, a monument does?\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Erin Thompson:\u003c/strong> The history of monuments in the U.S. shows, at least I argue in my book, that they’re often meant to show the rest of us our place.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Erin Thompson:\u003c/strong> The history of monuments in the U.S. shows, at least I argue in my book, that they’re often meant to show the rest of us our place.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>So, for example, a lot of Confederate memorials went up not in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War, but in the 20th century and were often associated with interracial unionization efforts. So if people started to threaten to strike, a monument would be put up by, say, the mine owners or the factory owners to remind white workers, don’t cross the color line, to ally yourself with your fellow workers. You need to respect the work of your Confederate forefathers.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>So, for example, a lot of Confederate memorials went up not in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War, but in the 20th century and were often associated with interracial unionization efforts. So if people started to threaten to strike, a monument would be put up by, say, the mine owners or the factory owners to remind white workers, don’t cross the color line, to ally yourself with your fellow workers. You need to respect the work of your Confederate forefathers.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>So I think that the autocratic monuments we’re seeing today are also meant to remind us as voters, as citizens, you know, just sit tight. Let the elite make the decisions for you.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>So I think that the autocratic monuments we’re seeing today are also meant to remind us as voters, as citizens, you know, just sit tight. Let the elite make the decisions for you.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> After the murder of George Floyd, though, suddenly all over the country, you start seeing monuments being taken down or graffitied. Why do you think that happened?\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> After the murder of George Floyd, though, suddenly all over the country, you start seeing monuments being taken down or graffitied. Why do you think that happened?\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Erin Thompson:\u003c/strong> Well, that’s the power of monuments to make concrete intangible ideas about justice, equality, et cetera. So they were places to rally ourselves, to think about, to protest inequality and power. And they were in the news a lot, but only about 200 monuments left their pedestals after the murder of George Floyd, which is far, far less than 1% of the public monuments in the U.S., something like a tenth of a percent. And many of those were removed by official actions; only about 20 were taken down by protesters. So we still have a lot to think about.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Erin Thompson:\u003c/strong> Well, that’s the power of monuments to make concrete intangible ideas about justice, equality, et cetera. So they were places to rally ourselves, to think about, to protest inequality and power. And they were in the news a lot, but only about 200 monuments left their pedestals after the murder of George Floyd, which is far, far less than 1% of the public monuments in the U.S., something like a tenth of a percent. And many of those were removed by official actions; only about 20 were taken down by protesters. So we still have a lot to think about.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Yeah, they’re very hard to bring down, aren’t they? Can you talk about that and why?\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Yeah, they’re very hard to bring down, aren’t they? Can you talk about that and why?\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Erin Thompson:\u003c/strong> Yeah, there’s the law. So in almost all former Confederate states, it’s simply impossible to remove an established public monument. They knew when they were especially putting those laws into place to protect Confederate monuments.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Erin Thompson:\u003c/strong> Yeah, there’s the law. So in almost all former Confederate states, it’s simply impossible to remove an established public monument. They knew when they were especially putting those laws into place to protect Confederate monuments.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>And even in states where there’s not an explicit prohibition, there’s just simply no procedure to follow to ask questions about a monument.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>And even in states where there’s not an explicit prohibition, there’s just simply no procedure to follow to ask questions about a monument.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>So part of what’s so infuriating about what the president is currently doing is that he’s ignoring all of these laws that future administrations might not be so willing to ignore, and thus it will become — it will be difficult to take down what he’s put up because we’ll be respecting laws that he is not.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>So part of what’s so infuriating about what the president is currently doing is that he’s ignoring all of these laws that future administrations might not be so willing to ignore, and thus it will become — it will be difficult to take down what he’s put up because we’ll be respecting laws that he is not.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Yeah, you tell the story of an Indigenous activist in Minnesota who was trying to get a monument down. Can you talk about that and what ultimately he had to do?\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Yeah, you tell the story of an Indigenous activist in Minnesota who was trying to get a monument down. Can you talk about that and what ultimately he had to do?\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Erin Thompson:\u003c/strong> So Mike Forcia, an Indigenous activist in St. Paul, Minnesota, had been trying for decades, his entire adult life, to question a monument of Christopher Columbus in front of the state capitol. He wanted to know, in this city, which is the largest urban population of Indigenous people in the U.S., why is a man who many blame with great reason for unleashing a genocide honored on the statehouse lawn?\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Erin Thompson:\u003c/strong> So Mike Forcia, an Indigenous activist in St. Paul, Minnesota, had been trying for decades, his entire adult life, to question a monument of Christopher Columbus in front of the state capitol. He wanted to know, in this city, which is the largest urban population of Indigenous people in the U.S., why is a man who many blame with great reason for unleashing a genocide honored on the statehouse lawn?\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>But every time he filed a petition, it essentially ended up thrown away because there was no procedure to question that monument.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>So finally, he heard that others were planning to tear down the statue during the middle of the night in August of 2020. And he decided that he was going to go out in the middle of the day, invite people to witness him because he said the monument went up in front of crowds of people and it needed to come down in the same way. And so he took responsibility for tearing down that monument.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>So finally, he heard that others were planning to tear down the statue during the middle of the night in August of 2020. And he decided that he was going to go out in the middle of the day, invite people to witness him because he said the monument went up in front of crowds of people and it needed to come down in the same way. And so he took responsibility for tearing down that monument.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Ultimately, did he face jail time?\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Ultimately, did he face jail time?\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Erin Thompson:\u003c/strong> He was charged, and prosecutors agreed to divert his case to a special restorative justice process. So he, instead of going into a court, was put in front of talking circles, they called it, of people who were affected by the removal, but also people who are affected by this statue being there in the first place, and he was sentenced to community service.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Erin Thompson:\u003c/strong> He was charged, and prosecutors agreed to divert his case to a special restorative justice process. So he, instead of going into a court, was put in front of talking circles, they called it, of people who were affected by the removal, but also people who are affected by this statue being there in the first place, and he was sentenced to community service.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>And one of my favorite parts of this case is that he only had a rope from Home Depot that he threw around the statue and tugged it down, but it turns out it came down so easily because no one had bolted it to the pedestal. It was just assumed no one would ever question the erection of Columbus on top of that pedestal, so it was very easy in the end to topple it.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>And one of my favorite parts of this case is that he only had a rope from Home Depot that he threw around the statue and tugged it down, but it turns out it came down so easily because no one had bolted it to the pedestal. It was just assumed no one would ever question the erection of Columbus on top of that pedestal, so it was very easy in the end to topple it.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Hmm. Well, let me go to Sasha in Berkeley next. Sasha, go ahead.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Hmm. Well, let me go to Sasha in Berkeley next. Sasha, go ahead.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Sasha:\u003c/strong> Good morning. Well, I look at this as Humpty Dumpty that we have to put back together again after Trump is gone. And I’m curious why what I’m going to suggest next couldn’t be done.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Sasha:\u003c/strong> Good morning. Well, I look at this as Humpty Dumpty that we have to put back together again after Trump is gone. And I’m curious why what I’m going to suggest next couldn’t be done.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>I would take down all the gold in the White House and anywhere else that’s been plastered and melt it down for money we could put into the Treasury. And in terms of the art, take it down and the ballroom — if there is no need for a huge room like that, currently called the ballroom, I would take at least half of it down if the other half is to be made into useful offices or replace, I forget what it was, the East or the West Wing that he tore down.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>I would take down all the gold in the White House and anywhere else that’s been plastered and melt it down for money we could put into the Treasury. And in terms of the art, take it down and the ballroom — if there is no need for a huge room like that, currently called the ballroom, I would take at least half of it down if the other half is to be made into useful offices or replace, I forget what it was, the East or the West Wing that he tore down.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>You know, but the biggest problem is how do we put the government back together again? And I have no answers for that because clearly all of our departments have been stripped of staff, and what have they been replaced for, or what it remains are people with political agendas to destroy.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>You know, but the biggest problem is how do we put the government back together again? And I have no answers for that because clearly all of our departments have been stripped of staff, and what have they been replaced for, or what it remains are people with political agendas to destroy.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Well, Sasha, thanks for weighing in.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Well, Sasha, thanks for weighing in.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Sasha:\u003c/strong> I’m curious about whether we can melt it all down or not.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Sasha:\u003c/strong> I’m curious about whether we can melt it all down or not.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Well, we were hearing from Erin, you know, just what kinds of potential consequences you could face for that. I don’t know if you want to add anything to Sasha’s point.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Well, we were hearing from Erin, you know, just what kinds of potential consequences you could face for that. I don’t know if you want to add anything to Sasha’s point.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Erin Thompson:\u003c/strong> Well, I’ll just say that I think that a lot of the stuff that got stuck up around the White House might not be actual gold, so melting it down might produce a lot of plastic fumes.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Erin Thompson:\u003c/strong> Well, I’ll just say that I think that a lot of the stuff that got stuck up around the White House might not be actual gold, so melting it down might produce a lot of plastic fumes.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> That was a suspicion. Let me go to David in Indiana next. David, go ahead. You’re on.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> That was a suspicion. Let me go to David in Indiana next. David, go ahead. You’re on.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>David:\u003c/strong> Well, since, uh… arches tend to commemorate something specific, and one of the biggest, if not the biggest, concern of Americans right now is affordability, maybe it should be named the Arch of Affordability, the Triumph of Affordability, or at least nicknamed that.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>David:\u003c/strong> Well, since, uh… arches tend to commemorate something specific, and one of the biggest, if not the biggest, concern of Americans right now is affordability, maybe it should be named the Arch of Affordability, the Triumph of Affordability, or at least nicknamed that.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Well, David, thanks. Yeah, if you can’t take it down, maybe you just reimagine and reconstitute its purpose. That could be one way to handle it.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Well, David, thanks. Yeah, if you can’t take it down, maybe you just reimagine and reconstitute its purpose. That could be one way to handle it.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>So RJ writes, “How can judges be so gullible and not see through claims that these projects are for national security?”\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>So RJ writes, “How can judges be so gullible and not see through claims that these projects are for national security?”\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>I wanna ask you about this, Tom. What is the status of the legal challenge, right? What can you tell us about the arch in particular?\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>I wanna ask you about this, Tom. What is the status of the legal challenge, right? What can you tell us about the arch in particular?\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Tom Nichols:\u003c/strong> Well, there are lawsuits pending, but to your listener’s point, it’s not that judges are gullible. It’s that they don’t think they have the power to contradict the executive on what constitutes national security, which is why this keeps getting kicked up further and further because there are some judges that say, okay, fine, I’m not buying that argument.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Tom Nichols:\u003c/strong> Well, there are lawsuits pending, but to your listener’s point, it’s not that judges are gullible. It’s that they don’t think they have the power to contradict the executive on what constitutes national security, which is why this keeps getting kicked up further and further because there are some judges that say, okay, fine, I’m not buying that argument.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>But, you know, precedence, precedent and history tend to be on the side of presidents when they say national security. The courts basically say someone besides us has to adjudicate what the answer — usually be in Congress, since we don’t actually have a function in Congress right now.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>But, you know, precedence, precedent and history tend to be on the side of presidents when they say national security. The courts basically say someone besides us has to adjudicate what the answer — usually be in Congress, since we don’t actually have a function in Congress right now.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>So it’s not that the judges are gullible, it’s that I think some of them feel that their hands are tied.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>So it’s not that the judges are gullible, it’s that I think some of them feel that their hands are tied.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>And I wanted to make, if I could, I just wanna make a quick note about what monuments are for, because Erin’s point is very important. But I think it depends on where you live.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>And I wanted to make, if I could, I just wanna make a quick note about what monuments are for, because Erin’s point is very important. But I think it depends on where you live.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>I lived and worked in Boston for years. And monuments can also be really important reminders about what’s good in us and what we should remember about ourselves.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>I lived and worked in Boston for years. And monuments can also be really important reminders about what’s good in us and what we should remember about ourselves.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>If you walked from my old office in the State House on Beacon Hill, all the way down through the garden and the Boston Common and the Public Garden, you would pass a plaque, a sculpture dedicated to Robert Gould Shaw, for example, the commander of the Massachusetts 54th, the first Black Army unit. You go further down, you pass statues of abolitionists. You walk out of the Public Garden under the gaze of George Washington.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>If you walked from my old office in the State House on Beacon Hill, all the way down through the garden and the Boston Common and the Public Garden, you would pass a plaque, a sculpture dedicated to Robert Gould Shaw, for example, the commander of the Massachusetts 54th, the first Black Army unit. You go further down, you pass statues of abolitionists. You walk out of the Public Garden under the gaze of George Washington.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>The problem is that Donald Trump is cheapening our notion of what a memorial is by taking them and basically admitting, as he did — he was interviewed last summer and basically someone said, are you putting these up because they’re afraid they won’t put them up for you when you’re gone? And he said, yeah, this is what I want. And no one will do this once I’m gone.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>The problem is that Donald Trump is cheapening our notion of what a memorial is by taking them and basically admitting, as he did — he was interviewed last summer and basically someone said, are you putting these up because they’re afraid they won’t put them up for you when you’re gone? And he said, yeah, this is what I want. And no one will do this once I’m gone.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Well, in a democracy, if you’re saying, I want to put these up because no one wants them but me, that’s a really kind of revealing and dysfunctional thing.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>Well, in a democracy, if you’re saying, I want to put these up because no one wants them but me, that’s a really kind of revealing and dysfunctional thing.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>So yes, it’s true that memorials can be these awful attempts to intimidate people. Trump’s efforts, by the way, remind me not of — although I think Colosseum is a great example — I spent a lot of time in the old Soviet Union, and his projects remind me of these outsized Soviet war memorials that were everywhere in Moscow and Leningrad and Kiev and other places in the Old Soviet Union.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>So yes, it’s true that memorials can be these awful attempts to intimidate people. Trump’s efforts, by the way, remind me not of — although I think Colosseum is a great example — I spent a lot of time in the old Soviet Union, and his projects remind me of these outsized Soviet war memorials that were everywhere in Moscow and Leningrad and Kiev and other places in the Old Soviet Union.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>That’s just not the kind of country we are, but that doesn’t mean that we should forget how memorials can really inspire us and make us better people just by seeing them.\u003c/p>\n",
"innerContent": [
"\n\u003cp>That’s just not the kind of country we are, but that doesn’t mean that we should forget how memorials can really inspire us and make us better people just by seeing them.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Well, Barbara writes, “Trump builds these illegal monuments to himself because he knows others will not. They need to be torn down at the earliest opportunity. We cannot let these un-American monuments to a cruel, lawless, corrupt leader stand. Symbols matter.”\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Well, Barbara writes, “Trump builds these illegal monuments to himself because he knows others will not. They need to be torn down at the earliest opportunity. We cannot let these un-American monuments to a cruel, lawless, corrupt leader stand. Symbols matter.”\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Let me remind listeners, you’re listening to \u003cem>Forum\u003c/em>. I’m Mina Kim.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>Let me remind listeners, you’re listening to \u003cem>Forum\u003c/em>. I’m Mina Kim.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>What do you think — and I know I’m asking you to sort of get into the mind, but I imagine, Erin, you have some thoughts on this. Is the simplistic message he wants to send with these monuments to himself — what do you think he’s hoping people will associate with him? Wealth.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>What do you think — and I know I’m asking you to sort of get into the mind, but I imagine, Erin, you have some thoughts on this. Is the simplistic message he wants to send with these monuments to himself — what do you think he’s hoping people will associate with him? Wealth.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Erin Thompson:\u003c/strong> Our goodness. Yeah, it’s not too complicated, I think. And it has been the same in monuments throughout time. Bigger is better, is permanent.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Erin Thompson:\u003c/strong> Our goodness. Yeah, it’s not too complicated, I think. And it has been the same in monuments throughout time. Bigger is better, is permanent.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>And I think it’s interesting that we do tend to think of monuments as permanent, but they really aren’t. America is very strange in that we’ve had the same set of monuments for so long, but almost every other culture, country in the world has seen waves of monuments go up and down every time power changes.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>And I think it’s interesting that we do tend to think of monuments as permanent, but they really aren’t. America is very strange in that we’ve had the same set of monuments for so long, but almost every other culture, country in the world has seen waves of monuments go up and down every time power changes.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>So yeah, I think we should get used to the idea, thinking of our monuments as lovely but temporary.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>So yeah, I think we should get used to the idea, thinking of our monuments as lovely but temporary.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> I think we think of them as so permanent just because of the way that they’re built, and like marble and stone. Yeah, that’s just — that’s why they’re so big, you can’t ignore them. Yeah, and you have to look up at them and so on.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> I think we think of them as so permanent just because of the way that they’re built, and like marble and stone. Yeah, that’s just — that’s why they’re so big, you can’t ignore them. Yeah, and you have to look up at them and so on.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Well, in the short term, can it serve the political purpose of distraction, say, from the things that he hasn’t been able to keep his promises on in this particular presidency? Erin or Tom. Yeah.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>Well, in the short term, can it serve the political purpose of distraction, say, from the things that he hasn’t been able to keep his promises on in this particular presidency? Erin or Tom. Yeah.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Tom Nichols:\u003c/strong> Oh, sorry. Yes, but I think it’s backfiring in the way that we discussed earlier.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Tom Nichols:\u003c/strong> Oh, sorry. Yes, but I think it’s backfiring in the way that we discussed earlier.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>If we were winning the war in Iran, and we are not, you could almost see people making an argument to say, well, we’ve toppled a terrible regime. We’ve been at each other’s throats for nearly a half century. And the people of Iran are going to be free. And who? You know, whatever argument you want to make, and therefore we should put up something.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>If we were winning the war in Iran, and we are not, you could almost see people making an argument to say, well, we’ve toppled a terrible regime. We’ve been at each other’s throats for nearly a half century. And the people of Iran are going to be free. And who? You know, whatever argument you want to make, and therefore we should put up something.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>The problem is that everything that he would want to commemorate, including himself — I mean, who puts up a monument to himself when he’s at 30%? You know, that’s the kind of, I suppose, grim and laughable part of this.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>The problem is that everything that he would want to commemorate, including himself — I mean, who puts up a monument to himself when he’s at 30%? You know, that’s the kind of, I suppose, grim and laughable part of this.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>He’s losing war, the economy is tumbling off the rails, his party is about to be clobbered. Um, you know, in, in, um, at least by all indications that we can see so far, his party’s going to get obliterated in the midterms. His — he’s at historic, he’s reaching, he has fallen below, uh, what our friend Sarah Longwell calls the Bush line, the George W. Bush line. And he’s now heading for Nixon territory.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>He’s losing war, the economy is tumbling off the rails, his party is about to be clobbered. Um, you know, in, in, um, at least by all indications that we can see so far, his party’s going to get obliterated in the midterms. His — he’s at historic, he’s reaching, he has fallen below, uh, what our friend Sarah Longwell calls the Bush line, the George W. Bush line. And he’s now heading for Nixon territory.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>And you know who’s, who’s response to that is to say, you don’t — we need a memorial, a statue, a ballroom.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>And you know who’s, who’s response to that is to say, you don’t — we need a memorial, a statue, a ballroom.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Um, and I think that’s the kind of shock that hits people. If things were going well, you would have a lot of people defending this or at least ignoring it. And instead he’s doing this at a time that I think a lot of ordinary Americans who don’t usually pay a lot of attention to the news are getting home from the grocery store and saying, you know, you’ve got to be kidding me. Well, what is this about?\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>Um, and I think that’s the kind of shock that hits people. If things were going well, you would have a lot of people defending this or at least ignoring it. And instead he’s doing this at a time that I think a lot of ordinary Americans who don’t usually pay a lot of attention to the news are getting home from the grocery store and saying, you know, you’ve got to be kidding me. Well, what is this about?\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>And I think it is breaking through.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Well, Gregory in Oakland writes, “I appreciate the point that it’s not just the system, but also the people who keep enabling this behavior from our leaders. These projects ultimately distract us from issues that matter even more.”\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Well, Gregory in Oakland writes, “I appreciate the point that it’s not just the system, but also the people who keep enabling this behavior from our leaders. These projects ultimately distract us from issues that matter even more.”\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Trish writes, “He knows that nobody is going to honor him in such a grand manner once he’s out of the picture. So he has to honor himself given the atrocities that he and his administration have perpetrated upon the nation and the world. I suspect that one day there will be a move to tear down all of his creations just as we are doing nowadays for those who have been revealed for their atrocities.”\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>Trish writes, “He knows that nobody is going to honor him in such a grand manner once he’s out of the picture. So he has to honor himself given the atrocities that he and his administration have perpetrated upon the nation and the world. I suspect that one day there will be a move to tear down all of his creations just as we are doing nowadays for those who have been revealed for their atrocities.”\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Trump’s name has been taken down for now from the Kennedy Center. Tom, can you just remind us of the status of all that? Because I know you’ve also recently reported on it.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>Trump’s name has been taken down for now from the Kennedy Center. Tom, can you just remind us of the status of all that? Because I know you’ve also recently reported on it.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Tom Nichols:\u003c/strong> Oh, yeah, this is, I mean, I think another place where people are starting to pay attention in a way that they didn’t before is looking at him and saying, with all the things going on in the world, he’s fixated on this, that he has to have his name next to Jack Kennedy for some reason, you know, in a city.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Tom Nichols:\u003c/strong> Oh, yeah, this is, I mean, I think another place where people are starting to pay attention in a way that they didn’t before is looking at him and saying, with all the things going on in the world, he’s fixated on this, that he has to have his name next to Jack Kennedy for some reason, you know, in a city.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>And I think we should also stipulate here what George — excuse me, Donald Trump hates Washington. I mean, it’s not a city where he is popular. He doesn’t like it there. When he first came to — in his first term, he actually tried to figure out if he could govern the country from New York instead of having to move to Washington.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>And I think we should also stipulate here what George — excuse me, Donald Trump hates Washington. I mean, it’s not a city where he is popular. He doesn’t like it there. When he first came to — in his first term, he actually tried to figure out if he could govern the country from New York instead of having to move to Washington.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>And the city kind of hates him back. I mean, he is tremendously unpopular there.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>And the city kind of hates him back. I mean, he is tremendously unpopular there.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>So he’s been trying to get this done. The courts have told him that he cannot put his name on it. Then he said, well, if I renovate it — well, can we put a big plaque? This is all done through his trustees, by the way, who are all basically his cronies. If I renovate it, can you put a plaque on it that said, renovated by the Trump Kennedy Center Foundation or some damn thing.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>So he’s been trying to get this done. The courts have told him that he cannot put his name on it. Then he said, well, if I renovate it — well, can we put a big plaque? This is all done through his trustees, by the way, who are all basically his cronies. If I renovate it, can you put a plaque on it that said, renovated by the Trump Kennedy Center Foundation or some damn thing.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>And the courts again said, nice try, very funny, but no.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>And the courts again said, nice try, very funny, but no.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>And so now the trustees have said, well, if we can’t rename it and the president won’t help us fundraise to rebuild it, we’re going to have to tear it down. Which was Trump event, essentially. I wrote a piece about it saying this is basically blackmail. This is the Dane-geld, as Kipling called it. He wants a payoff, he wants his name on it, or he’s going to destroy this beloved national icon.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>And so now the trustees have said, well, if we can’t rename it and the president won’t help us fundraise to rebuild it, we’re going to have to tear it down. Which was Trump event, essentially. I wrote a piece about it saying this is basically blackmail. This is the Dane-geld, as Kipling called it. He wants a payoff, he wants his name on it, or he’s going to destroy this beloved national icon.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>And my argument is that we ought to let him. I think in full view of the American people, if this is who he is and the kind of administration he’s running, then I think Americans ought to see the John F. Kennedy Center torn down because the president had a temper tantrum.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>And my argument is that we ought to let him. I think in full view of the American people, if this is who he is and the kind of administration he’s running, then I think Americans ought to see the John F. Kennedy Center torn down because the president had a temper tantrum.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>But that’s where it stands now. He can’t get his name on it. The courts have stopped him at every turn, and his threat now is, it’s so decrepit that without my money, you know, without me raising money, it’ll have to be torn down.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>But that’s where it stands now. He can’t get his name on it. The courts have stopped him at every turn, and his threat now is, it’s so decrepit that without my money, you know, without me raising money, it’ll have to be torn down.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Well, as we’ve talked about, this issue with the monuments is very much a metaphor for his presidency. Thanks for digging through it with us. Tom Nichols of \u003cem>The Atlantic\u003c/em> and Erin Thompson of City University of New York, author of \u003cem>Smashing Statues\u003c/em>, and also thank you for doing that with us, our listeners.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Well, as we’ve talked about, this issue with the monuments is very much a metaphor for his presidency. Thanks for digging through it with us. Tom Nichols of \u003cem>The Atlantic\u003c/em> and Erin Thompson of City University of New York, author of \u003cem>Smashing Statues\u003c/em>, and also thank you for doing that with us, our listeners.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>And my thanks as well for Ana de Amaral for producing this segment.\u003c/p>\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\n\u003ch2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Airdate: Thursday, September 24, 2026 at 10am\u003c/h2>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>From the White House ballroom to the Kennedy Center to a proposed triumphal arch along the Potomac, President Trump has taken a special interest in creating physical markers of his legacy. We’ll look at how he’s largely escaped oversight, including by designating these projects as central to national security. Why are monuments such a priority for Trump, and what does this tell us about the growing reach of executive power?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Guests:\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n\u003cli>\u003cstrong>Tom Nichols,\u003c/strong> staff writer, The Atlantic, professor emeritus of national security affairs, U.S. Naval War College\u003c/li>\n\n\n\n\u003cli>\u003cstrong>Erin Thompson\u003c/strong>, professor of art crime, CUNY, author of \u003cem>Smashing Statues: The Rise and Fall of America’s Public Monuments\u003c/em>\u003c/li>\n\u003c/ul>\n\n\n\n\u003ch2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Episode Transcript\u003c/h2>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cem>\u003cstrong>This is a computer-generated transcript. While our team has reviewed it, there may be errors.\u003c/strong>\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Welcome to \u003cem>Forum\u003c/em>, I’m Mina Kim. Of all the things the president has on his plate — the war in Iran, high fuel and food prices, steep potential losses for his party in the midterms — what seems to animate Trump the most are his building projects. The latest announcement this week is that his proposed triumphal arch on D.C.’s Memorial Circle will now be a military complex, complete with snipers and drones for national security reasons. And for all the skepticism and unpopularity of the idea, it continues to move forward for now.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>This hour, we look at how Trump’s construction projects are changing the landscape and the reach of executive power and the role of monuments in shaping a collective narrative. Starting us off is Tom Nichols, whose latest piece for \u003cem>The Atlantic\u003c/em> is called “Trump’s Monumental Obsession.” Good to have you back, Tom.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Tom Nichols:\u003c/strong> Thanks. Thanks for having me.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> So first, talk about why the idea of militarizing the arch has drawn fresh skepticism and pushback from not only you, but retired generals, preservationists, others.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Tom Nichols:\u003c/strong> Because it’s crazy. You’re talking about putting an arch in the middle of a busy traffic circle, and anybody who’s ever been to Washington has probably experienced that particular area between the cemetery and the Lincoln Memorial and downtown D.C. And the idea of filling it with weapons while cars sit in traffic around it every day. And airplanes, by the way, this is another problem, as airplanes fly over it because it’s right in the approach path for Reagan National Airport. It’s a stupid and dangerous idea.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>But I also don’t think that the president is serious about it. He’s saying this because he knows that national security arguments tend to prevail in court, as he did with the ballroom. When people sued to stop him from demolishing the East Wing and building the ballroom, some of his opponents won in court and there was a tussle back and forth. Then Trump said, no, this is a national security project. It’s to build a bunker and an operation center, and the ballroom is just a kind of a hat we’re putting on top of that national security stuff. The courts bought it. Supreme Court, all the way down, you know. Well, you know, the president gets his way on national security issues.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Yeah. Why did the courts buy it? What does recasting the building project as military infrastructure and therefore a national security asset, right, help Trump do with the courts and with Congress as well?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Tom Nichols:\u003c/strong> The courts have always — I should say always since the end of World War II, since the Cold War, when national security became a thing, became a phrase. You know, before World War Two, very rare to actually see the phrase “national security” used anywhere. And during the Cold War, we created a national security state and we prioritized national security above a lot of things, including civil liberties. And we did it again after 9/11.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>So when presidents invoke national security, courts kind of wrap that under the president’s Article II powers. And they become very hesitant to interfere with that because they don’t want to interfere with what they think is the president’s legitimate sphere of competence and power on that issue.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>So it’s become a thing where presidents, not just Donald Trump, but presidents in the past, have said, well, to get through a policy I really want to get to, matter of national security. And that’s kind of meant to snuff out debate about whether the thing involved is actually important or worth the money or even legal. So that’s why it happens.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> This does also undermine Congress’s authority to constrain it at all in a substantive way.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Tom Nichols:\u003c/strong> Yeah, it always has. I mean, the national security argument has always been part of the shift, the migration in power from Congress to an imperial presidency. Presidents over the course of the Cold War and then during the war on terror, executive power has expanded vastly beyond what I think the founders envisioned in the Constitution.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>But the president has become, you know, the vicar of national security, and it’s a very effective argument to make. And sometimes, you know — let’s be fair about this — sometimes it’s a legitimate argument. There are things that the executive branch has to do in the name of national security, like build bunkers under the White House.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>But when that gets applied to things like tariffs, for example, you know, Trump at one point claimed that tariffs were a matter of national security. Pretty soon everything becomes a matter of national security because presidents, and this president in particular, just like the fact that it sort of, you know, just kind of shuts down opposition and legal challenges to whatever it is he wants to do.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Yes. I mean, Trump argued that the ban on CNN, MS NOW, and Politico from White House grounds was because they were a threat to our national security.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>I want to invite listeners into the conversation. What questions do you have about President Trump’s militarized arch? You know, why do you think these construction projects are so important to the president? Do these things bother you? Why or why not?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>You can tell us by emailing \u003ca href=\"mailto:forum@kqed.org\">forum@kqed.org\u003c/a>, finding us on Discord, Bluesky, Facebook, or Instagram at KQED Forum, or by calling 866-733-6786. Again, that’s 866-733-6786.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Those are on Discord, right? “Trump’s building projects are a frustrating waste of money and grotesque display of ego. But honestly, I prioritize his D.C. monuments pretty low compared to other damage he’s doing to the country and world. Everything built can be disassembled.” Do you think that? The types of things he’s building now could easily be disassembled?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Tom Nichols:\u003c/strong> I think some of them can be. I personally, as a former Washington resident — I should say a former suburban resident. I used to work on the Hill and spent my graduate years at Georgetown and all that. I think that these are atrocious and garish projects, and I would happily support any president who says the ballroom’s got to go and we’re going to rebuild the East Wing and not put up an armed platform in the middle of, in front of Arlington Cemetery.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>I think Donald Trump has proven one thing, that if you can put these things up through sheer willpower, a president can take them down through sheer willpower.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>I think your listener, I agree with your listener who said, hey, this isn’t the biggest problem in the world except for two things, I would say. One is that Donald Trump is establishing that presidents can just spend money at will simply by chanting “national security” over even trivial and dumb things, like putting up this kind of, you know, bit of militaristic bombast.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>I referred to the victory arch that he wants to put up as something that looks like it was found in the bottom desk drawer of, you know, Albert Speer’s desk. And it’s just ugly. But he can just build it because he’s — national security, and he snaps his fingers and people start digging.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>So once you establish that, you’re setting a lot of bad precedents here.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>The other is that I think symbolism matters. I think, I think, you know, the president, the White House in particular, is meant to be dignified and austere, but not bombastic and overwhelming. And I think it’s an affront to the culture of democracy to put up a Tsarist ballroom that would make a King Louis of France blush in the middle of the place that’s meant to be the people’s house.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>So I, while it’s not the most important thing in the world, it’s more important than it may seem.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Yeah, I know. And also I think in the context of all the other things that are happening in the country, as you point out in your piece and as I mentioned in the intro, I think it’s concerning to have that be the main focus of the president. Is there any chance at all that because he noted that it was at the military’s request, is there a chance at all, as someone who knows the military well, that he would have found people in the military to say, yes, this is something that could be meaningful for national security?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Tom Nichols:\u003c/strong> I would — this again, my personal view here is that I will file that under things that didn’t happen. He may well have turned to Pete Hegseth and said, Pete, maybe we should build a big arch. And he said, good idea, sir. And that was the source of saying the military has asked for it.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>But I cannot imagine that, you know, anybody in the uniformed military was sitting around and saying, hey, you know what would really improve that arch? Snipers.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Is it possible in this administration? Again, he may have turned to some hapless colonel and said, Colonel, you think that’s a good idea, right? And the guy’s going to say, oh, whatever you think, Mr. President.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>But I just don’t believe that people walked into his office and said, Mr. President, you got to build this armed platform right next to Reagan National. Uh… Because, you know, it’s a matter of national security. I, I just — it can — I could be wrong, but I just don’t believe that happened.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> You noted costs as well. Do you know who is paying for these monuments and what kind of cost we are looking at, or maybe costs across things like the arch and the ballroom?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Tom Nichols:\u003c/strong> I’m sorry. Are you insisting on transparency and how millions of dollars are being spent in Washington? That sounds like communism. I don’t know.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>That’s another part of this problem. I mean, the president changes stories every other day on — you saw this with the ballroom. Well, it’s only going to cost this much and we’re going to get donations and it’s not going to be a big deal. And then the costs balloon and then it turns out we are using government money. Don’t hurt! But again, only for national security, because there’s going to be a thing under it.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>In the end, the president — this is a personalized cult of personality regime inside the White House, where the president says, I want a victory arch. And a bunch of people look at each other and say, well, yes, okay. And we’ll figure out who’s paying for it and how all that’s going to happen later.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And if we had a Congress that cared about oversight… You would know. But because this Congress currently is controlled by a Republican majority that is mostly terrified of Trump because nobody wants to end up, you know, primaried like John Cornyn or, you know, Cassidy or Tom Tillis or any of these people that are leaving, they simply kind of keep their head down and they’re just waiting for this.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>I mean, it’s been almost 10 years of some Republicans just waiting this to blow over, but obviously it’s not gonna blow over. And Trump’s gonna spend this money and nobody’s gonna really ask why.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> We’re talking with \u003cem>Atlantic\u003c/em> staff writer Tom Nichols about Trump’s triumphal arch and his special interest in creating physical markers of his legacy and why neither Congress nor the courts right now have been able to end these projects, especially when the administration cites national security.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>We’ll have more after the break. Stay with us.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>I’m Mina Kim. Welcome back to \u003cem>Forum\u003c/em>. I’m Mina Kim. We’re talking this hour about Trump’s triumphal arch, the White House ballroom, and other building projects that have drawn the president’s attention and how these construction projects are extending the reach of executive power, even if on the face of them they don’t seem as much of an issue for the country as, say, things like the war in Iran and high fuel and food prices.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>We’re talking about this with Tom Nichols. With you, our listeners, join the conversation by emailing \u003ca href=\"mailto:forum@kqed.org\">forum@kqed.org\u003c/a>, finding us on Discord, Bluesky, Facebook, or Instagram at KQED Forum. Call us at 866-733-6786, 866-733-6786.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>What questions do you have about the president’s efforts to push building projects through D.C.? Why do you think he wants to do this? And do they bother you? Why or why not? How do you think these projects will inform how we remember President Trump?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Let me go to caller Susan in Marin. Hi, Susan. Go ahead, you’re on.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Susan:\u003c/strong> I think, uh… I hold Congress as responsible for the ballroom as I hold Trump. Uh… They’re the part of our government that’s supposed to be able to spend money, and the fact that they’re allowing him to take money out of, uh… common bank is just, it just makes me furious. They’ve done nothing for an awful long time, and this is nothing that is going to cost us millions and millions and billions of money.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Well, thanks for sharing how you feel about this, Susan. Let me go to Colin next in San Francisco. Colin, go ahead. You’re on.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Colin:\u003c/strong> Good morning. I’m not as concerned about the proposed, um, victory arch or Arc de Triomphe, whatever we want to call it, because it’s very unlikely that it will be completed within Trump’s lifetime. It’s likely going to be abandoned just as soon as he’s out of office.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>The original Arc de Triomphe took about 30 years from, uh, inception under Napoleon Bonaparte to completion in 1836. Um, it’s also my, you know, it could jinx this country too. You know, after the Arch of Triumph was built, the Germans were able to stage two victory parades in 1871 and 1940 under or by the arch.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Well, thanks for sharing where you’re at and what you think in terms of jinxing. That’s an interesting point.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>I do want to bring Erin Thompson into the conversation now, professor of art crime at City University, New York, and also the author of the book \u003cem>Smashing Statues: The Rise and Fall of America’s Public Monuments\u003c/em>. Erin, thanks so much for being with us.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Erin Thompson:\u003c/strong> Happy to be here.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> So stepping back a bit, you know, help us understand the power of monuments as people sort of grapple with how significant this moment is with regards to Trump. How could they affect us generally, the public?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Erin Thompson:\u003c/strong> Well, monuments are really about capturing the future. They’re about shaping the memory of the past. So I think it will be very difficult to get rid of any monuments, really, but Trump’s monuments in particular, and they’re going to keep shaping what we value about America. So it…\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> It’s interesting that you say they have that type of power because they feel, you know, sort of very limiting in some ways of sending a message. Can you talk about how or where their power lies? I guess maybe even in their simplicity.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Erin Thompson:\u003c/strong> Exactly. Monuments don’t actually teach history. There’s not enough space for that. They just tell us who should you literally look up to, who is large, who should be honored and hold power.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Say there’s a certain power in the way we sort of get used to them, how they fade into the background. How so?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Erin Thompson:\u003c/strong> Yeah, their power is in their boringness. We accept them, we take them for granted. Something like 90% of the public monuments in the U.S. honor white men, for example. So that constant message about who deserves to hold power in the U.S., I think, has a continuing effect.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Yeah. Tom, you know, Trump was quoted as saying, out of the 59 top cities and capitals, Washington, D.C. is the only one in the world that does not have a triumphal arch. And you were noting earlier, you that sort of Americans have a certain dislike of those kinds of things, or generally does not do this in our capitals for, for good reason. What are those reasons?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Tom Nichols:\u003c/strong> Well, for one, we tend to celebrate the citizen soldier, the people among us who fought and died, which is why our war memorials, especially in the modern era, tend to be more muted.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>You do have some big monuments that came after the Civil War to the Union. There’s one in New York, there’s actually very few of them in Boston, but a lot of statues. But by and large, Americans view going to war as something they’ve been dragged into. One of my late colleagues used to call it the avenging angel syndrome that, well, you know, by God, we didn’t start this thing, but we’ll get in there and finish it.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And then we kind of come home and realize that, you know, war takes a toll on a democracy. So we don’t build these Napoleonic arches. We don’t build these, you know, Germany, these these kind of Nazi, you know, winged angels or Soviet, you know, the big Soviet Mother of Russia with the sword and the shield and all that stuff. We were just not that kind of culture.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>So when Trump says, you know, we’re the only country in the world that doesn’t have one of these things, that’s, I think, the right answer to that is that’s right. And that’s good. And that one of the things that’s good about America, that we don’t do that.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>But Trump is very much — you can see it in his taste, which is vulgar and deeply affected by the grandeur that he sees in other cities. And he thinks that this makes America and him somehow less of a player, less majestic on the world scene not to have one of these big arteries.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And I always think of what your caller, your most recent caller, said. You know, the Arc de Triomphe in Paris has been a mixed blessing. It was meant to honor the French victory in the Battle of Austerlitz in a war that eventually Napoleon lost and ended up exiled and dead for conducting.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>So maybe it’s not a good thing to put these things up. Maybe things like the Vietnam Memorial, the World War II Memorial, and others are much more thoughtful and much more in line with the American character.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> I think listener Eric would agree with you in terms of taste. Eric writes, “Trump uses emergency when there is none. He breaks the law faster than the law can apply remedies. Also, he has horrible taste in design.”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Erin, I understand you recently visited D.C. and tried to visit many of the locations that President Trump is trying to change or build. What did you notice about the aesthetic?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Erin Thompson:\u003c/strong> Well, first that they’re even worse in person. So the $5 million have recently been spent on re-gilding four statues on the Arlington Memorial Bridge between the Lincoln Memorial and Arlington Cemetery. And they now look like they should be unwrapped and have chocolate inside. They’re so shiny and ridiculous looking.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And it was also a no-bid contract, his favorite form of using government money. But much more disturbing to me was the fact that so little was visible. There is a giant fence around the White House and Lafayette Park, which is a public space, preventing you from seeing where the East Wing used to be, where the construction is.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And so I agree in a way that monuments are not the most important things, but I think they’re the gilded canary in the coal mine. And if he’s able to hide what he’s doing with these construction projects, what else is he not telling us?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Hmm. Well, let me go to caller Charlotte next in Menlo Park. Charlotte, go ahead.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Charlotte:\u003c/strong> Yes, hi. Thank you so much for the program. Uh… I’ve wanted to just chime in about it, actually, just that that’s what, uh… And she said just now about the White House. I have very strong feelings of love of the monuments of Washington, D.C., and, uh… I am wondering, can people actually still fit at the White House the way that they could before, or what it — what is the policy? Is it — has it changed? Are people banned from even visiting anymore?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Hmm, Erin?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Erin Thompson:\u003c/strong> Thanks, Charlotte. I think it’s been greatly reduced. It is still, in theory, available, but Lafayette Park, for example, which is a popular pedestrian place to see the White House, is now closed more and more frequently. And the Trump administration has just proposed putting up a permanent fence to replace the janky-looking tarp construction they’ve got happening now.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Erin, what do you think is the overall message of this? We did a show on aesthetics in the past when Trump was sort of adorning the Oval Office with gold and so on. So this combination of sort of a gilded and what I think you’re describing feels like a gilded fortress.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Erin Thompson:\u003c/strong> Exactly. And another reason that D.C. hasn’t had a triumphal arch is that those arches celebrate a single leader. That’s not democracy. It’s a little less aesthetically unified to have monuments celebrating a whole host of people, but that’s what we need to do in a democracy.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>What the redesign of D.C. is doing is suggesting to visitors for potentially generations to come that power should be and is concentrated in the hands of the few or even one person, and that wealth should be the requirement of power. Whereas that is something that since the very beginnings of official congressional, national, federal arts has been fought against.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Well, I think this on Discord is echoing some of your points. The listener writes, “This is a symptom of a weak and vulnerable form of government that can be so easily taken over by one person. One person has corrupted all three branches of government. The power and self-interest of those around him have allowed Trump to seemingly do whatever he wants without meaningful challenges or accountability. He doesn’t ask permission. His reign ends in two years. But what does this say about the future of democracy?”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Tom, do you want to weigh in on that too?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Tom Nichols:\u003c/strong> Yeah, I think people should beware talking about the flaws of the system when what we’re really talking about are the flaws in the American people.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>James Madison warned us during the debate on ratifying the Constitution. He was asked, you know, will these checks and balances really work? Are these institutions that you’re asking us here in Virginia — it was during the debate in Virginia — are these, you know, institutions really going to protect us in the you’re promising?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And Madison, I think with a certain amount of exasperation, said, none of these things work if we are not decent people. The way he put it, he said, “Is there no virtue among us? If not, then we are in a wretched situation.”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>That, I think, is part of what’s happening. The problem is not the design of the system, it’s not the Constitution or the branches of government. It’s that you have tens of millions of people who think this is okay, and some of them even think it’s more than okay. They like it, and they vote for it.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And I think that’s a problem with our society, that there’s a kind of decadence on we that’s overtaken our society where millions of people just shrug and say, well, he’s going to build a ballroom. What are you going to do?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And I think that in an earlier time — and when I say earlier, I don’t mean 100 years ago, I mean like 20 years ago, 15 years ago — any one of these things would have been the source of a huge outcry.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>I think Donald Trump has, by firehosing us with these crazy projects and ideas and wars and other things that he’s been doing, has just kind of worn people down into numbness to say, well, I guess we’re going to build this drone platform with a big winged victory statue on it. And what can we do about it?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And that’s in part, again, because of the cowardice of his party, which now depends — the elected officials of his party depend on surviving primary challenges in which maybe 15 or 20% of the party votes. And that very small number of people has basically put a stranglehold on a party and on the legislature.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Now, hopefully that can change if people get mad enough and vote. But I guess I would just caution everyone against saying, well, somehow the design of this system is flawed. This system was never meant to work if people did not have some kind of civic affection and involvement in it. And that, I think, is the source of our real problem here.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Yeah. Interestingly, you know, we had Sarah Longwell on not that long ago, and she seemed to think that this issue may actually be breaking through with some of his voters, just because the contrast is so stark, Tom, between Americans struggling, right, with economic pressures from the war, very much as a result of the war that he started, and these gilded statues and arches that he seems very fixated on.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Do you see that as actually being a place where maybe there will be pushback by the very electorate that has voted him in?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Tom Nichols:\u003c/strong> Yeah. And I think you’re seeing that happen. I mean, for Donald Trump to be hovering now around 30, 32% popularity is really quite remarkable considering that he came back into office. I won a discontinuous election and managed to ride back into office.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Sarah, I think Sarah’s right about this, and she of course is the one who has sat with hundreds of focus groups to hear it.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And I think what breaks through is not necessarily the monuments as an issue per se. I don’t think anybody’s gonna get out there and vote and say, you know, I really don’t like this ballroom. But they’re standing there at the gas pump saying, you know, I’m paying four and a half bucks, or if you’re a farmer or trucker or something, you say, I’m payin’ you know six and a huff bucks for diesel, and this guy is running around like Goldfinger, you know, painting everything in gold.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Who’s thinking about me, and why is he putting up gold statues and sticking gold appliques on everything when I can’t afford to keep filling my car to take my kids to school?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>I think that has broken through. I think it’s been a really important part of the nosedive in his popularity. He really does come across as a callous, uncaring king who basically tells the people to eat cake and that expensive gas is a small price to pay for having a great president like him.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Well, Lorraine writes, “The expense of all these projects is deeply offensive in view that he tore healthcare away from millions of Americans through his big ugly bill.”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Erin, can you think of a historical analog as well of a leader fixated on building monuments in the face of much more pressing problems?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Erin Thompson:\u003c/strong> Well, and I just want to say, too, that thousands of people came out last weekend to protest his threats to close the Kennedy Center. So he’s attacking what people love.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And yeah, looking at Trump’s actions now made me think of the Colosseum. Right? In Rome, it’s named the Coliseum after the Colossus, a gigantic statue that stood beside it that was — he was one of the worst rulers of all history and was obsessed with trying to beautify Rome because he saw what was coming. He wanted to fix his reputation and it did not work.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> He fiddled while Rome burned, right?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>We’re talking with Erin Thompson, Professor of Art Crime at City University of New York, author of \u003cem>Smashing Statues\u003c/em>, and Tom Nichols, staff writer at \u003cem>The Atlantic\u003c/em>, about Trump’s focus on monuments and monuments, in many ways, to himself, the difficulties in curbing those actions by Congress and the courts, at least as they’re currently constituted, and what broader impact that has.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>You can join the conversation, listeners, with your questions about his recent announcement of the militarized arch, which Tom Nichols wrote about, and also just how you feel about these construction projects. Do they matter to you? Do they bother you? Why or why not? What kinds of messages do you think they will send? And what would you like to see happen to them going forward, especially after the president’s presidency?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>You can email Forum at kqed.org, find us on Discord, Bluesky, Facebook or Instagram at KQED Forum, or call us at 866-733-6786, 866-733-6786.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And Lorraine also writes, “Trump thinks that by splashing gold everywhere projects an image of wealth and power. The truth is an excess of gold makes those things look tawdry and cheap. As for the victory arch, where’s the victory? I hope I’m wrong, but the bunker under the ballroom combined with the militarization of the art paints a picture of a man who’s preparing to dig in after the 2028 election, if things don’t go his way.”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>We’ll have more after the break. This is \u003cem>Forum\u003c/em>.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Welcome back to \u003cem>Forum\u003c/em>. I’m Mina Kim. We’re talking this hour about Trump’s building projects, his monument, which he did say, in fact, that the triumphal arch early when he was announcing it was in honor of him.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>“Trump’s Monumental Obsession” is the piece by Tom Nichols, our guest today, a staff writer at \u003cem>The Atlantic\u003c/em>, and Erin Thompson is author of \u003cem>Smashing Statues\u003c/em> and professor of art crime at City University in New York.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And listeners, you’re joining the conversation with your questions about President Trump’s building projects, why you think he’s doing them and whether or not they bother you and why. 866-733-6786, the number. Discord, Bluesky, Facebook or Instagram is where you can post your comments. You can also email \u003ca href=\"mailto:forum@kqed.org\">forum@kqed.org\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And this listener on Discord writes, “What about this spending in the context of the total national debt? After all, DOGE’s purpose was to cut spending, right? How can the spending on these monuments be reconciled with that purpose?”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Erin, we talked with Tom earlier about whether or not we really have a good sense of how much these projects are costing. I mean, Trump once promised to finance the building of his own giant ballroom himself or with private donors as well. And I was struck by how you have noted that actually often the kinds of monuments we see across this country are not put up by state or federal governments, that they’re actually put up…\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Erin Thompson:\u003c/strong> By private donors? Yes, we think of them as public monuments, but they’re not public in that the public has any say into what they look like or where they go or whether they should come down. Public monuments are usually only put up by those with enough power to find a place for them and enough money to pay for them.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Yeah. So what does that then mean with regard to, you know, who gets to deliver whatever message they’re trying to deliver, as you were saying earlier, a monument does?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Erin Thompson:\u003c/strong> The history of monuments in the U.S. shows, at least I argue in my book, that they’re often meant to show the rest of us our place.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>So, for example, a lot of Confederate memorials went up not in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War, but in the 20th century and were often associated with interracial unionization efforts. So if people started to threaten to strike, a monument would be put up by, say, the mine owners or the factory owners to remind white workers, don’t cross the color line, to ally yourself with your fellow workers. You need to respect the work of your Confederate forefathers.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>So I think that the autocratic monuments we’re seeing today are also meant to remind us as voters, as citizens, you know, just sit tight. Let the elite make the decisions for you.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> After the murder of George Floyd, though, suddenly all over the country, you start seeing monuments being taken down or graffitied. Why do you think that happened?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Erin Thompson:\u003c/strong> Well, that’s the power of monuments to make concrete intangible ideas about justice, equality, et cetera. So they were places to rally ourselves, to think about, to protest inequality and power. And they were in the news a lot, but only about 200 monuments left their pedestals after the murder of George Floyd, which is far, far less than 1% of the public monuments in the U.S., something like a tenth of a percent. And many of those were removed by official actions; only about 20 were taken down by protesters. So we still have a lot to think about.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Yeah, they’re very hard to bring down, aren’t they? Can you talk about that and why?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Erin Thompson:\u003c/strong> Yeah, there’s the law. So in almost all former Confederate states, it’s simply impossible to remove an established public monument. They knew when they were especially putting those laws into place to protect Confederate monuments.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And even in states where there’s not an explicit prohibition, there’s just simply no procedure to follow to ask questions about a monument.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>So part of what’s so infuriating about what the president is currently doing is that he’s ignoring all of these laws that future administrations might not be so willing to ignore, and thus it will become — it will be difficult to take down what he’s put up because we’ll be respecting laws that he is not.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Yeah, you tell the story of an Indigenous activist in Minnesota who was trying to get a monument down. Can you talk about that and what ultimately he had to do?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Erin Thompson:\u003c/strong> So Mike Forcia, an Indigenous activist in St. Paul, Minnesota, had been trying for decades, his entire adult life, to question a monument of Christopher Columbus in front of the state capitol. He wanted to know, in this city, which is the largest urban population of Indigenous people in the U.S., why is a man who many blame with great reason for unleashing a genocide honored on the statehouse lawn?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>But every time he filed a petition, it essentially ended up thrown away because there was no procedure to question that monument.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>So finally, he heard that others were planning to tear down the statue during the middle of the night in August of 2020. And he decided that he was going to go out in the middle of the day, invite people to witness him because he said the monument went up in front of crowds of people and it needed to come down in the same way. And so he took responsibility for tearing down that monument.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Ultimately, did he face jail time?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Erin Thompson:\u003c/strong> He was charged, and prosecutors agreed to divert his case to a special restorative justice process. So he, instead of going into a court, was put in front of talking circles, they called it, of people who were affected by the removal, but also people who are affected by this statue being there in the first place, and he was sentenced to community service.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And one of my favorite parts of this case is that he only had a rope from Home Depot that he threw around the statue and tugged it down, but it turns out it came down so easily because no one had bolted it to the pedestal. It was just assumed no one would ever question the erection of Columbus on top of that pedestal, so it was very easy in the end to topple it.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Hmm. Well, let me go to Sasha in Berkeley next. Sasha, go ahead.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Sasha:\u003c/strong> Good morning. Well, I look at this as Humpty Dumpty that we have to put back together again after Trump is gone. And I’m curious why what I’m going to suggest next couldn’t be done.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>I would take down all the gold in the White House and anywhere else that’s been plastered and melt it down for money we could put into the Treasury. And in terms of the art, take it down and the ballroom — if there is no need for a huge room like that, currently called the ballroom, I would take at least half of it down if the other half is to be made into useful offices or replace, I forget what it was, the East or the West Wing that he tore down.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>You know, but the biggest problem is how do we put the government back together again? And I have no answers for that because clearly all of our departments have been stripped of staff, and what have they been replaced for, or what it remains are people with political agendas to destroy.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Well, Sasha, thanks for weighing in.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Sasha:\u003c/strong> I’m curious about whether we can melt it all down or not.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Well, we were hearing from Erin, you know, just what kinds of potential consequences you could face for that. I don’t know if you want to add anything to Sasha’s point.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Erin Thompson:\u003c/strong> Well, I’ll just say that I think that a lot of the stuff that got stuck up around the White House might not be actual gold, so melting it down might produce a lot of plastic fumes.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> That was a suspicion. Let me go to David in Indiana next. David, go ahead. You’re on.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>David:\u003c/strong> Well, since, uh… arches tend to commemorate something specific, and one of the biggest, if not the biggest, concern of Americans right now is affordability, maybe it should be named the Arch of Affordability, the Triumph of Affordability, or at least nicknamed that.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Well, David, thanks. Yeah, if you can’t take it down, maybe you just reimagine and reconstitute its purpose. That could be one way to handle it.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>So RJ writes, “How can judges be so gullible and not see through claims that these projects are for national security?”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>I wanna ask you about this, Tom. What is the status of the legal challenge, right? What can you tell us about the arch in particular?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Tom Nichols:\u003c/strong> Well, there are lawsuits pending, but to your listener’s point, it’s not that judges are gullible. It’s that they don’t think they have the power to contradict the executive on what constitutes national security, which is why this keeps getting kicked up further and further because there are some judges that say, okay, fine, I’m not buying that argument.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>But, you know, precedence, precedent and history tend to be on the side of presidents when they say national security. The courts basically say someone besides us has to adjudicate what the answer — usually be in Congress, since we don’t actually have a function in Congress right now.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>So it’s not that the judges are gullible, it’s that I think some of them feel that their hands are tied.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And I wanted to make, if I could, I just wanna make a quick note about what monuments are for, because Erin’s point is very important. But I think it depends on where you live.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>I lived and worked in Boston for years. And monuments can also be really important reminders about what’s good in us and what we should remember about ourselves.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>If you walked from my old office in the State House on Beacon Hill, all the way down through the garden and the Boston Common and the Public Garden, you would pass a plaque, a sculpture dedicated to Robert Gould Shaw, for example, the commander of the Massachusetts 54th, the first Black Army unit. You go further down, you pass statues of abolitionists. You walk out of the Public Garden under the gaze of George Washington.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>The problem is that Donald Trump is cheapening our notion of what a memorial is by taking them and basically admitting, as he did — he was interviewed last summer and basically someone said, are you putting these up because they’re afraid they won’t put them up for you when you’re gone? And he said, yeah, this is what I want. And no one will do this once I’m gone.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Well, in a democracy, if you’re saying, I want to put these up because no one wants them but me, that’s a really kind of revealing and dysfunctional thing.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>So yes, it’s true that memorials can be these awful attempts to intimidate people. Trump’s efforts, by the way, remind me not of — although I think Colosseum is a great example — I spent a lot of time in the old Soviet Union, and his projects remind me of these outsized Soviet war memorials that were everywhere in Moscow and Leningrad and Kiev and other places in the Old Soviet Union.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>That’s just not the kind of country we are, but that doesn’t mean that we should forget how memorials can really inspire us and make us better people just by seeing them.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Well, Barbara writes, “Trump builds these illegal monuments to himself because he knows others will not. They need to be torn down at the earliest opportunity. We cannot let these un-American monuments to a cruel, lawless, corrupt leader stand. Symbols matter.”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Let me remind listeners, you’re listening to \u003cem>Forum\u003c/em>. I’m Mina Kim.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>What do you think — and I know I’m asking you to sort of get into the mind, but I imagine, Erin, you have some thoughts on this. Is the simplistic message he wants to send with these monuments to himself — what do you think he’s hoping people will associate with him? Wealth.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Erin Thompson:\u003c/strong> Our goodness. Yeah, it’s not too complicated, I think. And it has been the same in monuments throughout time. Bigger is better, is permanent.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And I think it’s interesting that we do tend to think of monuments as permanent, but they really aren’t. America is very strange in that we’ve had the same set of monuments for so long, but almost every other culture, country in the world has seen waves of monuments go up and down every time power changes.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>So yeah, I think we should get used to the idea, thinking of our monuments as lovely but temporary.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> I think we think of them as so permanent just because of the way that they’re built, and like marble and stone. Yeah, that’s just — that’s why they’re so big, you can’t ignore them. Yeah, and you have to look up at them and so on.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Well, in the short term, can it serve the political purpose of distraction, say, from the things that he hasn’t been able to keep his promises on in this particular presidency? Erin or Tom. Yeah.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Tom Nichols:\u003c/strong> Oh, sorry. Yes, but I think it’s backfiring in the way that we discussed earlier.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>If we were winning the war in Iran, and we are not, you could almost see people making an argument to say, well, we’ve toppled a terrible regime. We’ve been at each other’s throats for nearly a half century. And the people of Iran are going to be free. And who? You know, whatever argument you want to make, and therefore we should put up something.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>The problem is that everything that he would want to commemorate, including himself — I mean, who puts up a monument to himself when he’s at 30%? You know, that’s the kind of, I suppose, grim and laughable part of this.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>He’s losing war, the economy is tumbling off the rails, his party is about to be clobbered. Um, you know, in, in, um, at least by all indications that we can see so far, his party’s going to get obliterated in the midterms. His — he’s at historic, he’s reaching, he has fallen below, uh, what our friend Sarah Longwell calls the Bush line, the George W. Bush line. And he’s now heading for Nixon territory.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And you know who’s, who’s response to that is to say, you don’t — we need a memorial, a statue, a ballroom.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Um, and I think that’s the kind of shock that hits people. If things were going well, you would have a lot of people defending this or at least ignoring it. And instead he’s doing this at a time that I think a lot of ordinary Americans who don’t usually pay a lot of attention to the news are getting home from the grocery store and saying, you know, you’ve got to be kidding me. Well, what is this about?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And I think it is breaking through.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Well, Gregory in Oakland writes, “I appreciate the point that it’s not just the system, but also the people who keep enabling this behavior from our leaders. These projects ultimately distract us from issues that matter even more.”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Trish writes, “He knows that nobody is going to honor him in such a grand manner once he’s out of the picture. So he has to honor himself given the atrocities that he and his administration have perpetrated upon the nation and the world. I suspect that one day there will be a move to tear down all of his creations just as we are doing nowadays for those who have been revealed for their atrocities.”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Trump’s name has been taken down for now from the Kennedy Center. Tom, can you just remind us of the status of all that? Because I know you’ve also recently reported on it.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Tom Nichols:\u003c/strong> Oh, yeah, this is, I mean, I think another place where people are starting to pay attention in a way that they didn’t before is looking at him and saying, with all the things going on in the world, he’s fixated on this, that he has to have his name next to Jack Kennedy for some reason, you know, in a city.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And I think we should also stipulate here what George — excuse me, Donald Trump hates Washington. I mean, it’s not a city where he is popular. He doesn’t like it there. When he first came to — in his first term, he actually tried to figure out if he could govern the country from New York instead of having to move to Washington.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And the city kind of hates him back. I mean, he is tremendously unpopular there.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>So he’s been trying to get this done. The courts have told him that he cannot put his name on it. Then he said, well, if I renovate it — well, can we put a big plaque? This is all done through his trustees, by the way, who are all basically his cronies. If I renovate it, can you put a plaque on it that said, renovated by the Trump Kennedy Center Foundation or some damn thing.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And the courts again said, nice try, very funny, but no.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And so now the trustees have said, well, if we can’t rename it and the president won’t help us fundraise to rebuild it, we’re going to have to tear it down. Which was Trump event, essentially. I wrote a piece about it saying this is basically blackmail. This is the Dane-geld, as Kipling called it. He wants a payoff, he wants his name on it, or he’s going to destroy this beloved national icon.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And my argument is that we ought to let him. I think in full view of the American people, if this is who he is and the kind of administration he’s running, then I think Americans ought to see the John F. Kennedy Center torn down because the president had a temper tantrum.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>But that’s where it stands now. He can’t get his name on it. The courts have stopped him at every turn, and his threat now is, it’s so decrepit that without my money, you know, without me raising money, it’ll have to be torn down.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Well, as we’ve talked about, this issue with the monuments is very much a metaphor for his presidency. Thanks for digging through it with us. Tom Nichols of \u003cem>The Atlantic\u003c/em> and Erin Thompson of City University of New York, author of \u003cem>Smashing Statues\u003c/em>, and also thank you for doing that with us, our listeners.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And my thanks as well for Ana de Amaral for producing this segment.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>This is \u003cem>Forum\u003c/em>. I’m Mina Kim.\u003c/p>\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"content": "\n\u003ch2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Airdate: Tuesday, September 1, 2026\u003c/h2>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Wildfire season is underway in California, but the state’s wildfire fund is running low after billions went to victims of last year’s massive Altadena fire, sparked by faulty equipment owned by Southern California Edison. Governor Newsom and the legislature’s debate over fixing the wildfire fund has hinged on the extent utilities, insurance companies and homeowners would pay into it. We’ll dig into the details, and hear your thoughts on who should pay to rebuild after wildfires.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Guests:\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n\u003cli>\u003cstrong>Guy Marzorati,\u003c/strong> correspondent, KQED’s California Politics and Government Desk\u003c/li>\n\n\n\n\u003cli>\u003cstrong>Michael Wara,\u003c/strong> policy director for the Sustainability Accelerator at the Doerr School of Sustainability, director of the Climate and Energy Policy Program, senior research scholar at the Woods Institute for the Environment, Stanford University\u003c/li>\n\n\n\n\u003cli>\u003cstrong>Joy Chen,\u003c/strong> executive director, Every Fire Survivor’s Network\u003c/li>\n\u003c/ul>\n\n\n\n\u003ch2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Episode Transcript\u003c/h2>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cem>\u003cstrong>This is a computer-generated transcript. While our team has reviewed it, there may be errors.\u003c/strong>\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Welcome to \u003cem>Forum\u003c/em>. I’m Mina Kim. State lawmakers are voting today on an agreement with Governor Newsom that changes some of the rules governing wildfires caused by utilities. The deal, reached after months of closed-door negotiations, falls short of Newsom’s biggest goal of limiting liability for utilities, but it does build in some increased protections for ratepayers and creates a state program to get faster payments to wildfire victims. This hour, we dig into the details and the broader question of how to manage the costs of California’s increasingly destructive wildfires. Joining me this hour is Guy Marzorati, correspondent on KQED’s California Politics and Government Desk. Hi, Guy.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Guy Marzorati:\u003c/strong> Hey, good morning.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> And also with us is Michael Wara, senior research scholar at Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment. Michael, glad to have you with us, too.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Michael Wara:\u003c/strong> Thank you for having me on.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> So, Guy, first take me back a bit and tell me when and why Newsom started making this push to limit utility companies’ liability.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Guy Marzorati:\u003c/strong> Yeah, so I guess just real bird’s-eye view, like, this is the politics of climate change in California in the 2020s. Like, it is a debate that’s no longer just about what emissions-reduction goals to set. It’s about how to deal with climate damages that are here. And when you talk about climate damages in California, you’re talking about people’s homes burning down. And you’re talking about the ripple effects of electricity prices going up, insurance premiums going up. And all three of those pieces are kind of at the heart of the debate that we’ve seen play out really for more than a year. I mean, like, this issue of electricity affordability was a hotly debated item at the end of last year’s legislative session, continued through the year to where we are now.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> So he wanted to reduce our electricity bills, then. He wanted to reduce our insurance payments. But were Edison and the state’s other two big utilities lobbying hard for him to do something about this, too?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Guy Marzorati:\u003c/strong> I mean, look, I think from the lens of electricity affordability, Newsom is looking at the burden, the liability that’s on these utilities, the potential business impact of a bankruptcy following the kind of damaging fires we’ve seen, the fire in Altadena at the beginning of 2025 being the most recent example. But what he’s pushing up against is, if you want to shift the liability away from utilities, where does it end up? And the place that he proposed it ending up was more so in the home insurance base. Well, that industry also has gone through some years of crisis for the same exact reason, the fallout from these wildfires. And so that was not an easy landing spot politically. And I think when you’re talking about the politics of getting something through the Legislature, doing anything that’s seen as overly favorable or generous to utilities is just a really difficult lift.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Yeah. So, you know, that did not work out for him with regard to trying to shift the cost to insurance companies. And it also is politically hard to be on the side of utilities that start a fire, like the Eaton Fire, as we know the liability was placed on them. But politically, why did it make sense for him?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Guy Marzorati:\u003c/strong> It’s a good question. I mean, I think there’s — look, I’ve heard a lot of different explanations for, like, why he’s — why he went after this in literally the last week of his last legislative session, ranging from the most charitable, which is, he took office at the beginning of 2019, right as PG&E was going into bankruptcy. He did not want the next governor — because this issue is not going away — he did not want the next governor to deal with the calamity that he faced while taking office. Okay, that’s probably the most charitable. He’s running for president. Having a future utility bankruptcy would not be a great headline.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>But then I also think you have to just keep in mind, like, his term does not end this week. The Legislature is done with their session. He’s governor through the end of the year. And there is ongoing risk of, if we have another fire the likes of the Eaton Fire, the Camp Fire, what does that do for utilities, given that the wildfire fund that has already existed probably gets depleted by the Eaton Fire? There’s a new one that was authorized last year, but, like, what’s the long-term play for that? Is it just we just continue to fund these bailout funds through ratepayers every time there’s a — I mean, it just doesn’t seem sustainable. So you have to think he was also looking at that.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Yeah, Michael, the strength of the wildfire fund was probably on his mind, certainly on state lawmakers’ minds as well. Can you remind us, you know, what the wildfire fund is and the pressure that’s on it right now in the wake of the fire?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Michael Wara:\u003c/strong> Sure. It’s a little bit like an insurance policy that you buy, you know, before a big calamity. And the policy is funded half out of shareholders’ pockets and half out of our pockets, ratepayer pockets, created in 2019 in the bankruptcy and designed to manage the risks of fire that were made so evident by both the Camp Fire and the Woolsey — Camp in Northern California, Woolsey in Southern California — and the fires in ’17 before that. And it really enabled PG&E to exit bankruptcy and kept Edison healthy through that process.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And then we ran the clock forward a few years, and we had a couple of bad fires that were not like Eaton in magnitude, but folks in Northern California may remember the Dixie Fire and the Kincade Fire a little bit before that, and those were bad utility-caused fires as well. But then Eaton basically wiped out the fund. We had a $21 billion claims-paying capacity. That’s kind of the limit, the coverage limit. And there haven’t actually been claims filed yet from Eaton. The settlements are still under negotiation. But I think most people believe that the fund will be exhausted or very nearly exhausted by the single event in January of ’25.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Wow. And just remind us, when a wildfire is started by a utility company, how and when can they access the money in that fund?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Michael Wara:\u003c/strong> Yeah, so it’s not right away. The utility company has to settle lawsuits, and those are generally from two kinds of parties. One is victims, and the other is insurance companies that sue on behalf of the people they’ve already paid claims to, and they try to recover the money they paid in claims. That’s called subrogation. And so those two types of claims make up most of the money, but you have to settle in court. And Edison is right now in court with the victims’ attorneys making lots of claims. And I think they’re starting to get further on the subrogation claim settlement process than maybe they are with the plaintiffs’ attorneys. Yeah.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Okay, so we’re hearing about all these pressures. We’re hearing all the goals, right, that the governor and lawmakers have. What did they finally agree to, Guy?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Guy Marzorati:\u003c/strong> Well, it was short of what Newsom initially proposed. He wanted to basically bar insurance companies from pursuing these claims against utilities through the subrogation process Michael’s talking about. The ultimate deal that was reached over the weekend was basically to limit — restrict hedge funds from buying those claims from insurance companies.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>So you can think about an insurance company: They make the payout to victims, they’re looking for ways to stay liquid, a hedge fund might come around and offer them something short of full compensation, but cash up front to take on the claim. And a hedge fund, look, they have a lot of lawyers. They can spend the years it takes in many cases in pursuing this litigation against utilities.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Newsom and the Legislature, their deal would say basically insurance companies can’t sell those rights to hedge funds or private equity firms. And then the bill does some other things. It sets up a fast-pay system for wildfire victims to get paid. It has some new reporting requirements around, you know, local efforts to actually prevent the damage from wildfires at a community level, although importantly there’s not any money in the bill to do that.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>So, short of what Newsom wanted to do, but again, given kind of the politics — and we should say, like, the coalition that formed against what Newsom is trying to do. It was not just the insurance companies who said, no, we want to continue to be able to file these lawsuits against utilities. It was also groups representing victims and then attorney groups, which have enormous sway, particularly in the Democratic caucus, who didn’t want kind of limits on what they see as their business. And so you had those, you know, kind of strange bedfellows, but a powerful coalition against Newsom and utilities. And in the end, the deal that was reached, which I’m not convinced Newsom actually likes — I mean, he made some comments last night that were pretty critical of the deal that he struck with legislative leaders — but certainly he was not able to get a lot of what he wanted.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Yeah, the biggest sticking point was the fact that he didn’t want to let insurance companies sue utilities.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Guy Marzorati:\u003c/strong> Right. And the point there is, like, the idea that, you know, that would drive up the overall, you know, claims that are made or the settlement amounts. And that the big-picture thing is all of that — the settlement amount, the liability that utility companies hold — that all trickles down to electricity bills.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And I guess, like, the best argument that I’ve heard in support of what Newsom is trying to do is, if you look at, you know, placing the burden for these liabilities on electric ratepayers, think about if you’re, you know, you and I, or if you were living in the Central Valley, you have to run your AC all the time. There’s very little that you can do at an individual level to actually change that, right? The liabilities held by the utilities, they’re passing that down.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>If you shift that to the insurance space, well, now there actually is something that individual homeowners can do to decrease their own liability, right? If the system works as it should, you should be able to discount if you are hardening your home, if you replace your roof, if you’re increasing defensible space. So it creates somewhat kind of like a structure of agency there, not saying it makes the politics any easier.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Right. Why did, Michael, lawmakers push back so hard on that, and did they have a point about what could happen in the insurance space?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Michael Wara:\u003c/strong> Well, I think there’s two issues, right? One is we need to have — we have private electric utilities and private insurance companies in California. They both provide essential services to California. We need available insurance to have mortgages, right, and it’s just, it’s essential to the —\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>The challenge is we have this growing cost because of the status quo, because of how things were done back in the 20th century. The cost is on electric utilities, but it’s getting so big that the electric utilities can’t handle it. But nobody else wants to handle it either. And the insurers have been in a fragile state, as Guy pointed to. I would say we’re sort of one or two steps into a healthy recovery for insurers in California. Maybe like when you’ve taken one dose of antibiotics, but you’ve got like four more to go? Um, and so the insurers were understandably concerned that this shift of cost would put them back where they were a couple of years ago before they started taking those antibiotic doses. And they pushed back hard.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>They don’t want to see this cost on their books. The problem is that we have the situation where, you know, the single mom in Fresno is paying through the nose because it’s 105 degrees outside in the summer. And maybe, maybe, and I’m not saying this is definitely true, but maybe it makes more sense to ask someone who’s already paying through the nose for their insurance because they live in a high-risk place and they have an expensive house to pay more. That’s really the debate. Who’s going to pay more? Is it the electricity customer in a hot place, or is it the homeowner in a high-risk place?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> We’re coming up on a break, but lawmakers are saying that this would raise premiums and cause more insurers to flee the state. Do you see that as—\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Michael Wara:\u003c/strong> I think it really depends on how it’s implemented. The final compromise would have softened that a lot, but it is gonna raise — like, prices are going up some way or other. Climate change is expensive. It is not free.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> We’re talking about the effects of climate change, specifically wildfires, and how California is attempting to manage the many costs that come with them, with Michael Wara and Guy Marzorati, and with you, our listeners. Stay with us. We’ll take your calls and comments after the break. This is \u003cem>Forum\u003c/em>.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Welcome to \u003cem>Forum\u003c/em>. I’m Mina Kim. State lawmakers are voting today on an agreement with Governor Newsom that changes some of the rules governing wildfires caused by utilities. The deal, reached after months of closed-door negotiations, falls short of Newsom’s biggest goal of limiting liability for utilities, but it does build in some increased protections for ratepayers and creates a state program to get faster payments to wildfire victims. This hour, we dig into the details and the broader question of how to manage the costs of California’s increasingly destructive wildfires. Joining me this hour is Guy Marzorati, correspondent on KQED’s California Politics and Government Desk. Hi, Guy.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Welcome to \u003cem>Forum\u003c/em>. I’m Mina Kim. State lawmakers are voting today on an agreement with Governor Newsom that changes some of the rules governing wildfires caused by utilities. The deal, reached after months of closed-door negotiations, falls short of Newsom’s biggest goal of limiting liability for utilities, but it does build in some increased protections for ratepayers and creates a state program to get faster payments to wildfire victims. This hour, we dig into the details and the broader question of how to manage the costs of California’s increasingly destructive wildfires. Joining me this hour is Guy Marzorati, correspondent on KQED’s California Politics and Government Desk. Hi, Guy.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> And also with us is Michael Wara, senior research scholar at Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment. Michael, glad to have you with us, too.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> So, Guy, first take me back a bit and tell me when and why Newsom started making this push to limit utility companies’ liability.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Guy Marzorati:\u003c/strong> Yeah, so I guess just real bird’s-eye view, like, this is the politics of climate change in California in the 2020s. Like, it is a debate that’s no longer just about what emissions-reduction goals to set. It’s about how to deal with climate damages that are here. And when you talk about climate damages in California, you’re talking about people’s homes burning down. And you’re talking about the ripple effects of electricity prices going up, insurance premiums going up. And all three of those pieces are kind of at the heart of the debate that we’ve seen play out really for more than a year. I mean, like, this issue of electricity affordability was a hotly debated item at the end of last year’s legislative session, continued through the year to where we are now.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> So he wanted to reduce our electricity bills, then. He wanted to reduce our insurance payments. But were Edison and the state’s other two big utilities lobbying hard for him to do something about this, too?\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Guy Marzorati:\u003c/strong> I mean, look, I think from the lens of electricity affordability, Newsom is looking at the burden, the liability that’s on these utilities, the potential business impact of a bankruptcy following the kind of damaging fires we’ve seen, the fire in Altadena at the beginning of 2025 being the most recent example. But what he’s pushing up against is, if you want to shift the liability away from utilities, where does it end up? And the place that he proposed it ending up was more so in the home insurance base. Well, that industry also has gone through some years of crisis for the same exact reason, the fallout from these wildfires. And so that was not an easy landing spot politically. And I think when you’re talking about the politics of getting something through the Legislature, doing anything that’s seen as overly favorable or generous to utilities is just a really difficult lift.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Guy Marzorati:\u003c/strong> I mean, look, I think from the lens of electricity affordability, Newsom is looking at the burden, the liability that’s on these utilities, the potential business impact of a bankruptcy following the kind of damaging fires we’ve seen, the fire in Altadena at the beginning of 2025 being the most recent example. But what he’s pushing up against is, if you want to shift the liability away from utilities, where does it end up? And the place that he proposed it ending up was more so in the home insurance base. Well, that industry also has gone through some years of crisis for the same exact reason, the fallout from these wildfires. And so that was not an easy landing spot politically. And I think when you’re talking about the politics of getting something through the Legislature, doing anything that’s seen as overly favorable or generous to utilities is just a really difficult lift.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Yeah. So, you know, that did not work out for him with regard to trying to shift the cost to insurance companies. And it also is politically hard to be on the side of utilities that start a fire, like the Eaton Fire, as we know the liability was placed on them. But politically, why did it make sense for him?\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Yeah. So, you know, that did not work out for him with regard to trying to shift the cost to insurance companies. And it also is politically hard to be on the side of utilities that start a fire, like the Eaton Fire, as we know the liability was placed on them. But politically, why did it make sense for him?\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Guy Marzorati:\u003c/strong> It’s a good question. I mean, I think there’s — look, I’ve heard a lot of different explanations for, like, why he’s — why he went after this in literally the last week of his last legislative session, ranging from the most charitable, which is, he took office at the beginning of 2019, right as PG&E was going into bankruptcy. He did not want the next governor — because this issue is not going away — he did not want the next governor to deal with the calamity that he faced while taking office. Okay, that’s probably the most charitable. He’s running for president. Having a future utility bankruptcy would not be a great headline.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Guy Marzorati:\u003c/strong> It’s a good question. I mean, I think there’s — look, I’ve heard a lot of different explanations for, like, why he’s — why he went after this in literally the last week of his last legislative session, ranging from the most charitable, which is, he took office at the beginning of 2019, right as PG&E was going into bankruptcy. He did not want the next governor — because this issue is not going away — he did not want the next governor to deal with the calamity that he faced while taking office. Okay, that’s probably the most charitable. He’s running for president. Having a future utility bankruptcy would not be a great headline.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>But then I also think you have to just keep in mind, like, his term does not end this week. The Legislature is done with their session. He’s governor through the end of the year. And there is ongoing risk of, if we have another fire the likes of the Eaton Fire, the Camp Fire, what does that do for utilities, given that the wildfire fund that has already existed probably gets depleted by the Eaton Fire? There’s a new one that was authorized last year, but, like, what’s the long-term play for that? Is it just we just continue to fund these bailout funds through ratepayers every time there’s a — I mean, it just doesn’t seem sustainable. So you have to think he was also looking at that.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>But then I also think you have to just keep in mind, like, his term does not end this week. The Legislature is done with their session. He’s governor through the end of the year. And there is ongoing risk of, if we have another fire the likes of the Eaton Fire, the Camp Fire, what does that do for utilities, given that the wildfire fund that has already existed probably gets depleted by the Eaton Fire? There’s a new one that was authorized last year, but, like, what’s the long-term play for that? Is it just we just continue to fund these bailout funds through ratepayers every time there’s a — I mean, it just doesn’t seem sustainable. So you have to think he was also looking at that.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Yeah, Michael, the strength of the wildfire fund was probably on his mind, certainly on state lawmakers’ minds as well. Can you remind us, you know, what the wildfire fund is and the pressure that’s on it right now in the wake of the fire?\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Yeah, Michael, the strength of the wildfire fund was probably on his mind, certainly on state lawmakers’ minds as well. Can you remind us, you know, what the wildfire fund is and the pressure that’s on it right now in the wake of the fire?\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Michael Wara:\u003c/strong> Sure. It’s a little bit like an insurance policy that you buy, you know, before a big calamity. And the policy is funded half out of shareholders’ pockets and half out of our pockets, ratepayer pockets, created in 2019 in the bankruptcy and designed to manage the risks of fire that were made so evident by both the Camp Fire and the Woolsey — Camp in Northern California, Woolsey in Southern California — and the fires in ’17 before that. And it really enabled PG&E to exit bankruptcy and kept Edison healthy through that process.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Michael Wara:\u003c/strong> Sure. It’s a little bit like an insurance policy that you buy, you know, before a big calamity. And the policy is funded half out of shareholders’ pockets and half out of our pockets, ratepayer pockets, created in 2019 in the bankruptcy and designed to manage the risks of fire that were made so evident by both the Camp Fire and the Woolsey — Camp in Northern California, Woolsey in Southern California — and the fires in ’17 before that. And it really enabled PG&E to exit bankruptcy and kept Edison healthy through that process.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>And then we ran the clock forward a few years, and we had a couple of bad fires that were not like Eaton in magnitude, but folks in Northern California may remember the Dixie Fire and the Kincade Fire a little bit before that, and those were bad utility-caused fires as well. But then Eaton basically wiped out the fund. We had a $21 billion claims-paying capacity. That’s kind of the limit, the coverage limit. And there haven’t actually been claims filed yet from Eaton. The settlements are still under negotiation. But I think most people believe that the fund will be exhausted or very nearly exhausted by the single event in January of ’25.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>And then we ran the clock forward a few years, and we had a couple of bad fires that were not like Eaton in magnitude, but folks in Northern California may remember the Dixie Fire and the Kincade Fire a little bit before that, and those were bad utility-caused fires as well. But then Eaton basically wiped out the fund. We had a $21 billion claims-paying capacity. That’s kind of the limit, the coverage limit. And there haven’t actually been claims filed yet from Eaton. The settlements are still under negotiation. But I think most people believe that the fund will be exhausted or very nearly exhausted by the single event in January of ’25.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Wow. And just remind us, when a wildfire is started by a utility company, how and when can they access the money in that fund?\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Wow. And just remind us, when a wildfire is started by a utility company, how and when can they access the money in that fund?\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Michael Wara:\u003c/strong> Yeah, so it’s not right away. The utility company has to settle lawsuits, and those are generally from two kinds of parties. One is victims, and the other is insurance companies that sue on behalf of the people they’ve already paid claims to, and they try to recover the money they paid in claims. That’s called subrogation. And so those two types of claims make up most of the money, but you have to settle in court. And Edison is right now in court with the victims’ attorneys making lots of claims. And I think they’re starting to get further on the subrogation claim settlement process than maybe they are with the plaintiffs’ attorneys. Yeah.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Michael Wara:\u003c/strong> Yeah, so it’s not right away. The utility company has to settle lawsuits, and those are generally from two kinds of parties. One is victims, and the other is insurance companies that sue on behalf of the people they’ve already paid claims to, and they try to recover the money they paid in claims. That’s called subrogation. And so those two types of claims make up most of the money, but you have to settle in court. And Edison is right now in court with the victims’ attorneys making lots of claims. And I think they’re starting to get further on the subrogation claim settlement process than maybe they are with the plaintiffs’ attorneys. Yeah.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Okay, so we’re hearing about all these pressures. We’re hearing all the goals, right, that the governor and lawmakers have. What did they finally agree to, Guy?\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Okay, so we’re hearing about all these pressures. We’re hearing all the goals, right, that the governor and lawmakers have. What did they finally agree to, Guy?\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Guy Marzorati:\u003c/strong> Well, it was short of what Newsom initially proposed. He wanted to basically bar insurance companies from pursuing these claims against utilities through the subrogation process Michael’s talking about. The ultimate deal that was reached over the weekend was basically to limit — restrict hedge funds from buying those claims from insurance companies.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Guy Marzorati:\u003c/strong> Well, it was short of what Newsom initially proposed. He wanted to basically bar insurance companies from pursuing these claims against utilities through the subrogation process Michael’s talking about. The ultimate deal that was reached over the weekend was basically to limit — restrict hedge funds from buying those claims from insurance companies.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>So you can think about an insurance company: They make the payout to victims, they’re looking for ways to stay liquid, a hedge fund might come around and offer them something short of full compensation, but cash up front to take on the claim. And a hedge fund, look, they have a lot of lawyers. They can spend the years it takes in many cases in pursuing this litigation against utilities.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>So you can think about an insurance company: They make the payout to victims, they’re looking for ways to stay liquid, a hedge fund might come around and offer them something short of full compensation, but cash up front to take on the claim. And a hedge fund, look, they have a lot of lawyers. They can spend the years it takes in many cases in pursuing this litigation against utilities.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Newsom and the Legislature, their deal would say basically insurance companies can’t sell those rights to hedge funds or private equity firms. And then the bill does some other things. It sets up a fast-pay system for wildfire victims to get paid. It has some new reporting requirements around, you know, local efforts to actually prevent the damage from wildfires at a community level, although importantly there’s not any money in the bill to do that.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>Newsom and the Legislature, their deal would say basically insurance companies can’t sell those rights to hedge funds or private equity firms. And then the bill does some other things. It sets up a fast-pay system for wildfire victims to get paid. It has some new reporting requirements around, you know, local efforts to actually prevent the damage from wildfires at a community level, although importantly there’s not any money in the bill to do that.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>So, short of what Newsom wanted to do, but again, given kind of the politics — and we should say, like, the coalition that formed against what Newsom is trying to do. It was not just the insurance companies who said, no, we want to continue to be able to file these lawsuits against utilities. It was also groups representing victims and then attorney groups, which have enormous sway, particularly in the Democratic caucus, who didn’t want kind of limits on what they see as their business. And so you had those, you know, kind of strange bedfellows, but a powerful coalition against Newsom and utilities. And in the end, the deal that was reached, which I’m not convinced Newsom actually likes — I mean, he made some comments last night that were pretty critical of the deal that he struck with legislative leaders — but certainly he was not able to get a lot of what he wanted.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>So, short of what Newsom wanted to do, but again, given kind of the politics — and we should say, like, the coalition that formed against what Newsom is trying to do. It was not just the insurance companies who said, no, we want to continue to be able to file these lawsuits against utilities. It was also groups representing victims and then attorney groups, which have enormous sway, particularly in the Democratic caucus, who didn’t want kind of limits on what they see as their business. And so you had those, you know, kind of strange bedfellows, but a powerful coalition against Newsom and utilities. And in the end, the deal that was reached, which I’m not convinced Newsom actually likes — I mean, he made some comments last night that were pretty critical of the deal that he struck with legislative leaders — but certainly he was not able to get a lot of what he wanted.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Yeah, the biggest sticking point was the fact that he didn’t want to let insurance companies sue utilities.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Yeah, the biggest sticking point was the fact that he didn’t want to let insurance companies sue utilities.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Guy Marzorati:\u003c/strong> Right. And the point there is, like, the idea that, you know, that would drive up the overall, you know, claims that are made or the settlement amounts. And that the big-picture thing is all of that — the settlement amount, the liability that utility companies hold — that all trickles down to electricity bills.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Guy Marzorati:\u003c/strong> Right. And the point there is, like, the idea that, you know, that would drive up the overall, you know, claims that are made or the settlement amounts. And that the big-picture thing is all of that — the settlement amount, the liability that utility companies hold — that all trickles down to electricity bills.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>And I guess, like, the best argument that I’ve heard in support of what Newsom is trying to do is, if you look at, you know, placing the burden for these liabilities on electric ratepayers, think about if you’re, you know, you and I, or if you were living in the Central Valley, you have to run your AC all the time. There’s very little that you can do at an individual level to actually change that, right? The liabilities held by the utilities, they’re passing that down.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>And I guess, like, the best argument that I’ve heard in support of what Newsom is trying to do is, if you look at, you know, placing the burden for these liabilities on electric ratepayers, think about if you’re, you know, you and I, or if you were living in the Central Valley, you have to run your AC all the time. There’s very little that you can do at an individual level to actually change that, right? The liabilities held by the utilities, they’re passing that down.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>If you shift that to the insurance space, well, now there actually is something that individual homeowners can do to decrease their own liability, right? If the system works as it should, you should be able to discount if you are hardening your home, if you replace your roof, if you’re increasing defensible space. So it creates somewhat kind of like a structure of agency there, not saying it makes the politics any easier.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>If you shift that to the insurance space, well, now there actually is something that individual homeowners can do to decrease their own liability, right? If the system works as it should, you should be able to discount if you are hardening your home, if you replace your roof, if you’re increasing defensible space. So it creates somewhat kind of like a structure of agency there, not saying it makes the politics any easier.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Right. Why did, Michael, lawmakers push back so hard on that, and did they have a point about what could happen in the insurance space?\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Right. Why did, Michael, lawmakers push back so hard on that, and did they have a point about what could happen in the insurance space?\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Michael Wara:\u003c/strong> Well, I think there’s two issues, right? One is we need to have — we have private electric utilities and private insurance companies in California. They both provide essential services to California. We need available insurance to have mortgages, right, and it’s just, it’s essential to the —\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Michael Wara:\u003c/strong> Well, I think there’s two issues, right? One is we need to have — we have private electric utilities and private insurance companies in California. They both provide essential services to California. We need available insurance to have mortgages, right, and it’s just, it’s essential to the —\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>The challenge is we have this growing cost because of the status quo, because of how things were done back in the 20th century. The cost is on electric utilities, but it’s getting so big that the electric utilities can’t handle it. But nobody else wants to handle it either. And the insurers have been in a fragile state, as Guy pointed to. I would say we’re sort of one or two steps into a healthy recovery for insurers in California. Maybe like when you’ve taken one dose of antibiotics, but you’ve got like four more to go? Um, and so the insurers were understandably concerned that this shift of cost would put them back where they were a couple of years ago before they started taking those antibiotic doses. And they pushed back hard.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>The challenge is we have this growing cost because of the status quo, because of how things were done back in the 20th century. The cost is on electric utilities, but it’s getting so big that the electric utilities can’t handle it. But nobody else wants to handle it either. And the insurers have been in a fragile state, as Guy pointed to. I would say we’re sort of one or two steps into a healthy recovery for insurers in California. Maybe like when you’ve taken one dose of antibiotics, but you’ve got like four more to go? Um, and so the insurers were understandably concerned that this shift of cost would put them back where they were a couple of years ago before they started taking those antibiotic doses. And they pushed back hard.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>They don’t want to see this cost on their books. The problem is that we have the situation where, you know, the single mom in Fresno is paying through the nose because it’s 105 degrees outside in the summer. And maybe, maybe, and I’m not saying this is definitely true, but maybe it makes more sense to ask someone who’s already paying through the nose for their insurance because they live in a high-risk place and they have an expensive house to pay more. That’s really the debate. Who’s going to pay more? Is it the electricity customer in a hot place, or is it the homeowner in a high-risk place?\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>They don’t want to see this cost on their books. The problem is that we have the situation where, you know, the single mom in Fresno is paying through the nose because it’s 105 degrees outside in the summer. And maybe, maybe, and I’m not saying this is definitely true, but maybe it makes more sense to ask someone who’s already paying through the nose for their insurance because they live in a high-risk place and they have an expensive house to pay more. That’s really the debate. Who’s going to pay more? Is it the electricity customer in a hot place, or is it the homeowner in a high-risk place?\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> We’re coming up on a break, but lawmakers are saying that this would raise premiums and cause more insurers to flee the state. Do you see that as—\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> We’re coming up on a break, but lawmakers are saying that this would raise premiums and cause more insurers to flee the state. Do you see that as—\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Michael Wara:\u003c/strong> I think it really depends on how it’s implemented. The final compromise would have softened that a lot, but it is gonna raise — like, prices are going up some way or other. Climate change is expensive. It is not free.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Michael Wara:\u003c/strong> I think it really depends on how it’s implemented. The final compromise would have softened that a lot, but it is gonna raise — like, prices are going up some way or other. Climate change is expensive. It is not free.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> We’re talking about the effects of climate change, specifically wildfires, and how California is attempting to manage the many costs that come with them, with Michael Wara and Guy Marzorati, and with you, our listeners. Stay with us. We’ll take your calls and comments after the break. This is \u003cem>Forum\u003c/em>.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> We’re talking about the effects of climate change, specifically wildfires, and how California is attempting to manage the many costs that come with them, with Michael Wara and Guy Marzorati, and with you, our listeners. Stay with us. We’ll take your calls and comments after the break. This is \u003cem>Forum\u003c/em>.\u003c/p>\n"
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\n\u003ch2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Airdate: Tuesday, September 1, 2026\u003c/h2>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Wildfire season is underway in California, but the state’s wildfire fund is running low after billions went to victims of last year’s massive Altadena fire, sparked by faulty equipment owned by Southern California Edison. Governor Newsom and the legislature’s debate over fixing the wildfire fund has hinged on the extent utilities, insurance companies and homeowners would pay into it. We’ll dig into the details, and hear your thoughts on who should pay to rebuild after wildfires.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Guests:\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n\u003cli>\u003cstrong>Guy Marzorati,\u003c/strong> correspondent, KQED’s California Politics and Government Desk\u003c/li>\n\n\n\n\u003cli>\u003cstrong>Michael Wara,\u003c/strong> policy director for the Sustainability Accelerator at the Doerr School of Sustainability, director of the Climate and Energy Policy Program, senior research scholar at the Woods Institute for the Environment, Stanford University\u003c/li>\n\n\n\n\u003cli>\u003cstrong>Joy Chen,\u003c/strong> executive director, Every Fire Survivor’s Network\u003c/li>\n\u003c/ul>\n\n\n\n\u003ch2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Episode Transcript\u003c/h2>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cem>\u003cstrong>This is a computer-generated transcript. While our team has reviewed it, there may be errors.\u003c/strong>\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Welcome to \u003cem>Forum\u003c/em>. I’m Mina Kim. State lawmakers are voting today on an agreement with Governor Newsom that changes some of the rules governing wildfires caused by utilities. The deal, reached after months of closed-door negotiations, falls short of Newsom’s biggest goal of limiting liability for utilities, but it does build in some increased protections for ratepayers and creates a state program to get faster payments to wildfire victims. This hour, we dig into the details and the broader question of how to manage the costs of California’s increasingly destructive wildfires. Joining me this hour is Guy Marzorati, correspondent on KQED’s California Politics and Government Desk. Hi, Guy.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Guy Marzorati:\u003c/strong> Hey, good morning.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> And also with us is Michael Wara, senior research scholar at Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment. Michael, glad to have you with us, too.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Michael Wara:\u003c/strong> Thank you for having me on.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> So, Guy, first take me back a bit and tell me when and why Newsom started making this push to limit utility companies’ liability.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Guy Marzorati:\u003c/strong> Yeah, so I guess just real bird’s-eye view, like, this is the politics of climate change in California in the 2020s. Like, it is a debate that’s no longer just about what emissions-reduction goals to set. It’s about how to deal with climate damages that are here. And when you talk about climate damages in California, you’re talking about people’s homes burning down. And you’re talking about the ripple effects of electricity prices going up, insurance premiums going up. And all three of those pieces are kind of at the heart of the debate that we’ve seen play out really for more than a year. I mean, like, this issue of electricity affordability was a hotly debated item at the end of last year’s legislative session, continued through the year to where we are now.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> So he wanted to reduce our electricity bills, then. He wanted to reduce our insurance payments. But were Edison and the state’s other two big utilities lobbying hard for him to do something about this, too?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Guy Marzorati:\u003c/strong> I mean, look, I think from the lens of electricity affordability, Newsom is looking at the burden, the liability that’s on these utilities, the potential business impact of a bankruptcy following the kind of damaging fires we’ve seen, the fire in Altadena at the beginning of 2025 being the most recent example. But what he’s pushing up against is, if you want to shift the liability away from utilities, where does it end up? And the place that he proposed it ending up was more so in the home insurance base. Well, that industry also has gone through some years of crisis for the same exact reason, the fallout from these wildfires. And so that was not an easy landing spot politically. And I think when you’re talking about the politics of getting something through the Legislature, doing anything that’s seen as overly favorable or generous to utilities is just a really difficult lift.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Yeah. So, you know, that did not work out for him with regard to trying to shift the cost to insurance companies. And it also is politically hard to be on the side of utilities that start a fire, like the Eaton Fire, as we know the liability was placed on them. But politically, why did it make sense for him?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Guy Marzorati:\u003c/strong> It’s a good question. I mean, I think there’s — look, I’ve heard a lot of different explanations for, like, why he’s — why he went after this in literally the last week of his last legislative session, ranging from the most charitable, which is, he took office at the beginning of 2019, right as PG&E was going into bankruptcy. He did not want the next governor — because this issue is not going away — he did not want the next governor to deal with the calamity that he faced while taking office. Okay, that’s probably the most charitable. He’s running for president. Having a future utility bankruptcy would not be a great headline.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>But then I also think you have to just keep in mind, like, his term does not end this week. The Legislature is done with their session. He’s governor through the end of the year. And there is ongoing risk of, if we have another fire the likes of the Eaton Fire, the Camp Fire, what does that do for utilities, given that the wildfire fund that has already existed probably gets depleted by the Eaton Fire? There’s a new one that was authorized last year, but, like, what’s the long-term play for that? Is it just we just continue to fund these bailout funds through ratepayers every time there’s a — I mean, it just doesn’t seem sustainable. So you have to think he was also looking at that.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Yeah, Michael, the strength of the wildfire fund was probably on his mind, certainly on state lawmakers’ minds as well. Can you remind us, you know, what the wildfire fund is and the pressure that’s on it right now in the wake of the fire?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Michael Wara:\u003c/strong> Sure. It’s a little bit like an insurance policy that you buy, you know, before a big calamity. And the policy is funded half out of shareholders’ pockets and half out of our pockets, ratepayer pockets, created in 2019 in the bankruptcy and designed to manage the risks of fire that were made so evident by both the Camp Fire and the Woolsey — Camp in Northern California, Woolsey in Southern California — and the fires in ’17 before that. And it really enabled PG&E to exit bankruptcy and kept Edison healthy through that process.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And then we ran the clock forward a few years, and we had a couple of bad fires that were not like Eaton in magnitude, but folks in Northern California may remember the Dixie Fire and the Kincade Fire a little bit before that, and those were bad utility-caused fires as well. But then Eaton basically wiped out the fund. We had a $21 billion claims-paying capacity. That’s kind of the limit, the coverage limit. And there haven’t actually been claims filed yet from Eaton. The settlements are still under negotiation. But I think most people believe that the fund will be exhausted or very nearly exhausted by the single event in January of ’25.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Wow. And just remind us, when a wildfire is started by a utility company, how and when can they access the money in that fund?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Michael Wara:\u003c/strong> Yeah, so it’s not right away. The utility company has to settle lawsuits, and those are generally from two kinds of parties. One is victims, and the other is insurance companies that sue on behalf of the people they’ve already paid claims to, and they try to recover the money they paid in claims. That’s called subrogation. And so those two types of claims make up most of the money, but you have to settle in court. And Edison is right now in court with the victims’ attorneys making lots of claims. And I think they’re starting to get further on the subrogation claim settlement process than maybe they are with the plaintiffs’ attorneys. Yeah.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Okay, so we’re hearing about all these pressures. We’re hearing all the goals, right, that the governor and lawmakers have. What did they finally agree to, Guy?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Guy Marzorati:\u003c/strong> Well, it was short of what Newsom initially proposed. He wanted to basically bar insurance companies from pursuing these claims against utilities through the subrogation process Michael’s talking about. The ultimate deal that was reached over the weekend was basically to limit — restrict hedge funds from buying those claims from insurance companies.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>So you can think about an insurance company: They make the payout to victims, they’re looking for ways to stay liquid, a hedge fund might come around and offer them something short of full compensation, but cash up front to take on the claim. And a hedge fund, look, they have a lot of lawyers. They can spend the years it takes in many cases in pursuing this litigation against utilities.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Newsom and the Legislature, their deal would say basically insurance companies can’t sell those rights to hedge funds or private equity firms. And then the bill does some other things. It sets up a fast-pay system for wildfire victims to get paid. It has some new reporting requirements around, you know, local efforts to actually prevent the damage from wildfires at a community level, although importantly there’s not any money in the bill to do that.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>So, short of what Newsom wanted to do, but again, given kind of the politics — and we should say, like, the coalition that formed against what Newsom is trying to do. It was not just the insurance companies who said, no, we want to continue to be able to file these lawsuits against utilities. It was also groups representing victims and then attorney groups, which have enormous sway, particularly in the Democratic caucus, who didn’t want kind of limits on what they see as their business. And so you had those, you know, kind of strange bedfellows, but a powerful coalition against Newsom and utilities. And in the end, the deal that was reached, which I’m not convinced Newsom actually likes — I mean, he made some comments last night that were pretty critical of the deal that he struck with legislative leaders — but certainly he was not able to get a lot of what he wanted.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Yeah, the biggest sticking point was the fact that he didn’t want to let insurance companies sue utilities.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Guy Marzorati:\u003c/strong> Right. And the point there is, like, the idea that, you know, that would drive up the overall, you know, claims that are made or the settlement amounts. And that the big-picture thing is all of that — the settlement amount, the liability that utility companies hold — that all trickles down to electricity bills.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And I guess, like, the best argument that I’ve heard in support of what Newsom is trying to do is, if you look at, you know, placing the burden for these liabilities on electric ratepayers, think about if you’re, you know, you and I, or if you were living in the Central Valley, you have to run your AC all the time. There’s very little that you can do at an individual level to actually change that, right? The liabilities held by the utilities, they’re passing that down.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>If you shift that to the insurance space, well, now there actually is something that individual homeowners can do to decrease their own liability, right? If the system works as it should, you should be able to discount if you are hardening your home, if you replace your roof, if you’re increasing defensible space. So it creates somewhat kind of like a structure of agency there, not saying it makes the politics any easier.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Right. Why did, Michael, lawmakers push back so hard on that, and did they have a point about what could happen in the insurance space?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Michael Wara:\u003c/strong> Well, I think there’s two issues, right? One is we need to have — we have private electric utilities and private insurance companies in California. They both provide essential services to California. We need available insurance to have mortgages, right, and it’s just, it’s essential to the —\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>The challenge is we have this growing cost because of the status quo, because of how things were done back in the 20th century. The cost is on electric utilities, but it’s getting so big that the electric utilities can’t handle it. But nobody else wants to handle it either. And the insurers have been in a fragile state, as Guy pointed to. I would say we’re sort of one or two steps into a healthy recovery for insurers in California. Maybe like when you’ve taken one dose of antibiotics, but you’ve got like four more to go? Um, and so the insurers were understandably concerned that this shift of cost would put them back where they were a couple of years ago before they started taking those antibiotic doses. And they pushed back hard.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>They don’t want to see this cost on their books. The problem is that we have the situation where, you know, the single mom in Fresno is paying through the nose because it’s 105 degrees outside in the summer. And maybe, maybe, and I’m not saying this is definitely true, but maybe it makes more sense to ask someone who’s already paying through the nose for their insurance because they live in a high-risk place and they have an expensive house to pay more. That’s really the debate. Who’s going to pay more? Is it the electricity customer in a hot place, or is it the homeowner in a high-risk place?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> We’re coming up on a break, but lawmakers are saying that this would raise premiums and cause more insurers to flee the state. Do you see that as—\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Michael Wara:\u003c/strong> I think it really depends on how it’s implemented. The final compromise would have softened that a lot, but it is gonna raise — like, prices are going up some way or other. Climate change is expensive. It is not free.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> We’re talking about the effects of climate change, specifically wildfires, and how California is attempting to manage the many costs that come with them, with Michael Wara and Guy Marzorati, and with you, our listeners. Stay with us. We’ll take your calls and comments after the break. This is \u003cem>Forum\u003c/em>.\u003c/p>\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"title": "Artificial Stone Containing Silica is Killing Workers. Will California Ban It?",
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"content": "\u003ch2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Airdate, Monday, August 17, 2026 at 10 AM\u003c/h2>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>More than 600 California stoneworkers have contracted silicosis, a deadly and incurable lung disease resulting from exposure to the silica in engineered stone. The material, a go-to choice for home countertops, has been found to be toxic to the workers who cut, grind and polish it. Now, doctors, stoneworkers and activists are pressuring California lawmakers to ban the material and embrace available alternatives. At the same time, stone manufacturers and lawmakers are pushing federal legislation to protect manufacturers from worker lawsuits. Join us as we unpack the danger of artificial stone containing silica and the state of efforts to protect workers.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Guests:\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n\u003cli>\u003cstrong>Farida Jhabvala Romero, \u003c/strong>labor correspondent, KQED\u003c/li>\n\n\n\n\u003cli>\u003cstrong>Dr. Sheiphali Gandhi,\u003c/strong> pulmonologist and assistant professor, UC San Francisco; director, the Center for Silicosis Support and Research Network\u003c/li>\n\u003c/ul>\n\n\n\n\u003ch2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Episode Transcript\u003c/h2>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cem>\u003cstrong>This is a computer-generated transcript. While our team has reviewed it, there may be errors.\u003c/strong>\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Welcome to \u003cem>Forum\u003c/em>, I’m Mina Kim. A new study finds that California workers who fabricate a popular engineered stone countertop, or quartz, are falling ill with an incurable and sometimes deadly disease. Some 600 people have developed silicosis since 2019, according to data from the State Department of Public Health, caused by inhaling silica particles. Dozens have died. At least 65 have required lung transplants. California is moving toward restricting engineered stone, but manufacturers are pushing back.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>We learn more this hour with KQED’s Farida Jhabvala Romero, labor correspondent here. Welcome, Farida.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Farida Jhabvala Romero:\u003c/strong> Hi, Mina.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Dr. Sheiphali Gandhi is also with us, a pulmonologist and occupational medicine physician and director for the Center for Silicosis Support and Research Network at UCSF. Welcome to \u003cem>Forum\u003c/em>, Dr. Gandhi.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Dr. Sheiphali Gandhi:\u003c/strong> Thank you for inviting me.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> So, Farida, you first encountered someone with silicosis a few years ago. What were they going through?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Farida Jhabvala Romero:\u003c/strong> Yeah. They were in their late 20s. And I think how young this worker was at the time — I think it was in 2023, when California was considering tightening rules for how engineered stone, or artificial stone, which is this material linked to the increase in silicosis — they were considering tightening these rules.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And so this young man came into the meeting via Zoom. And I could see that he was connected to an oxygen machine, you know, with, like, the clear tubes tied to his nostrils, clipped to his nostrils. And I just couldn’t believe that he was so young and he was having to depend on an oxygen machine to breathe.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And I think he said he was on the waitlist to receive a lung transplant, which meant that his silicosis was really advanced. And he’d worked a number of years in this industry. But obviously, I mean, the fact that he was so young and already having to deal with it, and it seemed like most of the burden for his disease was falling on his family.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>He used to be the main breadwinner, and now everybody had to deal with this. So it’s —\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> The age is not necessarily a major outlier, right? Young men predominantly are getting this disease. I read that the median age of diagnosis is 46.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Farida Jhabvala Romero:\u003c/strong> Yeah. I mean, California, first of all, is the only state, as I understand it, actively tracking this disease. And what we know from this data that doctors at the California Department of Public Health have gathered and spent time confirming these cases, tracking these cases.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And then also, the numbers that you, the figures that you just mentioned right now — I mean, the fact that we have this website showing us all the new cases that they’re finding, where they are in the state, the age of the people getting sick, how many people have undergone lung transplants or are waiting for this surgery.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>What we know is that many of these workers are in their 30s, in their 40s, in their 50s. Many of them have told me that they used to work with natural stones for decades. You know, the older workers, and they didn’t have this problem until they began working with artificial stone.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And all of them, you know, have told me, the people that I’ve spoken with, have said that they didn’t know about the hazards of working with engineered stone until they or someone — you know, a coworker, a friend — got sick.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> I was also really struck by the statistic that 98% of the cases are among Latino men.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Farida Jhabvala Romero:\u003c/strong> In California, that’s right.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Yes, in California. And as you say, the fact that we even have this data is because California is uniquely taking this opportunity to really learn more about it.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Farida Jhabvala Romero:\u003c/strong> Yeah, we’ve heard from doctors in other states, in Illinois, in Florida, Massachusetts, Colorado, that have reported cases, but those states don’t have, you know, a concerted effort like California does to track this disease in the industry.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> So, Dr. Gandhi, what exactly is silicosis? Why is it so debilitating and even deadly?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Dr. Sheiphali Gandhi:\u003c/strong> So silicosis is a completely preventable lung disease. It essentially is caused by breathing in fractured or respirable crystalline silica that comes from mostly, like, minerals and rocks in the ground, so quartz. And when it is ground into a fine powder, it becomes the perfect size to enter into lungs and retain.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And the air sacs of the lungs are alveoli, where we exchange gas. And over time, the silica causes inflammation, it seems like, and also that inflammation, and also direct scars to the lungs. And when the lungs scar, it is very difficult to reverse from any cause.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>But in other lung diseases, we decrease the progression, so stabilize it, but at this point, we don’t really have great medications to reverse scars in the lungs, and there’s no proven therapy for silicosis at this time. So that’s why it’s considered incurable.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> And that’s why it progresses even after someone, let’s say, if they just completely stop their exposure to silica dust, that the inflammation, the scarring and so on progresses.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Dr. Sheiphali Gandhi:\u003c/strong> That’s right. Yeah, you know, there is retained silica in the lung. So it remains there because it’s so small and the body thinks it’s an invader or some kind of, like, foreign body, is what we call it. And so the body almost walls it off inside the lung with, like, your immune system.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>So it is stuck there. And so there is data from Spain, but also, like, historical data from mining and other occupations, where they show even when people stop working, that they keep getting worse.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> What about if they’ve received a lung transplant?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Dr. Sheiphali Gandhi:\u003c/strong> So a lung transplant is not really a cure because a lung transplant, in many outcome data, like when we look at studies of what is a bad outcome from a lung disease, lung transplant is almost the same level as someone dying from that disease because people generally receive a lung transplant when there is a thought that they would not live six more months without it.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>So you have to be very ill to receive a lung transplant. And so if you think about it, we’ve had one in six people in California already to that, like, worst outcome almost.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>A lung transplant replaces your lungs with someone else’s, but we often counsel patients that it’s like replacing one chronic disease with another, because with a lung transplant, many times it just is not as safe of a transplant as many of the others, like kidney, or heart, or liver, where people can live many years.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>On average, the lifespan is like five to eight years after. So if you’re in your 20s or 30s receiving a lung transplant, your life expectancy is still very short. And so it’s not like a treatment. It’s just the last effort to provide some length of quality life for people.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> And what is the quality of life if you have silicosis? What are the types of things you are probably experiencing day to day?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Dr. Sheiphali Gandhi:\u003c/strong> You know, in the beginning, many people don’t have very many symptoms. And really, we push them to say, oh, like, you know, I ask them. And they’ll be like, oh, I’m fine. I can still work.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>But then you ask them, like, are you able to play games with your kids? They’re like, no, I’m too tired when I come home.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Many times, it starts out with, like, a mild dry cough, a little bit of shortness of breath, some tiredness. But over time, this insidiously progresses. So they get worse and worse, almost in a way that is imperceptible until it is just completely affecting all aspects of their life.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>So they’re very short of breath. Many of them have very severe chest pain that is difficult to treat. They are exhausted all the time. Many lose weight, significant amounts of weight, or have poor appetite.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Often we see people develop rare infections that you only see in people with severe lung diseases. They can develop heart issues because of the stress on the heart from the lungs. And then you start to see where they need oxygen, more hospitalizations. And when you’re at that point, we see that they tend to get much worse fast after that point.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Farida, you have a clip from a stoneworker diagnosed with silicosis. What can you tell us about him?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Farida Jhabvala Romero:\u003c/strong> His name is Lopez. Yeah. So Lopez lives in the East Bay. And we’re not using his full name because he’s undocumented and his wife as well.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>So he also needs an oxygen machine to breathe 24/7. And I think when you speak with these workers and their families, I mean, it’s just this enormous stress of not being able to work anymore. They’re completely disabled, you know? They can’t even, like Dr. Gandhi said, play with their children or do things that used to be really easy before, like walking to the store or carrying grocery bags or going upstairs.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And then Lopez is also on a waitlist for a lung transplant. And I think not just him, but other folks I’ve spoken with, they talk about the mental toll, going from feeling like they were the main breadwinners for their family and now they feel like a burden, and they’re terrified about what’s going to happen to them.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Let’s hear the clip and have you translate.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Lopez:\u003c/strong> Right now, I feel desperate. It’s a desperation to be just sitting around, without being able to do anything. It’s anguish to be here just waiting for the time for them to talk to me about the hospital, to receive the transplant that I’m waiting for, so that I can go out and work.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Farida Jhabvala Romero:\u003c/strong> Yeah, so he’s just talking about how he feels desperate, and how difficult it is to be just sitting at home waiting for the hospital to call to tell him when he can get a lung transplant.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> So you noted that he’s undocumented. Are a lot of stoneworkers undocumented, and does that make it harder for them to get the health care they need or ask employers for the support that they need?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Farida Jhabvala Romero:\u003c/strong> Um, you know, we know many, many of them are immigrant workers, immigrant Latino workers. A lot of people I’ve spoken with are undocumented, but we don’t have a clear picture if the majority are undocumented.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>But this is part of the construction industry. There are so many Latino immigrants in California that work in that industry. And I think, you know, something to note about California is because we have a safety net for undocumented workers as well, although it’s been, you know, impacted in the last couple years because of budget cuts in the state.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>That’s one of the reasons that doctors like Dr. Gandhi say that we’ve been able to, you know, track these cases as well. In other states, through our public health system, and that these workers have been able to receive life-saving treatment.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> We’re talking with Farida Jhabvala Romero, labor correspondent for KQED, who’s been covering the increase in the cases of silicosis caused by cutting engineered stone. Also, Dr. Sheiphali Gandhi is with us, an assistant professor at UCSF, who is a pulmonologist and occupational medicine physician.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>We’ll have more with them and you after the break. This is \u003cem>Forum\u003c/em>.\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>More than 600 California stoneworkers have contracted silicosis, a deadly and incurable lung disease resulting from exposure to the silica in engineered stone. The material, a go-to choice for home countertops, has been found to be toxic to the workers who cut, grind and polish it. Now, doctors, stoneworkers and activists are pressuring California lawmakers to ban the material and embrace available alternatives. At the same time, stone manufacturers and lawmakers are pushing federal legislation to protect manufacturers from worker lawsuits. Join us as we unpack the danger of artificial stone containing silica and the state of efforts to protect workers.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>More than 600 California stoneworkers have contracted silicosis, a deadly and incurable lung disease resulting from exposure to the silica in engineered stone. The material, a go-to choice for home countertops, has been found to be toxic to the workers who cut, grind and polish it. Now, doctors, stoneworkers and activists are pressuring California lawmakers to ban the material and embrace available alternatives. At the same time, stone manufacturers and lawmakers are pushing federal legislation to protect manufacturers from worker lawsuits. Join us as we unpack the danger of artificial stone containing silica and the state of efforts to protect workers.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cem>\u003cstrong>This is a computer-generated transcript. While our team has reviewed it, there may be errors.\u003c/strong>\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Welcome to \u003cem>Forum\u003c/em>, I’m Mina Kim. A new study finds that California workers who fabricate a popular engineered stone countertop, or quartz, are falling ill with an incurable and sometimes deadly disease. Some 600 people have developed silicosis since 2019, according to data from the State Department of Public Health, caused by inhaling silica particles. Dozens have died. At least 65 have required lung transplants. California is moving toward restricting engineered stone, but manufacturers are pushing back.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Welcome to \u003cem>Forum\u003c/em>, I’m Mina Kim. A new study finds that California workers who fabricate a popular engineered stone countertop, or quartz, are falling ill with an incurable and sometimes deadly disease. Some 600 people have developed silicosis since 2019, according to data from the State Department of Public Health, caused by inhaling silica particles. Dozens have died. At least 65 have required lung transplants. California is moving toward restricting engineered stone, but manufacturers are pushing back.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>We learn more this hour with KQED’s Farida Jhabvala Romero, labor correspondent here. Welcome, Farida.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>We learn more this hour with KQED’s Farida Jhabvala Romero, labor correspondent here. Welcome, Farida.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Farida Jhabvala Romero:\u003c/strong> Hi, Mina.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Dr. Sheiphali Gandhi is also with us, a pulmonologist and occupational medicine physician and director for the Center for Silicosis Support and Research Network at UCSF. Welcome to \u003cem>Forum\u003c/em>, Dr. Gandhi.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Dr. Sheiphali Gandhi is also with us, a pulmonologist and occupational medicine physician and director for the Center for Silicosis Support and Research Network at UCSF. Welcome to \u003cem>Forum\u003c/em>, Dr. Gandhi.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Dr. Sheiphali Gandhi:\u003c/strong> Thank you for inviting me.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Dr. Sheiphali Gandhi:\u003c/strong> Thank you for inviting me.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> So, Farida, you first encountered someone with silicosis a few years ago. What were they going through?\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> So, Farida, you first encountered someone with silicosis a few years ago. What were they going through?\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Farida Jhabvala Romero:\u003c/strong> Yeah. They were in their late 20s. And I think how young this worker was at the time — I think it was in 2023, when California was considering tightening rules for how engineered stone, or artificial stone, which is this material linked to the increase in silicosis — they were considering tightening these rules.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>And so this young man came into the meeting via Zoom. And I could see that he was connected to an oxygen machine, you know, with, like, the clear tubes tied to his nostrils, clipped to his nostrils. And I just couldn’t believe that he was so young and he was having to depend on an oxygen machine to breathe.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>And I think he said he was on the waitlist to receive a lung transplant, which meant that his silicosis was really advanced. And he’d worked a number of years in this industry. But obviously, I mean, the fact that he was so young and already having to deal with it, and it seemed like most of the burden for his disease was falling on his family.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>And I think he said he was on the waitlist to receive a lung transplant, which meant that his silicosis was really advanced. And he’d worked a number of years in this industry. But obviously, I mean, the fact that he was so young and already having to deal with it, and it seemed like most of the burden for his disease was falling on his family.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>He used to be the main breadwinner, and now everybody had to deal with this. So it’s —\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> The age is not necessarily a major outlier, right? Young men predominantly are getting this disease. I read that the median age of diagnosis is 46.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> The age is not necessarily a major outlier, right? Young men predominantly are getting this disease. I read that the median age of diagnosis is 46.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Farida Jhabvala Romero:\u003c/strong> Yeah. I mean, California, first of all, is the only state, as I understand it, actively tracking this disease. And what we know from this data that doctors at the California Department of Public Health have gathered and spent time confirming these cases, tracking these cases.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>And then also, the numbers that you, the figures that you just mentioned right now — I mean, the fact that we have this website showing us all the new cases that they’re finding, where they are in the state, the age of the people getting sick, how many people have undergone lung transplants or are waiting for this surgery.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>What we know is that many of these workers are in their 30s, in their 40s, in their 50s. Many of them have told me that they used to work with natural stones for decades. You know, the older workers, and they didn’t have this problem until they began working with artificial stone.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>What we know is that many of these workers are in their 30s, in their 40s, in their 50s. Many of them have told me that they used to work with natural stones for decades. You know, the older workers, and they didn’t have this problem until they began working with artificial stone.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>And all of them, you know, have told me, the people that I’ve spoken with, have said that they didn’t know about the hazards of working with engineered stone until they or someone — you know, a coworker, a friend — got sick.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>And all of them, you know, have told me, the people that I’ve spoken with, have said that they didn’t know about the hazards of working with engineered stone until they or someone — you know, a coworker, a friend — got sick.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> I was also really struck by the statistic that 98% of the cases are among Latino men.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> I was also really struck by the statistic that 98% of the cases are among Latino men.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Farida Jhabvala Romero:\u003c/strong> In California, that’s right.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Farida Jhabvala Romero:\u003c/strong> In California, that’s right.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Yes, in California. And as you say, the fact that we even have this data is because California is uniquely taking this opportunity to really learn more about it.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Yes, in California. And as you say, the fact that we even have this data is because California is uniquely taking this opportunity to really learn more about it.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Farida Jhabvala Romero:\u003c/strong> Yeah, we’ve heard from doctors in other states, in Illinois, in Florida, Massachusetts, Colorado, that have reported cases, but those states don’t have, you know, a concerted effort like California does to track this disease in the industry.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Farida Jhabvala Romero:\u003c/strong> Yeah, we’ve heard from doctors in other states, in Illinois, in Florida, Massachusetts, Colorado, that have reported cases, but those states don’t have, you know, a concerted effort like California does to track this disease in the industry.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> So, Dr. Gandhi, what exactly is silicosis? Why is it so debilitating and even deadly?\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> So, Dr. Gandhi, what exactly is silicosis? Why is it so debilitating and even deadly?\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Dr. Sheiphali Gandhi:\u003c/strong> So silicosis is a completely preventable lung disease. It essentially is caused by breathing in fractured or respirable crystalline silica that comes from mostly, like, minerals and rocks in the ground, so quartz. And when it is ground into a fine powder, it becomes the perfect size to enter into lungs and retain.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Dr. Sheiphali Gandhi:\u003c/strong> So silicosis is a completely preventable lung disease. It essentially is caused by breathing in fractured or respirable crystalline silica that comes from mostly, like, minerals and rocks in the ground, so quartz. And when it is ground into a fine powder, it becomes the perfect size to enter into lungs and retain.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>And the air sacs of the lungs are alveoli, where we exchange gas. And over time, the silica causes inflammation, it seems like, and also that inflammation, and also direct scars to the lungs. And when the lungs scar, it is very difficult to reverse from any cause.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>And the air sacs of the lungs are alveoli, where we exchange gas. And over time, the silica causes inflammation, it seems like, and also that inflammation, and also direct scars to the lungs. And when the lungs scar, it is very difficult to reverse from any cause.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>But in other lung diseases, we decrease the progression, so stabilize it, but at this point, we don’t really have great medications to reverse scars in the lungs, and there’s no proven therapy for silicosis at this time. So that’s why it’s considered incurable.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>But in other lung diseases, we decrease the progression, so stabilize it, but at this point, we don’t really have great medications to reverse scars in the lungs, and there’s no proven therapy for silicosis at this time. So that’s why it’s considered incurable.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> And that’s why it progresses even after someone, let’s say, if they just completely stop their exposure to silica dust, that the inflammation, the scarring and so on progresses.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> And that’s why it progresses even after someone, let’s say, if they just completely stop their exposure to silica dust, that the inflammation, the scarring and so on progresses.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Dr. Sheiphali Gandhi:\u003c/strong> That’s right. Yeah, you know, there is retained silica in the lung. So it remains there because it’s so small and the body thinks it’s an invader or some kind of, like, foreign body, is what we call it. And so the body almost walls it off inside the lung with, like, your immune system.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Dr. Sheiphali Gandhi:\u003c/strong> That’s right. Yeah, you know, there is retained silica in the lung. So it remains there because it’s so small and the body thinks it’s an invader or some kind of, like, foreign body, is what we call it. And so the body almost walls it off inside the lung with, like, your immune system.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>So it is stuck there. And so there is data from Spain, but also, like, historical data from mining and other occupations, where they show even when people stop working, that they keep getting worse.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>So it is stuck there. And so there is data from Spain, but also, like, historical data from mining and other occupations, where they show even when people stop working, that they keep getting worse.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> What about if they’ve received a lung transplant?\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Dr. Sheiphali Gandhi:\u003c/strong> So a lung transplant is not really a cure because a lung transplant, in many outcome data, like when we look at studies of what is a bad outcome from a lung disease, lung transplant is almost the same level as someone dying from that disease because people generally receive a lung transplant when there is a thought that they would not live six more months without it.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Dr. Sheiphali Gandhi:\u003c/strong> So a lung transplant is not really a cure because a lung transplant, in many outcome data, like when we look at studies of what is a bad outcome from a lung disease, lung transplant is almost the same level as someone dying from that disease because people generally receive a lung transplant when there is a thought that they would not live six more months without it.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>So you have to be very ill to receive a lung transplant. And so if you think about it, we’ve had one in six people in California already to that, like, worst outcome almost.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>So you have to be very ill to receive a lung transplant. And so if you think about it, we’ve had one in six people in California already to that, like, worst outcome almost.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>A lung transplant replaces your lungs with someone else’s, but we often counsel patients that it’s like replacing one chronic disease with another, because with a lung transplant, many times it just is not as safe of a transplant as many of the others, like kidney, or heart, or liver, where people can live many years.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>A lung transplant replaces your lungs with someone else’s, but we often counsel patients that it’s like replacing one chronic disease with another, because with a lung transplant, many times it just is not as safe of a transplant as many of the others, like kidney, or heart, or liver, where people can live many years.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>On average, the lifespan is like five to eight years after. So if you’re in your 20s or 30s receiving a lung transplant, your life expectancy is still very short. And so it’s not like a treatment. It’s just the last effort to provide some length of quality life for people.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>On average, the lifespan is like five to eight years after. So if you’re in your 20s or 30s receiving a lung transplant, your life expectancy is still very short. And so it’s not like a treatment. It’s just the last effort to provide some length of quality life for people.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> And what is the quality of life if you have silicosis? What are the types of things you are probably experiencing day to day?\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> And what is the quality of life if you have silicosis? What are the types of things you are probably experiencing day to day?\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Dr. Sheiphali Gandhi:\u003c/strong> You know, in the beginning, many people don’t have very many symptoms. And really, we push them to say, oh, like, you know, I ask them. And they’ll be like, oh, I’m fine. I can still work.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Dr. Sheiphali Gandhi:\u003c/strong> You know, in the beginning, many people don’t have very many symptoms. And really, we push them to say, oh, like, you know, I ask them. And they’ll be like, oh, I’m fine. I can still work.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>But then you ask them, like, are you able to play games with your kids? They’re like, no, I’m too tired when I come home.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>But then you ask them, like, are you able to play games with your kids? They’re like, no, I’m too tired when I come home.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Many times, it starts out with, like, a mild dry cough, a little bit of shortness of breath, some tiredness. But over time, this insidiously progresses. So they get worse and worse, almost in a way that is imperceptible until it is just completely affecting all aspects of their life.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>Many times, it starts out with, like, a mild dry cough, a little bit of shortness of breath, some tiredness. But over time, this insidiously progresses. So they get worse and worse, almost in a way that is imperceptible until it is just completely affecting all aspects of their life.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>So they’re very short of breath. Many of them have very severe chest pain that is difficult to treat. They are exhausted all the time. Many lose weight, significant amounts of weight, or have poor appetite.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>So they’re very short of breath. Many of them have very severe chest pain that is difficult to treat. They are exhausted all the time. Many lose weight, significant amounts of weight, or have poor appetite.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Often we see people develop rare infections that you only see in people with severe lung diseases. They can develop heart issues because of the stress on the heart from the lungs. And then you start to see where they need oxygen, more hospitalizations. And when you’re at that point, we see that they tend to get much worse fast after that point.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>Often we see people develop rare infections that you only see in people with severe lung diseases. They can develop heart issues because of the stress on the heart from the lungs. And then you start to see where they need oxygen, more hospitalizations. And when you’re at that point, we see that they tend to get much worse fast after that point.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Farida, you have a clip from a stoneworker diagnosed with silicosis. What can you tell us about him?\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Farida, you have a clip from a stoneworker diagnosed with silicosis. What can you tell us about him?\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Farida Jhabvala Romero:\u003c/strong> His name is Lopez. Yeah. So Lopez lives in the East Bay. And we’re not using his full name because he’s undocumented and his wife as well.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Farida Jhabvala Romero:\u003c/strong> His name is Lopez. Yeah. So Lopez lives in the East Bay. And we’re not using his full name because he’s undocumented and his wife as well.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>So he also needs an oxygen machine to breathe 24/7. And I think when you speak with these workers and their families, I mean, it’s just this enormous stress of not being able to work anymore. They’re completely disabled, you know? They can’t even, like Dr. Gandhi said, play with their children or do things that used to be really easy before, like walking to the store or carrying grocery bags or going upstairs.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>So he also needs an oxygen machine to breathe 24/7. And I think when you speak with these workers and their families, I mean, it’s just this enormous stress of not being able to work anymore. They’re completely disabled, you know? They can’t even, like Dr. Gandhi said, play with their children or do things that used to be really easy before, like walking to the store or carrying grocery bags or going upstairs.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>And then Lopez is also on a waitlist for a lung transplant. And I think not just him, but other folks I’ve spoken with, they talk about the mental toll, going from feeling like they were the main breadwinners for their family and now they feel like a burden, and they’re terrified about what’s going to happen to them.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>And then Lopez is also on a waitlist for a lung transplant. And I think not just him, but other folks I’ve spoken with, they talk about the mental toll, going from feeling like they were the main breadwinners for their family and now they feel like a burden, and they’re terrified about what’s going to happen to them.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Let’s hear the clip and have you translate.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Let’s hear the clip and have you translate.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Lopez:\u003c/strong> Right now, I feel desperate. It’s a desperation to be just sitting around, without being able to do anything. It’s anguish to be here just waiting for the time for them to talk to me about the hospital, to receive the transplant that I’m waiting for, so that I can go out and work.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Lopez:\u003c/strong> Right now, I feel desperate. It’s a desperation to be just sitting around, without being able to do anything. It’s anguish to be here just waiting for the time for them to talk to me about the hospital, to receive the transplant that I’m waiting for, so that I can go out and work.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Farida Jhabvala Romero:\u003c/strong> Yeah, so he’s just talking about how he feels desperate, and how difficult it is to be just sitting at home waiting for the hospital to call to tell him when he can get a lung transplant.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Farida Jhabvala Romero:\u003c/strong> Yeah, so he’s just talking about how he feels desperate, and how difficult it is to be just sitting at home waiting for the hospital to call to tell him when he can get a lung transplant.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> So you noted that he’s undocumented. Are a lot of stoneworkers undocumented, and does that make it harder for them to get the health care they need or ask employers for the support that they need?\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> So you noted that he’s undocumented. Are a lot of stoneworkers undocumented, and does that make it harder for them to get the health care they need or ask employers for the support that they need?\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Farida Jhabvala Romero:\u003c/strong> Um, you know, we know many, many of them are immigrant workers, immigrant Latino workers. A lot of people I’ve spoken with are undocumented, but we don’t have a clear picture if the majority are undocumented.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Farida Jhabvala Romero:\u003c/strong> Um, you know, we know many, many of them are immigrant workers, immigrant Latino workers. A lot of people I’ve spoken with are undocumented, but we don’t have a clear picture if the majority are undocumented.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>But this is part of the construction industry. There are so many Latino immigrants in California that work in that industry. And I think, you know, something to note about California is because we have a safety net for undocumented workers as well, although it’s been, you know, impacted in the last couple years because of budget cuts in the state.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>But this is part of the construction industry. There are so many Latino immigrants in California that work in that industry. And I think, you know, something to note about California is because we have a safety net for undocumented workers as well, although it’s been, you know, impacted in the last couple years because of budget cuts in the state.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>That’s one of the reasons that doctors like Dr. Gandhi say that we’ve been able to, you know, track these cases as well. In other states, through our public health system, and that these workers have been able to receive life-saving treatment.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> We’re talking with Farida Jhabvala Romero, labor correspondent for KQED, who’s been covering the increase in the cases of silicosis caused by cutting engineered stone. Also, Dr. Sheiphali Gandhi is with us, an assistant professor at UCSF, who is a pulmonologist and occupational medicine physician.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> We’re talking with Farida Jhabvala Romero, labor correspondent for KQED, who’s been covering the increase in the cases of silicosis caused by cutting engineered stone. Also, Dr. Sheiphali Gandhi is with us, an assistant professor at UCSF, who is a pulmonologist and occupational medicine physician.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>We’ll have more with them and you after the break. This is \u003cem>Forum\u003c/em>.\u003c/p>\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003ch2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Airdate, Monday, August 17, 2026 at 10 AM\u003c/h2>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>More than 600 California stoneworkers have contracted silicosis, a deadly and incurable lung disease resulting from exposure to the silica in engineered stone. The material, a go-to choice for home countertops, has been found to be toxic to the workers who cut, grind and polish it. Now, doctors, stoneworkers and activists are pressuring California lawmakers to ban the material and embrace available alternatives. At the same time, stone manufacturers and lawmakers are pushing federal legislation to protect manufacturers from worker lawsuits. Join us as we unpack the danger of artificial stone containing silica and the state of efforts to protect workers.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Guests:\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n\u003cli>\u003cstrong>Farida Jhabvala Romero, \u003c/strong>labor correspondent, KQED\u003c/li>\n\n\n\n\u003cli>\u003cstrong>Dr. Sheiphali Gandhi,\u003c/strong> pulmonologist and assistant professor, UC San Francisco; director, the Center for Silicosis Support and Research Network\u003c/li>\n\u003c/ul>\n\n\n\n\u003ch2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Episode Transcript\u003c/h2>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cem>\u003cstrong>This is a computer-generated transcript. While our team has reviewed it, there may be errors.\u003c/strong>\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Welcome to \u003cem>Forum\u003c/em>, I’m Mina Kim. A new study finds that California workers who fabricate a popular engineered stone countertop, or quartz, are falling ill with an incurable and sometimes deadly disease. Some 600 people have developed silicosis since 2019, according to data from the State Department of Public Health, caused by inhaling silica particles. Dozens have died. At least 65 have required lung transplants. California is moving toward restricting engineered stone, but manufacturers are pushing back.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>We learn more this hour with KQED’s Farida Jhabvala Romero, labor correspondent here. Welcome, Farida.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Farida Jhabvala Romero:\u003c/strong> Hi, Mina.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Dr. Sheiphali Gandhi is also with us, a pulmonologist and occupational medicine physician and director for the Center for Silicosis Support and Research Network at UCSF. Welcome to \u003cem>Forum\u003c/em>, Dr. Gandhi.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Dr. Sheiphali Gandhi:\u003c/strong> Thank you for inviting me.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> So, Farida, you first encountered someone with silicosis a few years ago. What were they going through?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Farida Jhabvala Romero:\u003c/strong> Yeah. They were in their late 20s. And I think how young this worker was at the time — I think it was in 2023, when California was considering tightening rules for how engineered stone, or artificial stone, which is this material linked to the increase in silicosis — they were considering tightening these rules.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And so this young man came into the meeting via Zoom. And I could see that he was connected to an oxygen machine, you know, with, like, the clear tubes tied to his nostrils, clipped to his nostrils. And I just couldn’t believe that he was so young and he was having to depend on an oxygen machine to breathe.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And I think he said he was on the waitlist to receive a lung transplant, which meant that his silicosis was really advanced. And he’d worked a number of years in this industry. But obviously, I mean, the fact that he was so young and already having to deal with it, and it seemed like most of the burden for his disease was falling on his family.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>He used to be the main breadwinner, and now everybody had to deal with this. So it’s —\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> The age is not necessarily a major outlier, right? Young men predominantly are getting this disease. I read that the median age of diagnosis is 46.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Farida Jhabvala Romero:\u003c/strong> Yeah. I mean, California, first of all, is the only state, as I understand it, actively tracking this disease. And what we know from this data that doctors at the California Department of Public Health have gathered and spent time confirming these cases, tracking these cases.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And then also, the numbers that you, the figures that you just mentioned right now — I mean, the fact that we have this website showing us all the new cases that they’re finding, where they are in the state, the age of the people getting sick, how many people have undergone lung transplants or are waiting for this surgery.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>What we know is that many of these workers are in their 30s, in their 40s, in their 50s. Many of them have told me that they used to work with natural stones for decades. You know, the older workers, and they didn’t have this problem until they began working with artificial stone.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And all of them, you know, have told me, the people that I’ve spoken with, have said that they didn’t know about the hazards of working with engineered stone until they or someone — you know, a coworker, a friend — got sick.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> I was also really struck by the statistic that 98% of the cases are among Latino men.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Farida Jhabvala Romero:\u003c/strong> In California, that’s right.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Yes, in California. And as you say, the fact that we even have this data is because California is uniquely taking this opportunity to really learn more about it.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Farida Jhabvala Romero:\u003c/strong> Yeah, we’ve heard from doctors in other states, in Illinois, in Florida, Massachusetts, Colorado, that have reported cases, but those states don’t have, you know, a concerted effort like California does to track this disease in the industry.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> So, Dr. Gandhi, what exactly is silicosis? Why is it so debilitating and even deadly?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Dr. Sheiphali Gandhi:\u003c/strong> So silicosis is a completely preventable lung disease. It essentially is caused by breathing in fractured or respirable crystalline silica that comes from mostly, like, minerals and rocks in the ground, so quartz. And when it is ground into a fine powder, it becomes the perfect size to enter into lungs and retain.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And the air sacs of the lungs are alveoli, where we exchange gas. And over time, the silica causes inflammation, it seems like, and also that inflammation, and also direct scars to the lungs. And when the lungs scar, it is very difficult to reverse from any cause.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>But in other lung diseases, we decrease the progression, so stabilize it, but at this point, we don’t really have great medications to reverse scars in the lungs, and there’s no proven therapy for silicosis at this time. So that’s why it’s considered incurable.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> And that’s why it progresses even after someone, let’s say, if they just completely stop their exposure to silica dust, that the inflammation, the scarring and so on progresses.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Dr. Sheiphali Gandhi:\u003c/strong> That’s right. Yeah, you know, there is retained silica in the lung. So it remains there because it’s so small and the body thinks it’s an invader or some kind of, like, foreign body, is what we call it. And so the body almost walls it off inside the lung with, like, your immune system.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>So it is stuck there. And so there is data from Spain, but also, like, historical data from mining and other occupations, where they show even when people stop working, that they keep getting worse.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> What about if they’ve received a lung transplant?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Dr. Sheiphali Gandhi:\u003c/strong> So a lung transplant is not really a cure because a lung transplant, in many outcome data, like when we look at studies of what is a bad outcome from a lung disease, lung transplant is almost the same level as someone dying from that disease because people generally receive a lung transplant when there is a thought that they would not live six more months without it.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>So you have to be very ill to receive a lung transplant. And so if you think about it, we’ve had one in six people in California already to that, like, worst outcome almost.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>A lung transplant replaces your lungs with someone else’s, but we often counsel patients that it’s like replacing one chronic disease with another, because with a lung transplant, many times it just is not as safe of a transplant as many of the others, like kidney, or heart, or liver, where people can live many years.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>On average, the lifespan is like five to eight years after. So if you’re in your 20s or 30s receiving a lung transplant, your life expectancy is still very short. And so it’s not like a treatment. It’s just the last effort to provide some length of quality life for people.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> And what is the quality of life if you have silicosis? What are the types of things you are probably experiencing day to day?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Dr. Sheiphali Gandhi:\u003c/strong> You know, in the beginning, many people don’t have very many symptoms. And really, we push them to say, oh, like, you know, I ask them. And they’ll be like, oh, I’m fine. I can still work.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>But then you ask them, like, are you able to play games with your kids? They’re like, no, I’m too tired when I come home.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Many times, it starts out with, like, a mild dry cough, a little bit of shortness of breath, some tiredness. But over time, this insidiously progresses. So they get worse and worse, almost in a way that is imperceptible until it is just completely affecting all aspects of their life.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>So they’re very short of breath. Many of them have very severe chest pain that is difficult to treat. They are exhausted all the time. Many lose weight, significant amounts of weight, or have poor appetite.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Often we see people develop rare infections that you only see in people with severe lung diseases. They can develop heart issues because of the stress on the heart from the lungs. And then you start to see where they need oxygen, more hospitalizations. And when you’re at that point, we see that they tend to get much worse fast after that point.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Farida, you have a clip from a stoneworker diagnosed with silicosis. What can you tell us about him?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Farida Jhabvala Romero:\u003c/strong> His name is Lopez. Yeah. So Lopez lives in the East Bay. And we’re not using his full name because he’s undocumented and his wife as well.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>So he also needs an oxygen machine to breathe 24/7. And I think when you speak with these workers and their families, I mean, it’s just this enormous stress of not being able to work anymore. They’re completely disabled, you know? They can’t even, like Dr. Gandhi said, play with their children or do things that used to be really easy before, like walking to the store or carrying grocery bags or going upstairs.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And then Lopez is also on a waitlist for a lung transplant. And I think not just him, but other folks I’ve spoken with, they talk about the mental toll, going from feeling like they were the main breadwinners for their family and now they feel like a burden, and they’re terrified about what’s going to happen to them.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Let’s hear the clip and have you translate.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Lopez:\u003c/strong> Right now, I feel desperate. It’s a desperation to be just sitting around, without being able to do anything. It’s anguish to be here just waiting for the time for them to talk to me about the hospital, to receive the transplant that I’m waiting for, so that I can go out and work.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Farida Jhabvala Romero:\u003c/strong> Yeah, so he’s just talking about how he feels desperate, and how difficult it is to be just sitting at home waiting for the hospital to call to tell him when he can get a lung transplant.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> So you noted that he’s undocumented. Are a lot of stoneworkers undocumented, and does that make it harder for them to get the health care they need or ask employers for the support that they need?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Farida Jhabvala Romero:\u003c/strong> Um, you know, we know many, many of them are immigrant workers, immigrant Latino workers. A lot of people I’ve spoken with are undocumented, but we don’t have a clear picture if the majority are undocumented.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>But this is part of the construction industry. There are so many Latino immigrants in California that work in that industry. And I think, you know, something to note about California is because we have a safety net for undocumented workers as well, although it’s been, you know, impacted in the last couple years because of budget cuts in the state.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>That’s one of the reasons that doctors like Dr. Gandhi say that we’ve been able to, you know, track these cases as well. In other states, through our public health system, and that these workers have been able to receive life-saving treatment.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> We’re talking with Farida Jhabvala Romero, labor correspondent for KQED, who’s been covering the increase in the cases of silicosis caused by cutting engineered stone. Also, Dr. Sheiphali Gandhi is with us, an assistant professor at UCSF, who is a pulmonologist and occupational medicine physician.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cfigure class=\"wp-block-audio\">\u003caudio controls src=\"https://www.podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/pdst.fm/e/traffic.megaphone.fm/KQINC3165819532.mp3\">\u003c/audio>\u003c/figure>\n\n\n\n\u003ch2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">\u003cstrong>Airdate: Monday, August 3, 2026 at 10 AM\u003c/strong>\u003c/h2>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>A trusted press is essential to a thriving democracy, but recent studies show that Americans’ confidence in news media has hit record lows — regardless of factors like geography and political affiliation. To blame are growing perceptions of bias and a sense that news reporting that doesn’t feel applicable to everyday life. We look at why so few people trust the media — and what could be done to change that.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Guests:\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n\u003cli>\u003cstrong>Madeleine Bair\u003c/strong>, journalist, founder and co-executive director of El Tímpano\u003c/li>\n\n\n\n\u003cli>\u003cstrong>John Biewen\u003c/strong>, Scene on Radio producer and host, Kenan Institute for Ethics at Duke University\u003c/li>\n\u003c/ul>\n\n\n\n\u003ch2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Episode Transcript\u003c/h2>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cem>\u003cstrong>This is a computer-generated transcript. While our team has reviewed it, there may be errors.\u003c/strong>\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Lesley McClurg:\u003c/strong> Welcome to \u003cem>Forum\u003c/em>. I’m Lesley McClurg. I am in today for Mina Kim.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And it is a very strange moment to be a journalist. Apparently, reporting gigs are declining faster than jobs in coal mining. And those of us in public radio have spent the last year grappling with really deep loss of funding, federal funding, really painful layoffs. Trust in the media is at an all-time low. People tell me all the time they can’t listen anymore because the news is simply just too depressing. Many Americans have more faith in podcasters than reporters because at least they offer some kind of entertainment.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>So what does that all mean? What has journalism gotten wrong? And where do we go from here?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>We are joined by \u003cstrong>John Biewen\u003c/strong>. He is host of \u003cem>Scene on Radio\u003c/em>. It’s a podcast out of the Kenan Institute for Ethics at Duke University that recently investigated Americans’ news and information crisis.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>We’re also joined by \u003cstrong>Madeleine Bair\u003c/strong>. She’s founder and co-executive director of El Tímpano. That’s a publication for the Bay Area’s Latino and Mayan immigrant communities.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Welcome to you both.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>John Biewen:\u003c/strong> Thank you. Good to be here.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Lesley McClurg:\u003c/strong> John, how do you define the news and information crisis? I have my own ideas of what that is, but how do you define it?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>John Biewen:\u003c/strong> Well, I think there are a few key aspects to it. It’s multifaceted.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>One is, you mentioned journalism jobs going away. Well, that’s a crisis that I think the news media itself has not done a very good job of covering. Sure, you can find news articles about local news in particular struggling and newspapers going out of business and the loss of journalism jobs. But I don’t think most people have really grasped it.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>When my co-host, Chenjerai Kumanyika, and I launched this latest season of \u003cem>Scene on Radio\u003c/em>, which we simply call \u003cem>The News\u003c/em>, I wasn’t aware of the depth and the extent of that crisis: that we’ve lost three-quarters of the working journalists at the local level in this country in 25 years or so. It’s absolutely extraordinary. And there are a lot of ramifications for communities and for democracy that we could talk more about. So that’s one facet.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>The other certainly is trust. You mentioned Gallup. In 2025, they found that less than 30% of Americans have even some trust that the news media will report the facts fully, accurately, and fairly. That’s way down from a few decades ago. And there are many reasons for that, I think, and many facets to it that we discuss.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And then there’s this general sense that there are a gazillion sources all saying very different things, so we don’t have a shared narrative in this country. And when you’re trying to run a democracy, that’s another kind of crisis.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Lesley McClurg:\u003c/strong> For your podcast, you talk to people who definitely don’t have a lot of confidence in the media. You went to the Border Belt. This is a rural part of North Carolina. Can you paint us a picture of this community?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>John Biewen:\u003c/strong> Yeah. So this is a section of southeastern North Carolina along the South Carolina border, several counties where I spent time talking to a range of people.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>These are counties that are historically, and still relatively, low income. They’re very, very diverse, with large white, Black, and Indigenous populations. It’s a place that has lost a whole bunch of manufacturing jobs, like many rural places in the U.S. over the last two or three decades.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>It’s also a place that has gone from mostly Democratic in presidential elections, quite recently, to very solidly red, really just in the age of Trump, which is really interesting and kind of surprising.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>So, yeah, we found a lot of people who have a lot of mistrust of the media.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>The other really, really important thing to say about the Border Belt is that most of these counties are news deserts, meaning there is very little in the way of local news sources about what’s going on in their communities.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Most of these counties had relatively strong independent newspapers that might have had a handful of reporters covering the city council, the school board, local business, and things like that up until 10 or 20 years ago. Now they’ve been bought by chains, and the newspapers typically have one full-time person who is kind of overseeing reporting on high school sports and a couple of features. They no longer have anybody to send even to cover the basics of what’s going on in local government.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>So there’s a sense of just not being able to get information about what’s going on in the community.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Lesley McClurg:\u003c/strong> And what are people in that community saying about the news? What do they think of the press and the local media, the news media in general? What’s the relationship now, given that there aren’t local reporters on the ground? What do they think of, like, \u003cem>The New York Times\u003c/em>, et cetera?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>John Biewen:\u003c/strong> Yeah, I think if you ask, this won’t surprise you. We talked to people who mostly get their news from Fox News and Newsmax and other right-wing sources who think that the rest of the news media — the mainstream media, TV networks, the national papers, and so on — are biased.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Particularly, they would say they are very anti-Trump, and that impression causes folks to sort of tune it out.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>One of the effects is that if you don’t have a local news source telling you what’s going on in your own community, you’re probably filling the time that you might have spent reading your local newspaper or listening to a local radio station with national news sources that you already pay attention to — or, frankly, more likely, social media and things like that, which are even more polarized and feed you the things you already think are true. There have been studies showing that this actually exacerbates polarization.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Lesley McClurg:\u003c/strong> Did you get a sense or an understanding of why people swung from Democratic to more Trumpian? What sort of led or pushed them toward the right?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>John Biewen:\u003c/strong> Yeah, I think you have to be really careful about attributing it to a single thing. I think there’s a combination of factors.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>There were economic changes that took place. I alluded to the loss of manufacturing jobs. There were people who, after the Great Recession of 2008 and 2009, lost faith in what either of the major parties were doing. Since the Democrats were in charge at that time, a lot of the frustration landed there.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>But to the extent that we could tie it to changes in the media, it was some of the things I was just talking about, and the sense that we’ve had a 60-year drumbeat in this country, going back at least to Spiro Agnew in the Nixon administration, of conservatives endlessly shouting that you shouldn’t trust the mainstream news media because they are left-wing or left-leaning.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>That has taken on an even sharper, more incessant tone under Trump, where you have a president who, for much of the last 10 years, has dominated the public discourse and casually calls the news “fake news.” I think that has given people a kind of license to simply write off things in the news that they would rather not hear.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Lesley McClurg:\u003c/strong> Madeleine, your reporting focuses on Latino and Mayan immigrant communities here in the Bay Area. What are you hearing from them about their relationship to the press and to the news media?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Madeleine Bair:\u003c/strong> Yeah. So before really starting El Tímpano, we spent nearly a year simply listening — sitting down and talking with hundreds of immigrants and community leaders in East Oakland to ask them, “What do you want to see in local media? What do you want to change in local media?”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>The biggest comment that we heard was simply, \u003cem>más información\u003c/em>. People wanted more information.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>When I was listening to John’s podcast and the conversations he was having with rural voters in North Carolina, it wasn’t that different. People had seen their local news decline.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>For Spanish speakers here in the Bay Area, despite the fact that there are nearly two million Bay Area residents who speak Spanish at home, there are so few sources of news and information serving that community.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Immigrants were primarily referring to the big broadcast networks of Univision and Telemundo. There are great reporters there, but if that is your only source of news and information, those outlets are covering a nine-plus-county metropolitan area in maybe less than a half hour each day. There’s only so much local reporting they can do that’s relevant to people’s lives in different corners of the Bay Area.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>People told us they wanted more information, more local information, more information that’s relevant to their daily lives. They also said, “I want actionable information.”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>One of the other biggest pieces of feedback that we heard about existing Spanish-language news was that it only covers attacks on my community without giving me information I can use to take action.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>We led this listening process during the first Trump administration, and so many people told us, “I just avoid the news because it leaves me in a panic.”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>So the news was, in some ways, harmful to their own mental health.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Lesley McClurg:\u003c/strong> And how do they feel their communities are profiled or presented to the world through the media?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Madeleine Bair:\u003c/strong> Essentially as victims — very much so.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>I recall one conversation that I had with a community organizer who was a leader in an organization of immigrant women in the East Bay. She told me that, previous to that job, she had worked as a lawyer and would oftentimes get calls from reporters asking to interview her for her expertise.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Yet in this role, working as a community organizer for an organization made up of immigrant women, reporters called her looking for profiles of people who were victims.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>I think that’s how she personally experienced the media, and I think it’s how a lot of community members see themselves reflected in the media.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Lesley McClurg:\u003c/strong> We’re talking about why people don’t trust the media. We’re joined by \u003cstrong>John Biewen\u003c/strong>, host of \u003cem>Scene on Radio\u003c/em>. That’s a podcast out of Duke University that recently investigated our news and information crisis.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And you just heard \u003cstrong>Madeleine Bair\u003c/strong>, founder and co-executive director of El Tímpano.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>We’ll be right back after this break. I’m Lesley McClurg. Stay with us.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>You’re listening to \u003cem>Forum\u003c/em>. I’m Lesley McClurg. I’m in today for Mina Kim, and we’re talking about why people don’t trust the media. This is across political parties.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>We are joined by \u003cstrong>John Biewen\u003c/strong>. He’s host of \u003cem>Scene on Radio\u003c/em>. That’s a podcast about America’s news and information crisis.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And \u003cstrong>Madeleine Bair\u003c/strong>, founder and co-executive director of El Tímpano. That’s the publication for the Bay Area’s Latino and Mayan immigrant communities.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>We would love to hear from you. Do you trust us? Why or why not? Can you remember when you potentially started to lose confidence in the media? Do you want more local news? Why or why not?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>You can email your comments and questions to forum@kqed.org, or you can find us on any of the social channels — Discord, Bluesky, Facebook, Instagram. We’re @KQEDForum. Or you can jump on the phone now and give us a call at 866-733-6786.\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cli>\u003cstrong>Madeleine Bair\u003c/strong>, journalist, founder and co-executive director of El Tímpano\u003c/li>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cli>\u003cstrong>John Biewen\u003c/strong>, Scene on Radio producer and host, Kenan Institute for Ethics at Duke University\u003c/li>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cem>\u003cstrong>This is a computer-generated transcript. While our team has reviewed it, there may be errors.\u003c/strong>\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cem>\u003cstrong>This is a computer-generated transcript. While our team has reviewed it, there may be errors.\u003c/strong>\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Lesley McClurg:\u003c/strong> Welcome to \u003cem>Forum\u003c/em>. I’m Lesley McClurg. I am in today for Mina Kim.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Lesley McClurg:\u003c/strong> Welcome to \u003cem>Forum\u003c/em>. I’m Lesley McClurg. I am in today for Mina Kim.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>And it is a very strange moment to be a journalist. Apparently, reporting gigs are declining faster than jobs in coal mining. And those of us in public radio have spent the last year grappling with really deep loss of funding, federal funding, really painful layoffs. Trust in the media is at an all-time low. People tell me all the time they can’t listen anymore because the news is simply just too depressing. Many Americans have more faith in podcasters than reporters because at least they offer some kind of entertainment.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>And it is a very strange moment to be a journalist. Apparently, reporting gigs are declining faster than jobs in coal mining. And those of us in public radio have spent the last year grappling with really deep loss of funding, federal funding, really painful layoffs. Trust in the media is at an all-time low. People tell me all the time they can’t listen anymore because the news is simply just too depressing. Many Americans have more faith in podcasters than reporters because at least they offer some kind of entertainment.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>So what does that all mean? What has journalism gotten wrong? And where do we go from here?\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>We are joined by \u003cstrong>John Biewen\u003c/strong>. He is host of \u003cem>Scene on Radio\u003c/em>. It’s a podcast out of the Kenan Institute for Ethics at Duke University that recently investigated Americans’ news and information crisis.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>We are joined by \u003cstrong>John Biewen\u003c/strong>. He is host of \u003cem>Scene on Radio\u003c/em>. It’s a podcast out of the Kenan Institute for Ethics at Duke University that recently investigated Americans’ news and information crisis.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>We’re also joined by \u003cstrong>Madeleine Bair\u003c/strong>. She’s founder and co-executive director of El Tímpano. That’s a publication for the Bay Area’s Latino and Mayan immigrant communities.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>We’re also joined by \u003cstrong>Madeleine Bair\u003c/strong>. She’s founder and co-executive director of El Tímpano. That’s a publication for the Bay Area’s Latino and Mayan immigrant communities.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Welcome to you both.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>John Biewen:\u003c/strong> Thank you. Good to be here.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>John Biewen:\u003c/strong> Thank you. Good to be here.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Lesley McClurg:\u003c/strong> John, how do you define the news and information crisis? I have my own ideas of what that is, but how do you define it?\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Lesley McClurg:\u003c/strong> John, how do you define the news and information crisis? I have my own ideas of what that is, but how do you define it?\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>John Biewen:\u003c/strong> Well, I think there are a few key aspects to it. It’s multifaceted.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>John Biewen:\u003c/strong> Well, I think there are a few key aspects to it. It’s multifaceted.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>One is, you mentioned journalism jobs going away. Well, that’s a crisis that I think the news media itself has not done a very good job of covering. Sure, you can find news articles about local news in particular struggling and newspapers going out of business and the loss of journalism jobs. But I don’t think most people have really grasped it.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>One is, you mentioned journalism jobs going away. Well, that’s a crisis that I think the news media itself has not done a very good job of covering. Sure, you can find news articles about local news in particular struggling and newspapers going out of business and the loss of journalism jobs. But I don’t think most people have really grasped it.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>When my co-host, Chenjerai Kumanyika, and I launched this latest season of \u003cem>Scene on Radio\u003c/em>, which we simply call \u003cem>The News\u003c/em>, I wasn’t aware of the depth and the extent of that crisis: that we’ve lost three-quarters of the working journalists at the local level in this country in 25 years or so. It’s absolutely extraordinary. And there are a lot of ramifications for communities and for democracy that we could talk more about. So that’s one facet.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>When my co-host, Chenjerai Kumanyika, and I launched this latest season of \u003cem>Scene on Radio\u003c/em>, which we simply call \u003cem>The News\u003c/em>, I wasn’t aware of the depth and the extent of that crisis: that we’ve lost three-quarters of the working journalists at the local level in this country in 25 years or so. It’s absolutely extraordinary. And there are a lot of ramifications for communities and for democracy that we could talk more about. So that’s one facet.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>The other certainly is trust. You mentioned Gallup. In 2025, they found that less than 30% of Americans have even some trust that the news media will report the facts fully, accurately, and fairly. That’s way down from a few decades ago. And there are many reasons for that, I think, and many facets to it that we discuss.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>The other certainly is trust. You mentioned Gallup. In 2025, they found that less than 30% of Americans have even some trust that the news media will report the facts fully, accurately, and fairly. That’s way down from a few decades ago. And there are many reasons for that, I think, and many facets to it that we discuss.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>And then there’s this general sense that there are a gazillion sources all saying very different things, so we don’t have a shared narrative in this country. And when you’re trying to run a democracy, that’s another kind of crisis.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>And then there’s this general sense that there are a gazillion sources all saying very different things, so we don’t have a shared narrative in this country. And when you’re trying to run a democracy, that’s another kind of crisis.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Lesley McClurg:\u003c/strong> For your podcast, you talk to people who definitely don’t have a lot of confidence in the media. You went to the Border Belt. This is a rural part of North Carolina. Can you paint us a picture of this community?\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Lesley McClurg:\u003c/strong> For your podcast, you talk to people who definitely don’t have a lot of confidence in the media. You went to the Border Belt. This is a rural part of North Carolina. Can you paint us a picture of this community?\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>John Biewen:\u003c/strong> Yeah. So this is a section of southeastern North Carolina along the South Carolina border, several counties where I spent time talking to a range of people.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>John Biewen:\u003c/strong> Yeah. So this is a section of southeastern North Carolina along the South Carolina border, several counties where I spent time talking to a range of people.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>These are counties that are historically, and still relatively, low income. They’re very, very diverse, with large white, Black, and Indigenous populations. It’s a place that has lost a whole bunch of manufacturing jobs, like many rural places in the U.S. over the last two or three decades.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>These are counties that are historically, and still relatively, low income. They’re very, very diverse, with large white, Black, and Indigenous populations. It’s a place that has lost a whole bunch of manufacturing jobs, like many rural places in the U.S. over the last two or three decades.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>It’s also a place that has gone from mostly Democratic in presidential elections, quite recently, to very solidly red, really just in the age of Trump, which is really interesting and kind of surprising.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>It’s also a place that has gone from mostly Democratic in presidential elections, quite recently, to very solidly red, really just in the age of Trump, which is really interesting and kind of surprising.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>So, yeah, we found a lot of people who have a lot of mistrust of the media.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>So, yeah, we found a lot of people who have a lot of mistrust of the media.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>The other really, really important thing to say about the Border Belt is that most of these counties are news deserts, meaning there is very little in the way of local news sources about what’s going on in their communities.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>The other really, really important thing to say about the Border Belt is that most of these counties are news deserts, meaning there is very little in the way of local news sources about what’s going on in their communities.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Most of these counties had relatively strong independent newspapers that might have had a handful of reporters covering the city council, the school board, local business, and things like that up until 10 or 20 years ago. Now they’ve been bought by chains, and the newspapers typically have one full-time person who is kind of overseeing reporting on high school sports and a couple of features. They no longer have anybody to send even to cover the basics of what’s going on in local government.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>Most of these counties had relatively strong independent newspapers that might have had a handful of reporters covering the city council, the school board, local business, and things like that up until 10 or 20 years ago. Now they’ve been bought by chains, and the newspapers typically have one full-time person who is kind of overseeing reporting on high school sports and a couple of features. They no longer have anybody to send even to cover the basics of what’s going on in local government.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>So there’s a sense of just not being able to get information about what’s going on in the community.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>So there’s a sense of just not being able to get information about what’s going on in the community.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Lesley McClurg:\u003c/strong> And what are people in that community saying about the news? What do they think of the press and the local media, the news media in general? What’s the relationship now, given that there aren’t local reporters on the ground? What do they think of, like, \u003cem>The New York Times\u003c/em>, et cetera?\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Lesley McClurg:\u003c/strong> And what are people in that community saying about the news? What do they think of the press and the local media, the news media in general? What’s the relationship now, given that there aren’t local reporters on the ground? What do they think of, like, \u003cem>The New York Times\u003c/em>, et cetera?\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>John Biewen:\u003c/strong> Yeah, I think if you ask, this won’t surprise you. We talked to people who mostly get their news from Fox News and Newsmax and other right-wing sources who think that the rest of the news media — the mainstream media, TV networks, the national papers, and so on — are biased.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>John Biewen:\u003c/strong> Yeah, I think if you ask, this won’t surprise you. We talked to people who mostly get their news from Fox News and Newsmax and other right-wing sources who think that the rest of the news media — the mainstream media, TV networks, the national papers, and so on — are biased.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Particularly, they would say they are very anti-Trump, and that impression causes folks to sort of tune it out.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>Particularly, they would say they are very anti-Trump, and that impression causes folks to sort of tune it out.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>One of the effects is that if you don’t have a local news source telling you what’s going on in your own community, you’re probably filling the time that you might have spent reading your local newspaper or listening to a local radio station with national news sources that you already pay attention to — or, frankly, more likely, social media and things like that, which are even more polarized and feed you the things you already think are true. There have been studies showing that this actually exacerbates polarization.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>One of the effects is that if you don’t have a local news source telling you what’s going on in your own community, you’re probably filling the time that you might have spent reading your local newspaper or listening to a local radio station with national news sources that you already pay attention to — or, frankly, more likely, social media and things like that, which are even more polarized and feed you the things you already think are true. There have been studies showing that this actually exacerbates polarization.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Lesley McClurg:\u003c/strong> Did you get a sense or an understanding of why people swung from Democratic to more Trumpian? What sort of led or pushed them toward the right?\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Lesley McClurg:\u003c/strong> Did you get a sense or an understanding of why people swung from Democratic to more Trumpian? What sort of led or pushed them toward the right?\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>John Biewen:\u003c/strong> Yeah, I think you have to be really careful about attributing it to a single thing. I think there’s a combination of factors.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>John Biewen:\u003c/strong> Yeah, I think you have to be really careful about attributing it to a single thing. I think there’s a combination of factors.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>There were economic changes that took place. I alluded to the loss of manufacturing jobs. There were people who, after the Great Recession of 2008 and 2009, lost faith in what either of the major parties were doing. Since the Democrats were in charge at that time, a lot of the frustration landed there.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>There were economic changes that took place. I alluded to the loss of manufacturing jobs. There were people who, after the Great Recession of 2008 and 2009, lost faith in what either of the major parties were doing. Since the Democrats were in charge at that time, a lot of the frustration landed there.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>But to the extent that we could tie it to changes in the media, it was some of the things I was just talking about, and the sense that we’ve had a 60-year drumbeat in this country, going back at least to Spiro Agnew in the Nixon administration, of conservatives endlessly shouting that you shouldn’t trust the mainstream news media because they are left-wing or left-leaning.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>But to the extent that we could tie it to changes in the media, it was some of the things I was just talking about, and the sense that we’ve had a 60-year drumbeat in this country, going back at least to Spiro Agnew in the Nixon administration, of conservatives endlessly shouting that you shouldn’t trust the mainstream news media because they are left-wing or left-leaning.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>That has taken on an even sharper, more incessant tone under Trump, where you have a president who, for much of the last 10 years, has dominated the public discourse and casually calls the news “fake news.” I think that has given people a kind of license to simply write off things in the news that they would rather not hear.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>That has taken on an even sharper, more incessant tone under Trump, where you have a president who, for much of the last 10 years, has dominated the public discourse and casually calls the news “fake news.” I think that has given people a kind of license to simply write off things in the news that they would rather not hear.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Lesley McClurg:\u003c/strong> Madeleine, your reporting focuses on Latino and Mayan immigrant communities here in the Bay Area. What are you hearing from them about their relationship to the press and to the news media?\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Lesley McClurg:\u003c/strong> Madeleine, your reporting focuses on Latino and Mayan immigrant communities here in the Bay Area. What are you hearing from them about their relationship to the press and to the news media?\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Madeleine Bair:\u003c/strong> Yeah. So before really starting El Tímpano, we spent nearly a year simply listening — sitting down and talking with hundreds of immigrants and community leaders in East Oakland to ask them, “What do you want to see in local media? What do you want to change in local media?”\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Madeleine Bair:\u003c/strong> Yeah. So before really starting El Tímpano, we spent nearly a year simply listening — sitting down and talking with hundreds of immigrants and community leaders in East Oakland to ask them, “What do you want to see in local media? What do you want to change in local media?”\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>The biggest comment that we heard was simply, \u003cem>más información\u003c/em>. People wanted more information.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>When I was listening to John’s podcast and the conversations he was having with rural voters in North Carolina, it wasn’t that different. People had seen their local news decline.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>When I was listening to John’s podcast and the conversations he was having with rural voters in North Carolina, it wasn’t that different. People had seen their local news decline.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>For Spanish speakers here in the Bay Area, despite the fact that there are nearly two million Bay Area residents who speak Spanish at home, there are so few sources of news and information serving that community.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Immigrants were primarily referring to the big broadcast networks of Univision and Telemundo. There are great reporters there, but if that is your only source of news and information, those outlets are covering a nine-plus-county metropolitan area in maybe less than a half hour each day. There’s only so much local reporting they can do that’s relevant to people’s lives in different corners of the Bay Area.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>Immigrants were primarily referring to the big broadcast networks of Univision and Telemundo. There are great reporters there, but if that is your only source of news and information, those outlets are covering a nine-plus-county metropolitan area in maybe less than a half hour each day. There’s only so much local reporting they can do that’s relevant to people’s lives in different corners of the Bay Area.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>People told us they wanted more information, more local information, more information that’s relevant to their daily lives. They also said, “I want actionable information.”\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>One of the other biggest pieces of feedback that we heard about existing Spanish-language news was that it only covers attacks on my community without giving me information I can use to take action.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>One of the other biggest pieces of feedback that we heard about existing Spanish-language news was that it only covers attacks on my community without giving me information I can use to take action.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>We led this listening process during the first Trump administration, and so many people told us, “I just avoid the news because it leaves me in a panic.”\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Lesley McClurg:\u003c/strong> We’re talking about why people don’t trust the media. We’re joined by \u003cstrong>John Biewen\u003c/strong>, host of \u003cem>Scene on Radio\u003c/em>. That’s a podcast out of Duke University that recently investigated our news and information crisis.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>You’re listening to \u003cem>Forum\u003c/em>. I’m Lesley McClurg. I’m in today for Mina Kim, and we’re talking about why people don’t trust the media. This is across political parties.\u003c/p>\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cfigure class=\"wp-block-audio\">\u003caudio controls src=\"https://www.podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/pdst.fm/e/traffic.megaphone.fm/KQINC3165819532.mp3\">\u003c/audio>\u003c/figure>\n\n\n\n\u003ch2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">\u003cstrong>Airdate: Monday, August 3, 2026 at 10 AM\u003c/strong>\u003c/h2>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>A trusted press is essential to a thriving democracy, but recent studies show that Americans’ confidence in news media has hit record lows — regardless of factors like geography and political affiliation. To blame are growing perceptions of bias and a sense that news reporting that doesn’t feel applicable to everyday life. We look at why so few people trust the media — and what could be done to change that.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Guests:\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n\u003cli>\u003cstrong>Madeleine Bair\u003c/strong>, journalist, founder and co-executive director of El Tímpano\u003c/li>\n\n\n\n\u003cli>\u003cstrong>John Biewen\u003c/strong>, Scene on Radio producer and host, Kenan Institute for Ethics at Duke University\u003c/li>\n\u003c/ul>\n\n\n\n\u003ch2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Episode Transcript\u003c/h2>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cem>\u003cstrong>This is a computer-generated transcript. While our team has reviewed it, there may be errors.\u003c/strong>\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Lesley McClurg:\u003c/strong> Welcome to \u003cem>Forum\u003c/em>. I’m Lesley McClurg. I am in today for Mina Kim.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And it is a very strange moment to be a journalist. Apparently, reporting gigs are declining faster than jobs in coal mining. And those of us in public radio have spent the last year grappling with really deep loss of funding, federal funding, really painful layoffs. Trust in the media is at an all-time low. People tell me all the time they can’t listen anymore because the news is simply just too depressing. Many Americans have more faith in podcasters than reporters because at least they offer some kind of entertainment.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>So what does that all mean? What has journalism gotten wrong? And where do we go from here?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>We are joined by \u003cstrong>John Biewen\u003c/strong>. He is host of \u003cem>Scene on Radio\u003c/em>. It’s a podcast out of the Kenan Institute for Ethics at Duke University that recently investigated Americans’ news and information crisis.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>We’re also joined by \u003cstrong>Madeleine Bair\u003c/strong>. She’s founder and co-executive director of El Tímpano. That’s a publication for the Bay Area’s Latino and Mayan immigrant communities.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Welcome to you both.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>John Biewen:\u003c/strong> Thank you. Good to be here.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Lesley McClurg:\u003c/strong> John, how do you define the news and information crisis? I have my own ideas of what that is, but how do you define it?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>John Biewen:\u003c/strong> Well, I think there are a few key aspects to it. It’s multifaceted.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>One is, you mentioned journalism jobs going away. Well, that’s a crisis that I think the news media itself has not done a very good job of covering. Sure, you can find news articles about local news in particular struggling and newspapers going out of business and the loss of journalism jobs. But I don’t think most people have really grasped it.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>When my co-host, Chenjerai Kumanyika, and I launched this latest season of \u003cem>Scene on Radio\u003c/em>, which we simply call \u003cem>The News\u003c/em>, I wasn’t aware of the depth and the extent of that crisis: that we’ve lost three-quarters of the working journalists at the local level in this country in 25 years or so. It’s absolutely extraordinary. And there are a lot of ramifications for communities and for democracy that we could talk more about. So that’s one facet.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>The other certainly is trust. You mentioned Gallup. In 2025, they found that less than 30% of Americans have even some trust that the news media will report the facts fully, accurately, and fairly. That’s way down from a few decades ago. And there are many reasons for that, I think, and many facets to it that we discuss.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And then there’s this general sense that there are a gazillion sources all saying very different things, so we don’t have a shared narrative in this country. And when you’re trying to run a democracy, that’s another kind of crisis.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Lesley McClurg:\u003c/strong> For your podcast, you talk to people who definitely don’t have a lot of confidence in the media. You went to the Border Belt. This is a rural part of North Carolina. Can you paint us a picture of this community?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>John Biewen:\u003c/strong> Yeah. So this is a section of southeastern North Carolina along the South Carolina border, several counties where I spent time talking to a range of people.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>These are counties that are historically, and still relatively, low income. They’re very, very diverse, with large white, Black, and Indigenous populations. It’s a place that has lost a whole bunch of manufacturing jobs, like many rural places in the U.S. over the last two or three decades.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>It’s also a place that has gone from mostly Democratic in presidential elections, quite recently, to very solidly red, really just in the age of Trump, which is really interesting and kind of surprising.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>So, yeah, we found a lot of people who have a lot of mistrust of the media.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>The other really, really important thing to say about the Border Belt is that most of these counties are news deserts, meaning there is very little in the way of local news sources about what’s going on in their communities.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Most of these counties had relatively strong independent newspapers that might have had a handful of reporters covering the city council, the school board, local business, and things like that up until 10 or 20 years ago. Now they’ve been bought by chains, and the newspapers typically have one full-time person who is kind of overseeing reporting on high school sports and a couple of features. They no longer have anybody to send even to cover the basics of what’s going on in local government.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>So there’s a sense of just not being able to get information about what’s going on in the community.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Lesley McClurg:\u003c/strong> And what are people in that community saying about the news? What do they think of the press and the local media, the news media in general? What’s the relationship now, given that there aren’t local reporters on the ground? What do they think of, like, \u003cem>The New York Times\u003c/em>, et cetera?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>John Biewen:\u003c/strong> Yeah, I think if you ask, this won’t surprise you. We talked to people who mostly get their news from Fox News and Newsmax and other right-wing sources who think that the rest of the news media — the mainstream media, TV networks, the national papers, and so on — are biased.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Particularly, they would say they are very anti-Trump, and that impression causes folks to sort of tune it out.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>One of the effects is that if you don’t have a local news source telling you what’s going on in your own community, you’re probably filling the time that you might have spent reading your local newspaper or listening to a local radio station with national news sources that you already pay attention to — or, frankly, more likely, social media and things like that, which are even more polarized and feed you the things you already think are true. There have been studies showing that this actually exacerbates polarization.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Lesley McClurg:\u003c/strong> Did you get a sense or an understanding of why people swung from Democratic to more Trumpian? What sort of led or pushed them toward the right?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>John Biewen:\u003c/strong> Yeah, I think you have to be really careful about attributing it to a single thing. I think there’s a combination of factors.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>There were economic changes that took place. I alluded to the loss of manufacturing jobs. There were people who, after the Great Recession of 2008 and 2009, lost faith in what either of the major parties were doing. Since the Democrats were in charge at that time, a lot of the frustration landed there.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>But to the extent that we could tie it to changes in the media, it was some of the things I was just talking about, and the sense that we’ve had a 60-year drumbeat in this country, going back at least to Spiro Agnew in the Nixon administration, of conservatives endlessly shouting that you shouldn’t trust the mainstream news media because they are left-wing or left-leaning.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>That has taken on an even sharper, more incessant tone under Trump, where you have a president who, for much of the last 10 years, has dominated the public discourse and casually calls the news “fake news.” I think that has given people a kind of license to simply write off things in the news that they would rather not hear.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Lesley McClurg:\u003c/strong> Madeleine, your reporting focuses on Latino and Mayan immigrant communities here in the Bay Area. What are you hearing from them about their relationship to the press and to the news media?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Madeleine Bair:\u003c/strong> Yeah. So before really starting El Tímpano, we spent nearly a year simply listening — sitting down and talking with hundreds of immigrants and community leaders in East Oakland to ask them, “What do you want to see in local media? What do you want to change in local media?”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>The biggest comment that we heard was simply, \u003cem>más información\u003c/em>. People wanted more information.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>When I was listening to John’s podcast and the conversations he was having with rural voters in North Carolina, it wasn’t that different. People had seen their local news decline.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>For Spanish speakers here in the Bay Area, despite the fact that there are nearly two million Bay Area residents who speak Spanish at home, there are so few sources of news and information serving that community.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Immigrants were primarily referring to the big broadcast networks of Univision and Telemundo. There are great reporters there, but if that is your only source of news and information, those outlets are covering a nine-plus-county metropolitan area in maybe less than a half hour each day. There’s only so much local reporting they can do that’s relevant to people’s lives in different corners of the Bay Area.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>People told us they wanted more information, more local information, more information that’s relevant to their daily lives. They also said, “I want actionable information.”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>One of the other biggest pieces of feedback that we heard about existing Spanish-language news was that it only covers attacks on my community without giving me information I can use to take action.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>We led this listening process during the first Trump administration, and so many people told us, “I just avoid the news because it leaves me in a panic.”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>So the news was, in some ways, harmful to their own mental health.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Lesley McClurg:\u003c/strong> And how do they feel their communities are profiled or presented to the world through the media?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Madeleine Bair:\u003c/strong> Essentially as victims — very much so.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>I recall one conversation that I had with a community organizer who was a leader in an organization of immigrant women in the East Bay. She told me that, previous to that job, she had worked as a lawyer and would oftentimes get calls from reporters asking to interview her for her expertise.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Yet in this role, working as a community organizer for an organization made up of immigrant women, reporters called her looking for profiles of people who were victims.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>I think that’s how she personally experienced the media, and I think it’s how a lot of community members see themselves reflected in the media.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Lesley McClurg:\u003c/strong> We’re talking about why people don’t trust the media. We’re joined by \u003cstrong>John Biewen\u003c/strong>, host of \u003cem>Scene on Radio\u003c/em>. That’s a podcast out of Duke University that recently investigated our news and information crisis.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And you just heard \u003cstrong>Madeleine Bair\u003c/strong>, founder and co-executive director of El Tímpano.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>We’ll be right back after this break. I’m Lesley McClurg. Stay with us.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>You’re listening to \u003cem>Forum\u003c/em>. I’m Lesley McClurg. I’m in today for Mina Kim, and we’re talking about why people don’t trust the media. This is across political parties.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>We are joined by \u003cstrong>John Biewen\u003c/strong>. He’s host of \u003cem>Scene on Radio\u003c/em>. That’s a podcast about America’s news and information crisis.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And \u003cstrong>Madeleine Bair\u003c/strong>, founder and co-executive director of El Tímpano. That’s the publication for the Bay Area’s Latino and Mayan immigrant communities.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>We would love to hear from you. 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"content": "\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"#episode-transcript\">\u003ci>View the full episode transcript.\u003c/i>\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">What are the chances that the internet could go down forever? How bad for humanity would it be if it did? And what would a shift back to the before-times look like? These are the kinds of questions “doom reporter” Ben Bradford tries to answer in his new podcast, \u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://doompod.com/\">\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Are We Doomed?\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Morgan and Ben discuss the scenarios that might lead to a long-term internet outage — from severed undersea cables to a massive solar storm. And they tackle the most pressing question of all: will influencers survive the internet apocalypse?\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c!-- iframe plugin v.4.3 wordpress.org/plugins/iframe/ -->\u003cbr>\n\u003ciframe loading=\"lazy\" frameborder=\"0\" height=\"200\" scrolling=\"no\" src=\"https://playlist.megaphone.fm?e=KQINC7222381679\" width=\"100%\" class=\"iframe-class\">\u003c/iframe>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Guest: \u003c/b>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Ben Bradford, journalist and host of \u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://doompod.com/\">\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Are We Doomed? \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Further Reading/Listening:\u003c/b>\u003c/p>\n\u003cul>\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://doompod.com/\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Are We Doomed?\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> — Ben Bradford, \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Are We Doomed?\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://pod.link/1893359212/episode/cHJ4XzE2ODU3XzAxYmFmM2NmLWU4ZWEtNDM0ZS05YTFlLTgyYzgzMjE1OGI3Yg?view=apps&sort=popularity\">We Try and Kill the Internet\u003c/a> — Ben Bradford, \u003ci>Are We Doomed?\u003c/i>\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://www.wired.com/story/amazon-explains-how-its-aws-outage-took-down-the-web/\">Amazon Explains How Its AWS Outage Took Down the Web\u003c/a> – Matt Burgess and Lily Hay Newman, \u003ci>WIRED \u003c/i>\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://www.404media.co/the-aws-outage-bricked-peoples-2-700-smartbeds/\">The AWS Outage Bricked People’s $2,700 Smartbeds\u003c/a> – Matthew Gault, \u003ci>404 Media\u003c/i>\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/complex-structure-supported-by-a-tiny-part\">Complex Structure Supported by a Tiny Part\u003c/a> – \u003ci>Know Your Meme \u003c/i>\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2024/04/02/a-stealth-attack-came-close-to-compromising-the-worlds-computers\">A Stealth Attack Came Close to Compromising the World’s Computers\u003c/a> – \u003ci>The Economist\u003c/i>\u003c/li>\n\u003c/ul>\n\u003cp>Want to give us feedback on the show? Shoot us an email at \u003ca href=\"mailto:CloseAllTabs@KQED.org\">CloseAllTabs@KQED.org\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Follow us on\u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://www.instagram.com/closealltabspod/\"> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Instagram\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> and\u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://www.tiktok.com/@closealltabs\"> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">TikTok\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2 id=\"episode-transcript\">Episode Transcript\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>This is a computer-generated transcript. While our team has reviewed it, there may be errors.\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Do you like these deep dives? Whether you call yourself a Tabby or a Tab Head or part of the Tab Hive, if you’re a fan of Close All Tabs, it would be so, so helpful if you could rate and review the show on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you’re listening to us. Under our watch, every tab in the land will be closed, eventually. I mean, I have like 15 open right now. Okay, let’s get to the show\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> Okay, not to brag, but last year Close All Tabs won a pretty special award, the Media Literate Media Award from NAML. That’s the National Association for Media Literacy. According to them, we’ve helped listeners better understand the internet, which is pretty cool. Ben Bradford, a veteran public radio journalist, also won the award. \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I recently talked with him, and obviously had to bring it up. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Well, thanks so much for joining us, Ben. Um, to start off, we both received NAMLE awards at the same time, which means that our takes are always correct. We are so media literate. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ben Bradford:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> That’s exactly right. We- it’s, it’s, it’s, it’s been proven. We’re credentialed.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Exactly. I have a little plaque that says, “My takes are always correct.” \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Ben has long been fascinated by politics and history and climate and disaster, which means he spends a lot of time thinking about the end of the world. And now he’s launched a new project. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ben Bradford:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> My name is Ben Bradford, and I am the creator and host of a new podcast that’s called Are We Doomed?, which is the cheery title for a show about the end of the world. And we look at practical threats to society and to humanity. We look at internet hysteria. We look at, like, our pop culture obsession with the end of the world, and try to find some hope in the darkness. And I think that we actually do that, which has been very fun.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Today, we’re actually doing something a little different than our usual deep dives. You see, Are We Doomed? recently explored my personal doomsday scenario. What happens if the internet goes out forever?\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">This would really suck for Close All Tabs, a show that literally revolves around the internet. It would also suck for me, someone who’s built an entire career around covering the online world. But this also goes way deeper than just a job. There are so many habits ingrained in my life that depend on internet access.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I’m not talking mindless scrolling. I mean daily functions, like LA earthquake Twitter\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I live in Los Angeles, so does Ben, and every time there’s even the slightest rumble afoot, I run straight to social media to check if it was indeed an earthquake. Despite its name, the concept of LA earthquake Twitter transcends a single social media platform. It’s the communal experience of everyone in Southern California going online to see if anyone else felt that rumble.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Was that an earthquake? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Most of the time it’s not, but there have been times when some earthquake hobbyist on social media confirms it before any news outlet does. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ben Bradford:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> The earthquake one is funny ’cause I definitely do that, and I also get… You know how people get phantom vibrations for their phone- \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Yeah\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ben Bradford:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> where they think that their phone is buzzing? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Yeah. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ben Bradford:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> I think I get that for earthquakes. I don’t know if you ever get that- Yeah … where I’m like, “Man, was that an earthquake?” \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> But, you know, how will I ever be sure if, if I can’t check Twitter? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ben Bradford:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> You need it \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> This isn’t a frivolous concern, okay? The entire infrastructure of modern warning systems relies on internet connection.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">For minor shakes, I’ll run to LA Earthquake Twitter, but if a big one’s coming, I’ll probably get a push alert from ShakeAlert first. That’s the West Coast Earthquake Warning System. It calculates the magnitude of potential earthquakes and where they might hit, and then automatically sends alerts to that area, which trigger safety actions like slowing down trains, shutting off elevators, and turning on hospital generators, and hopefully with enough time to get people to safety.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">But to do all that, ShakeAlert gathers data from a sprawling network of sensors transmitted electronically online. The algorithms that figure out if an earthquake is actually dangerous process from the cloud. And to actually send this information to people, obviously the system needs the internet.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Internet connection is baked into every step of the process. It’s why the very concept of the internet going dark is such a terrifying doomsday event. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ben Bradford:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> We have become so reliant on this very complicated technology, and that happens in various ways throughout human history. I think we can safely say there has not been one as complicated, and that requires so many other things to keep running. I mean, you know, from, uh, electricity to infrastructure to software. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> As a self-described doom reporter, this kept Ben up at night. LA Earthquake Twitter and the complex warning system behind it is just one example. The infrastructure of society is internet based. Our drinking water processing sites, our food supply chains, our hospital equipment, these all rely on systems that can only function with internet access.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So for his podcast, Are We Doomed?, Ben looked into it. I said we’re doing things a little differently for this one, right? Today, Ben and I are both going to take you on a deep dive as we attempt to get to the bottom of some questions you might be asking yourself right now. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Has the internet ever gone dark before? What kind of doomsday scenarios are we looking at here? Could we survive? And the question I was dying to ask, how likely is this really? Buckle up. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">This is Close All Tabs. I’m Morgan Sung, tech journalist, and your chronically online friend here to open as many browser tabs as it takes to help you understand how the digital world affects our real lives.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Let’s get into it.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Okay, let’s open our first tab. How important is the internet to our lives?\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Just like my fear of losing LA earthquake Twitter, this question feels frivolous. But like the warning system behind it, losing the internet will cut a lot deeper than you might think. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ben Bradford:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> And so then the question becomes, one, how reliant are we actually? What ability do we have to roll back if this thing were to leave us, and not for an inconvenient couple of hours, not for a day, but for longer? And then two, is there a way for that to happen? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Yeah. So you actually looked at a real world, um, case study of this that took place in northern Arizona in 2015. What happened there? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ben Bradford:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> So 2015, the internet went out in Flagstaff and surrounding areas, and it is an interesting case study because of just how many things suddenly didn’t work and what people could figure out how to do and what they couldn’t figure out how to do.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Here’s an excerpt from this episode of Are We Doomed? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ben Bradford:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Northern Arizona, TV screens cut out. ATMs broke down. Credit card readers, gone. Cell phone service, gone. 911, jammed. Banks, courthouses, bars, you name it, in disarray\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">What had happened was this big internet cable that delivers internet to that area of Arizona had been cut by copper thieves probably looking for copper wire. And so it’s sort of a small vulnerability. The cable’s just out there. It stretches hundreds of miles. You go, you saw in, you take the copper, and it has this really dramatic effect.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> From emergency services to sewer systems, it became clear that this one cable was foundational to the infrastructure that kept northern Arizona going. One reporter called it the area’s digital umbilical cord. This outage only lasted half a day and affected a 100-mile stretch of communities. It makes me wonder, what if the internet went down for the whole world, and it lasted much longer, even forever?\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Okay, but the situation in Arizona happened over 10 years ago. Surely society as a whole has learned from that experience and developed better backup plans since then, right? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ben Bradford:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> So this is one of the questions that we looked at and didn’t thrill me because I don’t think that I loved the answers to it. As we embrace the internet more as a fundamental technology, and we build more things on top of it, we, we do simply have less backups. And so I remember talking to a friend of mine, I just pinged him while I was working on a story. Um, he’s the medical director in an emergency department at a major hospital, and I said, “Hey, if the internet went down, and not for a day, but for a while, what would it mean for you?” And he said, “We’d be out of luck.”\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">That’s how we submit prescriptions. That is how we look up patients. That’s how we transfer them between places.” And so it’s funny because hospitals have backup generators, but they don’t have a backup internet. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> I’m thinking of that scene in The Pit when, uh, the hospital systems go down because of a cyber attack and- \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ben Bradford:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Yeah\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> all these doctors have to suddenly go back to clipboards and charting by hand and, like, reading manual, uh, test results. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>[Clip from The Pitt]:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> This is how we rolled when I was a resident. Was that in the 1900s? Yeah, when charts were written by candlelight. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ben Bradford:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> The part of it that I think is sort of fascinating is just how expansive that question becomes. Things that surprised me are, like, the degree to which our water treatment centers rely on network connectivity. There are reports that have been written, federal government inspector general reports or GAO reports, that look at the vulnerability of water treatment centers to cyber attacks, for instance, and that’s not great.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Uh, you would prefer that your water not be hacked, and I don’t know that we wanna create a system where we rely on our water where it’s vulnerable to hacking. Like, that’s sort of a strange thing. Uh- Well, who thought? Totally, and then it becomes, okay, in our sort of galaxy brain scenario where the whole internet goes down or this technology just becomes unfeasible, it’s like, yeah, your drinking water is degraded, if available at all, and that’s pretty wild. And it depends on the area that you’re in, and there’s some nuance to that, but it shows the extent to what we’re looking at here. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Yeah. So it seems like a lot of these scenarios that we’ve talked about, the fictional one in The Pit or, you know- \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ben Bradford:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Yeah … \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> the one in Arizona, like, all these scenarios have an end date or an end time.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Like, they will come to an end and that’s comforting. But in the event that the whole world’s internet does go dark, I mean, what would happen? Like, genuinely, would we die without the internet? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ben Bradford:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> So I can’t predict the- … the future or the hypothetical of it, but I will say that I think it would be massively disruptive for a longer amount of time than we might think.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> When it comes to survival, the main questions are over food and water. Our food system is incredibly reliant on the internet. Crops don’t rely on the internet to grow, but the cargo shipping systems that get that food into our grocery stores do, and these systems also send necessary supplies to the farms that grow our food.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">All of these systems rely on the internet and our ability to communicate through it. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ben Bradford:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> And while I am confident in humanity’s resilience and cleverness in being able to figure out workarounds, I think that the massive scale of the disruption, I mean, what it would do just to basically to money, you know, your stock market crashes, um, people can’t get access to their money. How often are you looking at paper bills, and what would those do for you in that world where so many other aspects of the financial system are down? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">You start to get into this real hard-to-imagine world, right? But if you start kind of taking those individual pieces of hospitals and water treatment centers and the supply chain, and you add it all together, you get something that looks pretty dystopian and a lot like an apocalypse movie.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So that is, I think, what you’re dealing with in the near term if the internet goes down and doesn’t come back. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Yeah, I mean, I’m gonna be honest, it’s really hard to not, like, hear this and then, want to, I don’t know, buy baby goat to move to Ohi, which is- Right. Yeah … like the furthest, most rural place I can imagine. Like- \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ben Bradford:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Yes. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Before Ben and I get you all worked up into a panic, take a breath. Humanity survived for thousands of years before the internet, and if we had to, we could do it again, even if I personally would really rather not.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">We’re gonna dive into these offline doomsday scenarios after a quick break, but first, we wanted to remind you that Close All Tabs depends on listeners like you to keep us going.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">You can support us by becoming a member at donate.kqed.org/podcasts. Okay, after the break, could the internet really go down for good?\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Welcome back. Let’s open a new tab. Could the internet go dark forever?\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I posed this question to Ben, and if it’s any small comfort, he says it’s actually a lot harder to make that happen than you might think, and that’s because of the way this physical infrastructure is built. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">You know how we call it the World Wide Web? The phrase is actually kind of literal. There are these undersea cables that span all across the globe.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ben Bradford:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> It is this sort of spider web connecting all the different continents in different ways, and the internet runs through all of them. If you cut one, the software of the internet figures out how to reroute the information. So when you think about Northern Arizona, that happens to be one area where there was sort of a choke point, one sort of big pipe connecting the internet to that region, and there are other places like that.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">We saw several years ago a volcanic eruption in the ocean, uh, near Tonga. An undersea volcano blew through the ocean’s floor. Smoke and ash erupted into the sky. The force of the explosion unleashed a devastating tsunami, and that explosion also ripped through the underwater cable that delivers internet to Tonga.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Without communication, other countries struggled to provide relief. Tongans couldn’t access outside money. Much of the nation relies on remittances from family off the islands. Those stopped. In that case, it was a natural disaster that cut off Tonga from the internet. But people do attack undersea cables, and it’s hard to prove sabotage, although countries are constantly accusing each other, because the cables are unprotected, innocent, perfect for attack.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">It was another sort of look at just how disruptive this kind of thing can be. So internet cables being severed can be a problem, but because the internet is decentralized and because the software is designed to find where it’s not working and then reroute, it’s generally not that big of a problem. One pipe goes down, and you can repair it.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And so Tonga was sort of like the worst-case scenario of that, and even then, the pipe gets repaired relatively quickly, and there are some workarounds you can put in place in the meantime. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> During the Cold War, technologists started thinking about how to build a telecommunication system that could survive nuclear war.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ben Bradford:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Legend goes that the internet was built off of that, and so that’s that sort of decentralized network. One part goes down, and you imagine a spiderweb with, like, electricity running through it. Electricity runs through all the spiderweb, but one little tendril of spiderweb gets severed, and the electricity still courses through the rest of it, and that’s essentially how information flows through the internet.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So even if you were to go and sever a lot of the undersea cables, it would be a problem. It would create slowdowns, but any places that the pipes were still running to would still work. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> That is comforting, simply cutting the cables connecting our world wouldn’t instantly doom us. But there is another theory of an event that could fry our internet, solar storms.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Solar storms are sudden bursts of energy from the sun with enough radiation that could affect our planet’s electrical systems. This has actually already happened on Earth in 1859. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ben Bradford:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> If you go back to the 1850s, the biggest technology of the day was the telegraph, and there was this event– it’s called the Carrington Event.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">All of a sudden, around the world, telegraph machines start going crazy. Telegraph stations in some cases are lighting on fire because they’re overloading. People are unplugging their telegraphs, and the telegraphs are still chattering away, and they don’t know what’s happening, right? They think they’re possessed.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The night sky lit up like it was daytime. Some people thought it was daytime, and so they went to church. Uh, it was a solar storm. It was the biggest solar storm that we’ve had in recorded history \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> And since 1859, we have become much more reliant on electricity. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ben Bradford:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> There are some questions about if we were to be hit with an equivalent event to that one back when there was telegraph, how well the internet would stand up. Like that seems to me like the best thing to blow out the hardware of the internet. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">But we have a government office called the Space Weather Center. It’s part of the, uh, National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration. You have utilities that are starting to take that threat more seriously. So you have some work being done, and I think the hope would be that by the time we have another one of those events, that we’re prepared.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> So from what you’ve been telling me, it sounds like the internet is actually a lot more resilient than you might think, than the, the doomsday people might be worried about. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ben Bradford:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> I feel really good about it. The two things that I worry about are, um, I think that there are some software vulnerabilities. There’s a famous, uh, web comic, uh, from XKCD.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">It’s, it’s Randall Munroe, who’s a former NASA rocket scientist, and just is, just absolutely brilliant, and he does these web comics. And there’s a very famous one that he does about the internet. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> It’s titled Dependency. So this image shows a drawing of a giant intricate tower of blocks stacked in increasingly complicated ways as you move toward the top. Above it, there’s text that says, “All modern digital infrastructure.” This is like Jenga from hell. At the bottom is a comically thin block holding up all the others. The caption says, “A project some random person in Nebraska has been thanklessly maintaining since 2003.” \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The artist posted Dependency in 2020, and it’s become a meme among software engineers who edit the tower higher and higher with even more precarious blocks.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Like, there’s this one edit that has the blocks off-kilter, balanced on a lever labeled AI. The tiny block propping up the whole tower is labeled unpaid open source developers, while an angry bird flies toward the structure, ready to topple it over. That one is labeled whatever Microsoft is doing. The point is the internet as we know it is this tower, cobbled together, perpetually built upon by hobbyists doing it for free and companies that have their own agenda.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ben Bradford:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> And so if people were to identify those particular things, you could potentially knock them out and have unforeseen outages. Now, would that outage create, you know, the endless lack of internet? It seems like probably not. And it seems like people are clever and people are really good at hacking things in. But that’s one of the other vulnerabilities that we saw. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> And it seems like it doesn’t necessarily need to be some kind of bad actor going after that one thing a guy built in his basement in 2003 to take down huge parts of the internet. You know, I’m thinking of the AWS outage last year. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Okay, for listeners, AWS, or Amazon Web Services, it’s the cloud computing platform that pretty much everyone uses.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">It’s the backbone of the internet. Last year, a DNS error brought it all down. DNS, domain name system. It’s the way the internet translates names to numbers, like translating the human language into one computers can understand. Some call DNS the phone book of the internet. Imagine all the contacts in your phone get wiped out, but your whole job is making calls.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">You’re the cog that keeps your whole machine running. So without your phone book, everything comes grinding to a halt. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">This led to a cascading comedy of errors that brought down, like, entire chunks of the internet. Like Ring cameras were down, online banking services went dark, my Roomba wouldn’t turn on because it couldn’t- \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ben Bradford:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Your Roomba? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> My Roomba actually went down. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ben Bradford:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Yeah, obviously you can’t vacuum if you can’t use the internet. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> No. Well, even worse, it kept turning on and then getting lost, and then trying to get back to its dock, but it couldn’t find anything, and I was like, “Stop turning on.” \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ben Bradford:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> What’d you do? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> I literally turned it upside down like a bug. Oh my God. It was so annoying. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Um, people’s smart beds went down and suddenly changed to, like, 100 degrees overnight, or it s- automatically set alarms off- Mm-hmm … in the middle of the night. It, it’s like parts of society just kind of came to a halt because of this one bug.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ben Bradford:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> People have apartments they can’t get into, uh- Literally … unless there’s network connectivity. It… Literally, it’s like our whole lives are, like, smart devices now. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> In the event of a real doomsday scenario, what does last year’s AWS outage tell us about society’s ability to function without even parts of the internet?\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ben Bradford:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Right. I mean, I think that that, again, is one of those examples that shows two sides of what we’re talking about here. It shows the level of disruption, and it also shows some of those pain points. Experts worry about the centralization of the internet because that becomes a potential vulnerability where one company goes down, one company has a bug like Amazon, and all of a sudden nothing works.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Well, that has only continued to build because 10, 15 years ago, if you were starting a business and it related in any way to the internet, you would buy your own servers, and you would usually host your own servers. But companies began to offer cloud services, and only a few companies are the big ones.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">AWS, Google has one, Oracle has one, and that is where almost all businesses now reside. So now you’ve again got this sort of larger vulnerability, and there’s a lot of security that they have, but things can go wrong ’cause they’re complicated. So the AWS outage is such a good example of that, and it shows you the reach that just that one company has in over all kinds of other things that we wouldn’t think are connected.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> It was a stark reminder that entire swaths of the internet depend on just a handful of tech giants. This centralization is not ideal when one of those companies has a problem, like a tiny block propping up a precarious and ever-growing tower of digital infrastructure. One vulnerability could cause it to all come tumbling down.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ben Bradford:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> The only other element that I wonder if we should talk about at all when we talk about the, the software side of things is, of course, like the big new player here is AI. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">You’ve got something like, you know, Claude Mythos, which has been hyped up as something that can find vulnerabilities that nobody has found in software. And I think that there is a question of as AI continues to advance, if this is a thing that seems to be good at, it seems to be good at coding, it seems to be useful for that, can it help people find more vulnerabilities? Does that add to our vulnerability on the software side? And I don’t think we know yet, but I mean, certainly to me as doom reporter guy, I’m like, that doesn’t seem ideal.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Okay, we’ve talked about the ways the internet could feasibly be taken down, whether it’s a solar storm or a software bug. What would the world look like if it really did go down for good, if we were all forced offline and had to figure out how to make it work? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Let’s open one more tab, Surviving the Internet Apocalypse.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The practical reality of like, oh, if the internet goes down, like we’ve talked about, it’s so much more deeply embedded in every aspect of like society and culture and our lives. What would a return to the before times actually look like? Is there any going back? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ben Bradford:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> So I think that, uh, in some ways it’s like we’ve done it before, we could do it again. And we have examples from history of civilizations collapsing where the whole, again, sort of supply chain of a massive area of the world fell apart. And not to be the guy that talks about Rome, um, but that is one example, I’m sorry. Uh, where, you know, you had this sort of kind of incredible amount of trade going around the Mediterranean, supply chains that really, you know, brought things from the Middle East all the way to Europe and back, and that falls apart. And places figured out how to continue to survive, and they became less reliant on large trade routes. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So I think that if the internet, which is this big connector of societies, fell apart, we would figure it out. It probably would require some reliance on figuring out how to go local. Uh, it would present some major challenges.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I think that like it’s hard to understate the level of challenges it would create because I do think things like figuring out how to get food to the places, figuring out how to get the things that grow the food to the right places is all a major challenge and a disruption for a matter of months, even if we could ultimately circumvent that, would be an issue.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">But I’m pretty confident we’d figure it out.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">If you ever camping and you’re in an area where your phone doesn’t get service, really quickly you put your phone away, and you kind of forget about it, and it becomes a non-issue because it’s just not there anymore. Whether we’re talking about Doom or we’re talking about just like everyday tasks, people kind of live their lives with what’s available to them. So I think that that would be true in an internet-less world. I think it would be true in a powerless world, a world where there wasn’t electricity. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">All of those would be less comfortable. All of them would be worse in certain ways. I’m not rooting for any of those. But yeah, I have kind of like good optimism in humanity’s ability to, to figure those things out, just not without suffering.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I am wondering, like from your perspective, like, you know, you are a tech reporter, you are much more immersed in this side of things, and I’m just wondering, you know, what struck you about this story, if anything, that I might not have thought of? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> You know, it’s funny, I, I started out reporting on the creator economy and memes and like influencers. Like That was kind of like the first jobs I had. I did have this thought of like, okay, society collapses, will influencers continue influencing? Will they just become local, you know, town criers? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ben Bradford:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Sure. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Will they become the person who’s like in the great market where everyone’s bartering again, where they’re like, “Everyone needs to get on this.”\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ben Bradford:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> yeah \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> I did have this thought of like, hmm, I bet, you know, all these current influencers and their ring lights, they’re gonna find a way. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ben Bradford:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> We have an upcoming episode that looks at what a post-apocalypse might actually look like. How would it be different from what we see in the films, and what would you actually need probably to survive a post-apocalypse?\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And as far as we can tell, in historic events that resemble today’s apocalypse scenarios, some society totally fractured, massive death, whatever. Um, I just said massive death whatever, and I regret that. But, um- … you know, in real big tragic scenarios, people do not flee to their bunkers. They come together and they reform communities.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So there are hard skills that seem to be useful like being able to grow food seems to be very useful. But there’s an argument that we hear that the most useful thing is communication, that it’s leading people to be able to work together. And I don’t know whether an influencer is like the best skill set to lead people and bring people together. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Yeah. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ben Bradford:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> But certainly in terms of having an authoritative voice that people will listen to, that skill set might be really useful. Yeah. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> I mean, hey, I can’t wait till the apocalypse when we’re all just eating berries and someone’s like, “Oh, this berry’s the best one. Believe me.” \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ben Bradford:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> This is the one. Yeah. Yeah. Here’s why I use it. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Okay. After all of this reporting, um, as the now voice of doom scenarios, in this kind of like, I don’t know, mental ranking that you have of like this is the worst thing that could happen, where does the internet going down worldwide fall in that?\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ben Bradford:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> It is not high up on the list of things that I worry about. It is an example of a black swan event, something that essentially is not in any planning, that we consider to be sort of impregnable. So I think it’s worth considering from the perspective of what if it’s not? So this one feels very solvable.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">It feels to me like a thing that people are thinking about to some extent, that we could take more seriously, that we should consider, but that we shouldn’t be like stressing about.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> So yes, the internet going down is a possible doomsday event, but the likelihood of it happening is comparatively low compared to other apocalyptic scenarios, and if it does happen, we’ll figure out ways to survive it. That being said, Ben, as a doomsday reporter, thinks about this stuff a lot, and there are a few situations that do seriously worry him.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The big four, according to him: AI, nuclear war, climate change, pandemics. But those last three are way out of my scope of a deep dive. To hear more about those scenarios, you should check out Are We Doomed? You can find it wherever you get your podcasts. We’ll link to Ben’s episode about killing the internet, and some useful reading, if you’re interested in opening even more tabs about this.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And as usual, if you’re really that hungry for more, you can stick around after the credits for some bonus content. Okay, but for now, let’s close all these tabs\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Close All Tabs is a production of KQED Studios and is reported and hosted by me, Morgan Sung. This episode was produced by Ana De Almeida Amaral and Chris Egusa. It was edited by Chris Egusa, who also composed our theme song and credits music. The Close All Tabs team also includes producer Maya Cueva, editor Chris Hambrick, and audio engineer Brendan Willard.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Additional music by APM. Audience engagement support from Maha Sanad. Jen Chien is our director of podcasts, and Ethan Toven Lindsay is our editor-in-chief. Some members of the KQED podcast team are represented by the Screen Actors Guild, American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, San Francisco Northern California Local.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">This episode’s keyboard sounds were submitted by Alex Tran and recorded on his white Epomaker Hi75 keyboard with Fogruaden red samurai keycaps and gateron milky yellow pro v2 switches. Thanks for listening.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ben Bradford:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Also, by the way, because we’re both running podcasts, uh, the fact that there is no podcast without the internet because that’s the way audio is shared- … that seems like a big problem for both of us. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> I’m, you know, I think out of habit if the internet went down, I would just be, like, alone in my closet talking into a hairbrush, you know?\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ben Bradford:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Right. That’s bleak.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n",
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"description": "What are the chances that the internet could go down forever? How bad for humanity would it be if it did? And what would a shift back to the before-times look like? These are the kinds of questions “doom reporter” Ben Bradford tries to answer in his new podcast, Are We Doomed? Morgan and Ben discuss the scenarios that might lead to a long-term internet outage — from severed undersea cables to a massive solar storm. And they tackle the most pressing question of all: will influencers survive the internet apocalypse?",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"#episode-transcript\">\u003ci>View the full episode transcript.\u003c/i>\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">What are the chances that the internet could go down forever? How bad for humanity would it be if it did? And what would a shift back to the before-times look like? These are the kinds of questions “doom reporter” Ben Bradford tries to answer in his new podcast, \u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://doompod.com/\">\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Are We Doomed?\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Morgan and Ben discuss the scenarios that might lead to a long-term internet outage — from severed undersea cables to a massive solar storm. And they tackle the most pressing question of all: will influencers survive the internet apocalypse?\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c!-- iframe plugin v.4.3 wordpress.org/plugins/iframe/ -->\u003cbr>\n\u003ciframe loading=\"lazy\" frameborder=\"0\" height=\"200\" scrolling=\"no\" src=\"https://playlist.megaphone.fm?e=KQINC7222381679\" width=\"100%\" class=\"iframe-class\">\u003c/iframe>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Guest: \u003c/b>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Ben Bradford, journalist and host of \u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://doompod.com/\">\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Are We Doomed? \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Further Reading/Listening:\u003c/b>\u003c/p>\n\u003cul>\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://doompod.com/\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Are We Doomed?\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> — Ben Bradford, \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Are We Doomed?\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://pod.link/1893359212/episode/cHJ4XzE2ODU3XzAxYmFmM2NmLWU4ZWEtNDM0ZS05YTFlLTgyYzgzMjE1OGI3Yg?view=apps&sort=popularity\">We Try and Kill the Internet\u003c/a> — Ben Bradford, \u003ci>Are We Doomed?\u003c/i>\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://www.wired.com/story/amazon-explains-how-its-aws-outage-took-down-the-web/\">Amazon Explains How Its AWS Outage Took Down the Web\u003c/a> – Matt Burgess and Lily Hay Newman, \u003ci>WIRED \u003c/i>\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://www.404media.co/the-aws-outage-bricked-peoples-2-700-smartbeds/\">The AWS Outage Bricked People’s $2,700 Smartbeds\u003c/a> – Matthew Gault, \u003ci>404 Media\u003c/i>\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/complex-structure-supported-by-a-tiny-part\">Complex Structure Supported by a Tiny Part\u003c/a> – \u003ci>Know Your Meme \u003c/i>\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2024/04/02/a-stealth-attack-came-close-to-compromising-the-worlds-computers\">A Stealth Attack Came Close to Compromising the World’s Computers\u003c/a> – \u003ci>The Economist\u003c/i>\u003c/li>\n\u003c/ul>\n\u003cp>Want to give us feedback on the show? Shoot us an email at \u003ca href=\"mailto:CloseAllTabs@KQED.org\">CloseAllTabs@KQED.org\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Follow us on\u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://www.instagram.com/closealltabspod/\"> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Instagram\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> and\u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://www.tiktok.com/@closealltabs\"> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">TikTok\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-content post-body\">\u003ch2 id=\"episode-transcript\">Episode Transcript\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>This is a computer-generated transcript. While our team has reviewed it, there may be errors.\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Do you like these deep dives? Whether you call yourself a Tabby or a Tab Head or part of the Tab Hive, if you’re a fan of Close All Tabs, it would be so, so helpful if you could rate and review the show on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you’re listening to us. Under our watch, every tab in the land will be closed, eventually. I mean, I have like 15 open right now. Okay, let’s get to the show\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> Okay, not to brag, but last year Close All Tabs won a pretty special award, the Media Literate Media Award from NAML. That’s the National Association for Media Literacy. According to them, we’ve helped listeners better understand the internet, which is pretty cool. Ben Bradford, a veteran public radio journalist, also won the award. \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I recently talked with him, and obviously had to bring it up. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Well, thanks so much for joining us, Ben. Um, to start off, we both received NAMLE awards at the same time, which means that our takes are always correct. We are so media literate. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ben Bradford:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> That’s exactly right. We- it’s, it’s, it’s, it’s been proven. We’re credentialed.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Exactly. I have a little plaque that says, “My takes are always correct.” \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Ben has long been fascinated by politics and history and climate and disaster, which means he spends a lot of time thinking about the end of the world. And now he’s launched a new project. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ben Bradford:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> My name is Ben Bradford, and I am the creator and host of a new podcast that’s called Are We Doomed?, which is the cheery title for a show about the end of the world. And we look at practical threats to society and to humanity. We look at internet hysteria. We look at, like, our pop culture obsession with the end of the world, and try to find some hope in the darkness. And I think that we actually do that, which has been very fun.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Today, we’re actually doing something a little different than our usual deep dives. You see, Are We Doomed? recently explored my personal doomsday scenario. What happens if the internet goes out forever?\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">This would really suck for Close All Tabs, a show that literally revolves around the internet. It would also suck for me, someone who’s built an entire career around covering the online world. But this also goes way deeper than just a job. There are so many habits ingrained in my life that depend on internet access.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I’m not talking mindless scrolling. I mean daily functions, like LA earthquake Twitter\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I live in Los Angeles, so does Ben, and every time there’s even the slightest rumble afoot, I run straight to social media to check if it was indeed an earthquake. Despite its name, the concept of LA earthquake Twitter transcends a single social media platform. It’s the communal experience of everyone in Southern California going online to see if anyone else felt that rumble.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Was that an earthquake? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Most of the time it’s not, but there have been times when some earthquake hobbyist on social media confirms it before any news outlet does. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ben Bradford:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> The earthquake one is funny ’cause I definitely do that, and I also get… You know how people get phantom vibrations for their phone- \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Yeah\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ben Bradford:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> where they think that their phone is buzzing? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Yeah. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ben Bradford:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> I think I get that for earthquakes. I don’t know if you ever get that- Yeah … where I’m like, “Man, was that an earthquake?” \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> But, you know, how will I ever be sure if, if I can’t check Twitter? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ben Bradford:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> You need it \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> This isn’t a frivolous concern, okay? The entire infrastructure of modern warning systems relies on internet connection.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">For minor shakes, I’ll run to LA Earthquake Twitter, but if a big one’s coming, I’ll probably get a push alert from ShakeAlert first. That’s the West Coast Earthquake Warning System. It calculates the magnitude of potential earthquakes and where they might hit, and then automatically sends alerts to that area, which trigger safety actions like slowing down trains, shutting off elevators, and turning on hospital generators, and hopefully with enough time to get people to safety.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">But to do all that, ShakeAlert gathers data from a sprawling network of sensors transmitted electronically online. The algorithms that figure out if an earthquake is actually dangerous process from the cloud. And to actually send this information to people, obviously the system needs the internet.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Internet connection is baked into every step of the process. It’s why the very concept of the internet going dark is such a terrifying doomsday event. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ben Bradford:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> We have become so reliant on this very complicated technology, and that happens in various ways throughout human history. I think we can safely say there has not been one as complicated, and that requires so many other things to keep running. I mean, you know, from, uh, electricity to infrastructure to software. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> As a self-described doom reporter, this kept Ben up at night. LA Earthquake Twitter and the complex warning system behind it is just one example. The infrastructure of society is internet based. Our drinking water processing sites, our food supply chains, our hospital equipment, these all rely on systems that can only function with internet access.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So for his podcast, Are We Doomed?, Ben looked into it. I said we’re doing things a little differently for this one, right? Today, Ben and I are both going to take you on a deep dive as we attempt to get to the bottom of some questions you might be asking yourself right now. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Has the internet ever gone dark before? What kind of doomsday scenarios are we looking at here? Could we survive? And the question I was dying to ask, how likely is this really? Buckle up. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">This is Close All Tabs. I’m Morgan Sung, tech journalist, and your chronically online friend here to open as many browser tabs as it takes to help you understand how the digital world affects our real lives.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Let’s get into it.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Okay, let’s open our first tab. How important is the internet to our lives?\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Just like my fear of losing LA earthquake Twitter, this question feels frivolous. But like the warning system behind it, losing the internet will cut a lot deeper than you might think. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ben Bradford:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> And so then the question becomes, one, how reliant are we actually? What ability do we have to roll back if this thing were to leave us, and not for an inconvenient couple of hours, not for a day, but for longer? And then two, is there a way for that to happen? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Yeah. So you actually looked at a real world, um, case study of this that took place in northern Arizona in 2015. What happened there? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ben Bradford:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> So 2015, the internet went out in Flagstaff and surrounding areas, and it is an interesting case study because of just how many things suddenly didn’t work and what people could figure out how to do and what they couldn’t figure out how to do.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Here’s an excerpt from this episode of Are We Doomed? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ben Bradford:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Northern Arizona, TV screens cut out. ATMs broke down. Credit card readers, gone. Cell phone service, gone. 911, jammed. Banks, courthouses, bars, you name it, in disarray\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">What had happened was this big internet cable that delivers internet to that area of Arizona had been cut by copper thieves probably looking for copper wire. And so it’s sort of a small vulnerability. The cable’s just out there. It stretches hundreds of miles. You go, you saw in, you take the copper, and it has this really dramatic effect.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> From emergency services to sewer systems, it became clear that this one cable was foundational to the infrastructure that kept northern Arizona going. One reporter called it the area’s digital umbilical cord. This outage only lasted half a day and affected a 100-mile stretch of communities. It makes me wonder, what if the internet went down for the whole world, and it lasted much longer, even forever?\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Okay, but the situation in Arizona happened over 10 years ago. Surely society as a whole has learned from that experience and developed better backup plans since then, right? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ben Bradford:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> So this is one of the questions that we looked at and didn’t thrill me because I don’t think that I loved the answers to it. As we embrace the internet more as a fundamental technology, and we build more things on top of it, we, we do simply have less backups. And so I remember talking to a friend of mine, I just pinged him while I was working on a story. Um, he’s the medical director in an emergency department at a major hospital, and I said, “Hey, if the internet went down, and not for a day, but for a while, what would it mean for you?” And he said, “We’d be out of luck.”\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">That’s how we submit prescriptions. That is how we look up patients. That’s how we transfer them between places.” And so it’s funny because hospitals have backup generators, but they don’t have a backup internet. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> I’m thinking of that scene in The Pit when, uh, the hospital systems go down because of a cyber attack and- \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ben Bradford:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Yeah\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> all these doctors have to suddenly go back to clipboards and charting by hand and, like, reading manual, uh, test results. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>[Clip from The Pitt]:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> This is how we rolled when I was a resident. Was that in the 1900s? Yeah, when charts were written by candlelight. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ben Bradford:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> The part of it that I think is sort of fascinating is just how expansive that question becomes. Things that surprised me are, like, the degree to which our water treatment centers rely on network connectivity. There are reports that have been written, federal government inspector general reports or GAO reports, that look at the vulnerability of water treatment centers to cyber attacks, for instance, and that’s not great.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Uh, you would prefer that your water not be hacked, and I don’t know that we wanna create a system where we rely on our water where it’s vulnerable to hacking. Like, that’s sort of a strange thing. Uh- Well, who thought? Totally, and then it becomes, okay, in our sort of galaxy brain scenario where the whole internet goes down or this technology just becomes unfeasible, it’s like, yeah, your drinking water is degraded, if available at all, and that’s pretty wild. And it depends on the area that you’re in, and there’s some nuance to that, but it shows the extent to what we’re looking at here. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Yeah. So it seems like a lot of these scenarios that we’ve talked about, the fictional one in The Pit or, you know- \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ben Bradford:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Yeah … \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> the one in Arizona, like, all these scenarios have an end date or an end time.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Like, they will come to an end and that’s comforting. But in the event that the whole world’s internet does go dark, I mean, what would happen? Like, genuinely, would we die without the internet? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ben Bradford:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> So I can’t predict the- … the future or the hypothetical of it, but I will say that I think it would be massively disruptive for a longer amount of time than we might think.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> When it comes to survival, the main questions are over food and water. Our food system is incredibly reliant on the internet. Crops don’t rely on the internet to grow, but the cargo shipping systems that get that food into our grocery stores do, and these systems also send necessary supplies to the farms that grow our food.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">All of these systems rely on the internet and our ability to communicate through it. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ben Bradford:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> And while I am confident in humanity’s resilience and cleverness in being able to figure out workarounds, I think that the massive scale of the disruption, I mean, what it would do just to basically to money, you know, your stock market crashes, um, people can’t get access to their money. How often are you looking at paper bills, and what would those do for you in that world where so many other aspects of the financial system are down? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">You start to get into this real hard-to-imagine world, right? But if you start kind of taking those individual pieces of hospitals and water treatment centers and the supply chain, and you add it all together, you get something that looks pretty dystopian and a lot like an apocalypse movie.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So that is, I think, what you’re dealing with in the near term if the internet goes down and doesn’t come back. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Yeah, I mean, I’m gonna be honest, it’s really hard to not, like, hear this and then, want to, I don’t know, buy baby goat to move to Ohi, which is- Right. Yeah … like the furthest, most rural place I can imagine. Like- \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ben Bradford:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Yes. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Before Ben and I get you all worked up into a panic, take a breath. Humanity survived for thousands of years before the internet, and if we had to, we could do it again, even if I personally would really rather not.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">We’re gonna dive into these offline doomsday scenarios after a quick break, but first, we wanted to remind you that Close All Tabs depends on listeners like you to keep us going.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">You can support us by becoming a member at donate.kqed.org/podcasts. Okay, after the break, could the internet really go down for good?\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Welcome back. Let’s open a new tab. Could the internet go dark forever?\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I posed this question to Ben, and if it’s any small comfort, he says it’s actually a lot harder to make that happen than you might think, and that’s because of the way this physical infrastructure is built. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">You know how we call it the World Wide Web? The phrase is actually kind of literal. There are these undersea cables that span all across the globe.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ben Bradford:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> It is this sort of spider web connecting all the different continents in different ways, and the internet runs through all of them. If you cut one, the software of the internet figures out how to reroute the information. So when you think about Northern Arizona, that happens to be one area where there was sort of a choke point, one sort of big pipe connecting the internet to that region, and there are other places like that.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">We saw several years ago a volcanic eruption in the ocean, uh, near Tonga. An undersea volcano blew through the ocean’s floor. Smoke and ash erupted into the sky. The force of the explosion unleashed a devastating tsunami, and that explosion also ripped through the underwater cable that delivers internet to Tonga.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Without communication, other countries struggled to provide relief. Tongans couldn’t access outside money. Much of the nation relies on remittances from family off the islands. Those stopped. In that case, it was a natural disaster that cut off Tonga from the internet. But people do attack undersea cables, and it’s hard to prove sabotage, although countries are constantly accusing each other, because the cables are unprotected, innocent, perfect for attack.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">It was another sort of look at just how disruptive this kind of thing can be. So internet cables being severed can be a problem, but because the internet is decentralized and because the software is designed to find where it’s not working and then reroute, it’s generally not that big of a problem. One pipe goes down, and you can repair it.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And so Tonga was sort of like the worst-case scenario of that, and even then, the pipe gets repaired relatively quickly, and there are some workarounds you can put in place in the meantime. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> During the Cold War, technologists started thinking about how to build a telecommunication system that could survive nuclear war.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ben Bradford:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Legend goes that the internet was built off of that, and so that’s that sort of decentralized network. One part goes down, and you imagine a spiderweb with, like, electricity running through it. Electricity runs through all the spiderweb, but one little tendril of spiderweb gets severed, and the electricity still courses through the rest of it, and that’s essentially how information flows through the internet.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So even if you were to go and sever a lot of the undersea cables, it would be a problem. It would create slowdowns, but any places that the pipes were still running to would still work. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> That is comforting, simply cutting the cables connecting our world wouldn’t instantly doom us. But there is another theory of an event that could fry our internet, solar storms.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Solar storms are sudden bursts of energy from the sun with enough radiation that could affect our planet’s electrical systems. This has actually already happened on Earth in 1859. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ben Bradford:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> If you go back to the 1850s, the biggest technology of the day was the telegraph, and there was this event– it’s called the Carrington Event.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">All of a sudden, around the world, telegraph machines start going crazy. Telegraph stations in some cases are lighting on fire because they’re overloading. People are unplugging their telegraphs, and the telegraphs are still chattering away, and they don’t know what’s happening, right? They think they’re possessed.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The night sky lit up like it was daytime. Some people thought it was daytime, and so they went to church. Uh, it was a solar storm. It was the biggest solar storm that we’ve had in recorded history \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> And since 1859, we have become much more reliant on electricity. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ben Bradford:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> There are some questions about if we were to be hit with an equivalent event to that one back when there was telegraph, how well the internet would stand up. Like that seems to me like the best thing to blow out the hardware of the internet. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">But we have a government office called the Space Weather Center. It’s part of the, uh, National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration. You have utilities that are starting to take that threat more seriously. So you have some work being done, and I think the hope would be that by the time we have another one of those events, that we’re prepared.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> So from what you’ve been telling me, it sounds like the internet is actually a lot more resilient than you might think, than the, the doomsday people might be worried about. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ben Bradford:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> I feel really good about it. The two things that I worry about are, um, I think that there are some software vulnerabilities. There’s a famous, uh, web comic, uh, from XKCD.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">It’s, it’s Randall Munroe, who’s a former NASA rocket scientist, and just is, just absolutely brilliant, and he does these web comics. And there’s a very famous one that he does about the internet. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> It’s titled Dependency. So this image shows a drawing of a giant intricate tower of blocks stacked in increasingly complicated ways as you move toward the top. Above it, there’s text that says, “All modern digital infrastructure.” This is like Jenga from hell. At the bottom is a comically thin block holding up all the others. The caption says, “A project some random person in Nebraska has been thanklessly maintaining since 2003.” \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The artist posted Dependency in 2020, and it’s become a meme among software engineers who edit the tower higher and higher with even more precarious blocks.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Like, there’s this one edit that has the blocks off-kilter, balanced on a lever labeled AI. The tiny block propping up the whole tower is labeled unpaid open source developers, while an angry bird flies toward the structure, ready to topple it over. That one is labeled whatever Microsoft is doing. The point is the internet as we know it is this tower, cobbled together, perpetually built upon by hobbyists doing it for free and companies that have their own agenda.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ben Bradford:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> And so if people were to identify those particular things, you could potentially knock them out and have unforeseen outages. Now, would that outage create, you know, the endless lack of internet? It seems like probably not. And it seems like people are clever and people are really good at hacking things in. But that’s one of the other vulnerabilities that we saw. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> And it seems like it doesn’t necessarily need to be some kind of bad actor going after that one thing a guy built in his basement in 2003 to take down huge parts of the internet. You know, I’m thinking of the AWS outage last year. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Okay, for listeners, AWS, or Amazon Web Services, it’s the cloud computing platform that pretty much everyone uses.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">It’s the backbone of the internet. Last year, a DNS error brought it all down. DNS, domain name system. It’s the way the internet translates names to numbers, like translating the human language into one computers can understand. Some call DNS the phone book of the internet. Imagine all the contacts in your phone get wiped out, but your whole job is making calls.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">You’re the cog that keeps your whole machine running. So without your phone book, everything comes grinding to a halt. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">This led to a cascading comedy of errors that brought down, like, entire chunks of the internet. Like Ring cameras were down, online banking services went dark, my Roomba wouldn’t turn on because it couldn’t- \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ben Bradford:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Your Roomba? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> My Roomba actually went down. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ben Bradford:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Yeah, obviously you can’t vacuum if you can’t use the internet. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> No. Well, even worse, it kept turning on and then getting lost, and then trying to get back to its dock, but it couldn’t find anything, and I was like, “Stop turning on.” \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ben Bradford:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> What’d you do? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> I literally turned it upside down like a bug. Oh my God. It was so annoying. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Um, people’s smart beds went down and suddenly changed to, like, 100 degrees overnight, or it s- automatically set alarms off- Mm-hmm … in the middle of the night. It, it’s like parts of society just kind of came to a halt because of this one bug.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ben Bradford:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> People have apartments they can’t get into, uh- Literally … unless there’s network connectivity. It… Literally, it’s like our whole lives are, like, smart devices now. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> In the event of a real doomsday scenario, what does last year’s AWS outage tell us about society’s ability to function without even parts of the internet?\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ben Bradford:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Right. I mean, I think that that, again, is one of those examples that shows two sides of what we’re talking about here. It shows the level of disruption, and it also shows some of those pain points. Experts worry about the centralization of the internet because that becomes a potential vulnerability where one company goes down, one company has a bug like Amazon, and all of a sudden nothing works.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Well, that has only continued to build because 10, 15 years ago, if you were starting a business and it related in any way to the internet, you would buy your own servers, and you would usually host your own servers. But companies began to offer cloud services, and only a few companies are the big ones.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">AWS, Google has one, Oracle has one, and that is where almost all businesses now reside. So now you’ve again got this sort of larger vulnerability, and there’s a lot of security that they have, but things can go wrong ’cause they’re complicated. So the AWS outage is such a good example of that, and it shows you the reach that just that one company has in over all kinds of other things that we wouldn’t think are connected.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> It was a stark reminder that entire swaths of the internet depend on just a handful of tech giants. This centralization is not ideal when one of those companies has a problem, like a tiny block propping up a precarious and ever-growing tower of digital infrastructure. One vulnerability could cause it to all come tumbling down.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ben Bradford:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> The only other element that I wonder if we should talk about at all when we talk about the, the software side of things is, of course, like the big new player here is AI. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">You’ve got something like, you know, Claude Mythos, which has been hyped up as something that can find vulnerabilities that nobody has found in software. And I think that there is a question of as AI continues to advance, if this is a thing that seems to be good at, it seems to be good at coding, it seems to be useful for that, can it help people find more vulnerabilities? Does that add to our vulnerability on the software side? And I don’t think we know yet, but I mean, certainly to me as doom reporter guy, I’m like, that doesn’t seem ideal.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Okay, we’ve talked about the ways the internet could feasibly be taken down, whether it’s a solar storm or a software bug. What would the world look like if it really did go down for good, if we were all forced offline and had to figure out how to make it work? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Let’s open one more tab, Surviving the Internet Apocalypse.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The practical reality of like, oh, if the internet goes down, like we’ve talked about, it’s so much more deeply embedded in every aspect of like society and culture and our lives. What would a return to the before times actually look like? Is there any going back? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ben Bradford:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> So I think that, uh, in some ways it’s like we’ve done it before, we could do it again. And we have examples from history of civilizations collapsing where the whole, again, sort of supply chain of a massive area of the world fell apart. And not to be the guy that talks about Rome, um, but that is one example, I’m sorry. Uh, where, you know, you had this sort of kind of incredible amount of trade going around the Mediterranean, supply chains that really, you know, brought things from the Middle East all the way to Europe and back, and that falls apart. And places figured out how to continue to survive, and they became less reliant on large trade routes. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So I think that if the internet, which is this big connector of societies, fell apart, we would figure it out. It probably would require some reliance on figuring out how to go local. Uh, it would present some major challenges.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I think that like it’s hard to understate the level of challenges it would create because I do think things like figuring out how to get food to the places, figuring out how to get the things that grow the food to the right places is all a major challenge and a disruption for a matter of months, even if we could ultimately circumvent that, would be an issue.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">But I’m pretty confident we’d figure it out.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">If you ever camping and you’re in an area where your phone doesn’t get service, really quickly you put your phone away, and you kind of forget about it, and it becomes a non-issue because it’s just not there anymore. Whether we’re talking about Doom or we’re talking about just like everyday tasks, people kind of live their lives with what’s available to them. So I think that that would be true in an internet-less world. I think it would be true in a powerless world, a world where there wasn’t electricity. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">All of those would be less comfortable. All of them would be worse in certain ways. I’m not rooting for any of those. But yeah, I have kind of like good optimism in humanity’s ability to, to figure those things out, just not without suffering.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I am wondering, like from your perspective, like, you know, you are a tech reporter, you are much more immersed in this side of things, and I’m just wondering, you know, what struck you about this story, if anything, that I might not have thought of? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> You know, it’s funny, I, I started out reporting on the creator economy and memes and like influencers. Like That was kind of like the first jobs I had. I did have this thought of like, okay, society collapses, will influencers continue influencing? Will they just become local, you know, town criers? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ben Bradford:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Sure. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Will they become the person who’s like in the great market where everyone’s bartering again, where they’re like, “Everyone needs to get on this.”\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ben Bradford:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> yeah \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> I did have this thought of like, hmm, I bet, you know, all these current influencers and their ring lights, they’re gonna find a way. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ben Bradford:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> We have an upcoming episode that looks at what a post-apocalypse might actually look like. How would it be different from what we see in the films, and what would you actually need probably to survive a post-apocalypse?\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And as far as we can tell, in historic events that resemble today’s apocalypse scenarios, some society totally fractured, massive death, whatever. Um, I just said massive death whatever, and I regret that. But, um- … you know, in real big tragic scenarios, people do not flee to their bunkers. They come together and they reform communities.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So there are hard skills that seem to be useful like being able to grow food seems to be very useful. But there’s an argument that we hear that the most useful thing is communication, that it’s leading people to be able to work together. And I don’t know whether an influencer is like the best skill set to lead people and bring people together. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Yeah. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ben Bradford:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> But certainly in terms of having an authoritative voice that people will listen to, that skill set might be really useful. Yeah. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> I mean, hey, I can’t wait till the apocalypse when we’re all just eating berries and someone’s like, “Oh, this berry’s the best one. Believe me.” \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ben Bradford:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> This is the one. Yeah. Yeah. Here’s why I use it. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Okay. After all of this reporting, um, as the now voice of doom scenarios, in this kind of like, I don’t know, mental ranking that you have of like this is the worst thing that could happen, where does the internet going down worldwide fall in that?\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ben Bradford:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> It is not high up on the list of things that I worry about. It is an example of a black swan event, something that essentially is not in any planning, that we consider to be sort of impregnable. So I think it’s worth considering from the perspective of what if it’s not? So this one feels very solvable.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">It feels to me like a thing that people are thinking about to some extent, that we could take more seriously, that we should consider, but that we shouldn’t be like stressing about.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> So yes, the internet going down is a possible doomsday event, but the likelihood of it happening is comparatively low compared to other apocalyptic scenarios, and if it does happen, we’ll figure out ways to survive it. That being said, Ben, as a doomsday reporter, thinks about this stuff a lot, and there are a few situations that do seriously worry him.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The big four, according to him: AI, nuclear war, climate change, pandemics. But those last three are way out of my scope of a deep dive. To hear more about those scenarios, you should check out Are We Doomed? You can find it wherever you get your podcasts. We’ll link to Ben’s episode about killing the internet, and some useful reading, if you’re interested in opening even more tabs about this.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And as usual, if you’re really that hungry for more, you can stick around after the credits for some bonus content. Okay, but for now, let’s close all these tabs\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Close All Tabs is a production of KQED Studios and is reported and hosted by me, Morgan Sung. This episode was produced by Ana De Almeida Amaral and Chris Egusa. It was edited by Chris Egusa, who also composed our theme song and credits music. The Close All Tabs team also includes producer Maya Cueva, editor Chris Hambrick, and audio engineer Brendan Willard.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Additional music by APM. Audience engagement support from Maha Sanad. Jen Chien is our director of podcasts, and Ethan Toven Lindsay is our editor-in-chief. Some members of the KQED podcast team are represented by the Screen Actors Guild, American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, San Francisco Northern California Local.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">This episode’s keyboard sounds were submitted by Alex Tran and recorded on his white Epomaker Hi75 keyboard with Fogruaden red samurai keycaps and gateron milky yellow pro v2 switches. Thanks for listening.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ben Bradford:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Also, by the way, because we’re both running podcasts, uh, the fact that there is no podcast without the internet because that’s the way audio is shared- … that seems like a big problem for both of us. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> I’m, you know, I think out of habit if the internet went down, I would just be, like, alone in my closet talking into a hairbrush, you know?\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ben Bradford:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Right. That’s bleak.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003c/div>"
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"content": "\u003ch2>Airdate: Friday, April 17 at 10 AM\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>The 2026 WNBA season tips off next month. It’s expected to see historic viewership and attendance, after last season’s record-breaking run as the most-watched regular season in the history of the league. But even though this is the WNBA’s historic 30th season, women have been playing basketball since long before 1996. Sports journalists Jordan Robinson and Emma Baccellieri set out to profile the female trailblazers who changed basketball history, like Denise Long Rife, the first woman drafted by an NBA team when she was recruited to the San Francisco Warriors in 1969, and Ora Washington, who in the 1930s became a star on her YMCA’s all-Black basketball team after already winning “almost every tennis trophy available to a Black woman in pre-war America.” We’ll celebrate the players and coaches who made women’s basketball into the phenomenon it is today, and get a preview for the upcoming season, with Robinson and Baccellieri. Their new book is “Court Queens: Celebrate the Players, Teams, and History of Women’s Basketball.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003ch2>Airdate: Friday, April 17 at 10 AM\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>The 2026 WNBA season tips off next month. It’s expected to see historic viewership and attendance, after last season’s record-breaking run as the most-watched regular season in the history of the league. But even though this is the WNBA’s historic 30th season, women have been playing basketball since long before 1996. Sports journalists Jordan Robinson and Emma Baccellieri set out to profile the female trailblazers who changed basketball history, like Denise Long Rife, the first woman drafted by an NBA team when she was recruited to the San Francisco Warriors in 1969, and Ora Washington, who in the 1930s became a star on her YMCA’s all-Black basketball team after already winning “almost every tennis trophy available to a Black woman in pre-war America.” We’ll celebrate the players and coaches who made women’s basketball into the phenomenon it is today, and get a preview for the upcoming season, with Robinson and Baccellieri. Their new book is “Court Queens: Celebrate the Players, Teams, and History of Women’s Basketball.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"slug": "in-a-tech-hub-like-the-bay-area-why-do-bart-announcements-sound-so-ancient",
"title": "In a Tech Hub Like the Bay Area, Why Do BART Announcements Sound So Ancient?",
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"headTitle": "In a Tech Hub Like the Bay Area, Why Do BART Announcements Sound So Ancient? | KQED",
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"content": "\u003cp>\u003cem>\u003ca href=\"#Viewthefullepisodetranscript\">View the full episode transcript.\u003c/a>\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/tag/bart\">Bay Area Rapid Transit\u003c/a> — or BART — was a brand new, cutting-edge transportation system when it opened in 1972. Since then, its reputation has become a bit less high-tech. And while riders hear a variety of voices making announcements throughout the BART system, there are two that sound different — robotic, synthesized voices, one male and one female, that sound like they are from yesteryear.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And at least one rider has taken particular note.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I never understood what it was saying,” Bay Curious listener Jimmy Tobin said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>To Jimmy, the voices sound rudimentary, like the voice of 1990s Microsoft Sam.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I’m baffled by this thing,” he said. “I just can’t justify why this is so hard to understand and so easy to update.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_12078618\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 2000px\">\u003ca href=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/04/250403-BART-VOICES-01-KQED.jpg\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-12078618\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/04/250403-BART-VOICES-01-KQED.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1522\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/04/250403-BART-VOICES-01-KQED.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/04/250403-BART-VOICES-01-KQED-160x122.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/04/250403-BART-VOICES-01-KQED-1536x1169.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Sept. 11, 1972, BART opens to the public. On the first day alone, 15,000 people rode the new trains, despite the fact that they only ran between Fremont and MacArthur Stations in the East Bay. \u003ccite>(Courtesy Bay Area Rapid Transit))\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>It seems like a blatant contradiction to him that trains running through communities at the heart of the AI boom sound like they’re from the first computers ever made. He wants to know why these robotic announcements have never been updated.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>\u003cstrong>Passengers used to just wait\u003c/strong>\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Before the late 1990s, BART had no live train information or announcements for passengers. There would occasionally be voiced announcements in the case of major disruptions, but on a regular day, riders would consult a paper schedule to see when a train was supposed to arrive. In the case of delays, riders would wait on the platform, without any information on when the train might actually come.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Then, in 2000, BART began using a new piece of technology.[aside postID=news_12077572 hero='https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/10/251027-ALMADENQUICKSILVER00034_TV-KQED.jpg'] The Advance Passenger Information System (APIS) is a data hub that allows BART to calculate and communicate live train locations. For the first time, BART had the ability to share real-time information with riders, like the estimated time of arrival of a train. They initially did this with digital signage on the train platforms.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The data would later be made publicly available, allowing for other platforms like navigation apps to utilize the live train information.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>When this technology was rolling out in 2000, BART was also assessing the accessibility of its system for blind and visually impaired riders. BART’s policy became, “Anything that’s been written down, we need to also verbally say,” said Alicia Trost, chief communications officer at BART.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In order to translate the digital signs with real-time updates into verbal announcements, BART acquired a text-to-speech system from Lucent Technologies, a telecommunications company. And those synthesized voices that bug Tobin so much, they have names — George and Gracie. Listen closely, and you’ll hear that George announces trains in one direction and the Gracie announces trains in the opposite direction.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>At the time, this was cutting-edge technology — the system could vocalize thousands of announcements per day with real-time information, all without any human involvement.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But in the past 26 years, George and Gracie have stayed mostly the same, and their limitations have become apparent. For an accessibility tool, they can be hard to understand, and compared to today’s voice synthesizing technology, they don’t sound very human.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>\u003cstrong>Why hasn’t BART updated George and Gracie?\u003c/strong>\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>George and Gracie are proprietary to Lucent Technologies, which went out of business in the mid-2000s. The company is no longer around to provide updates, and BART doesn’t have access to the source code to make its own changes. The only thing that can be updated is the text that George and Gracie read.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“BART has really limited funding, and we have to think about the priority,” Trost said. “Things like replacing our trains are more important.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_12044953\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 2000px\">\u003ca href=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/06/20241204-BART-JY-009_qed.jpg\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-12044953\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/06/20241204-BART-JY-009_qed.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1333\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/06/20241204-BART-JY-009_qed.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/06/20241204-BART-JY-009_qed-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/06/20241204-BART-JY-009_qed-1536x1024.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Passengers wait to board BART at Daly City Station in Daly City, on Dec. 4, 2024. \u003ccite>(Juliana Yamada/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>George and Gracie may be a bit outdated, but the system works, so updating it isn’t a top priority, Trost said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It’s also clear that some Bay Area residents love George and Gracie.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In the computer game Roblox, users have \u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=24yglNNGJZ4\">featured their voices\u003c/a> in recreations of the BART system. As players drive or board a virtual BART train, George and Gracie are there announcing: “Now boarding at Embarcadero.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>They have also been a topic of discussion on Reddit and YouTube. \u003ca href=\"https://www.reddit.com/r/Bart/comments/1g130wj/the_voices_of_bart/?solution=4a4ea784b52b90a34a4ea784b52b90a3&js_challenge=1&token=bbbe4bf1c9a2b5160829c4be34da586108bdd3256eb2920042534355492efd5e\">One Reddit user, ‘get-a-mac,’\u003c/a> wrote, “I never want those voices gone. They are the voice of BART!”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Another with the handle StreetyMcCarface wrote, “Keep George and Gracie, they are iconic.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Still, Trost said BART \u003cem>is \u003c/em>looking to replace the announcement system at some point, which will force some tough decisions.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Do we introduce new voices or do we actually replicate the old George and Gracie that sound so dated, because people love them?” Trost said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>BART is currently facing a $376 million deficit, raising big questions about its future. It’s forcing Bay Area residents to consider a world without BART and its role in the culture of the bay, big and small.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[baycuriousquestion]\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>\u003ca id=\"Viewthefullepisodetranscript\">\u003c/a>Episode transcript\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Olivia Allen-Price:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Bay Area Rapid Transit. Our dear friend, BART. \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">For regular riders, your whirs, squeaks and horns are part of the everyday soundtrack of life.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">We \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">always\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> hear you coming. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Whir of a train pulling into the station\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cb>Olivia Allen-Price: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">We appreciate those timely warnings… \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The doors are closing please stand clear of the doors\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Olivia Allen-Price: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And how you help us not miss our stop. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Arriving at 16th street Mission\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cb>Olivia Allen-Price: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Every now and then, someone \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">real\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> pops in\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">This is BART operation control…\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Olivia Allen-Price: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Jimmy Tobin, our question asker, has been fixated on one particular sound in the BART ecosystem. A set of announcements …\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Jimmy Tobin:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> So sometimes it feels like there’s like a lower kind of male voice that’s like, feels like it’s from like war games, like WOPR kind of style. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Wargames Clip:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> This box interprets signals from the computer and turns it into sounds. “Shall we play a game?” \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Jimmy Tobin:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> And there’s a higher female voice is kind of like 90s Microsoft Sam style.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Microsoft Sam: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Hello, I am Microsoft Sam. I am the most popular voice of Microsoft.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Olivia Allen-Price: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">There are a variety of voices riders hear throughout BART, some of which are voiced by actual people. But it’s \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">these\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> robotic and synthesized voices that Jimmy can’t stop hearing … \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Three car Fremont Train now boarding, platform 2.\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Olivia Allen-Price: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Jimmy is an audio engineer at Google who actually works on synthesized speech models, and these voices really \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">bothered\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> him. One day when he was waiting for a BART train and heard an announcement for a train heading toward the Oakland Airport.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">6-car Blue line train for OAK Airport Dublin in 15 minutes. 6-car Green line train for OAK Airport Barryessa in 19 minutes\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Jimmy Tobin:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> I never understood what it was saying. I always thought it was, like, Oasis? And so I was just like, what is this word? And then I look at the board and it’s like, OAK, and I’m like, why didn’t it say Oakland? Like, and so I’m baffled by this thing.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Olivia Allen-Price: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">It felt like such a contradiction to him that \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">this \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">was a voice of the transit system going through the home to the AI Boom… where all the newest tech is being developed.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Jimmy Tobin:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> And I kept being like, it must be for, like, accessibility or maybe it’s like, it doesn’t have accents or something. And I was just like, I just can’t justify why this is so hard to understand and so easy to update. That’s why I came to you guys.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Olivia Allen-Price: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">He wants to know the backstory behind these voices – and where they came from.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Jimmy Tobin: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">What has been the decision-making to keep it?\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Olivia Allen-Price: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I’m Olivia Allen-Price and you’re listening to Bay Curious. Today on the show we answer Jimmy’s questions. Stay with us. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Sponsor Break\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Olivia Allen-Price: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">To tell us more about the voices behind BART, we pass it to KQED’s Ana De Almeida Amaral…\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ana De Almeida Amaral: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">When BART first opened to the public on Sept. 11, 1972, the world looked different.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">1970s music plays\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ana De Almeida Amaral: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Richard Nixon was president of the United States. Elvis Presley’s “Burning Love” was charting. And Bay Area residents flocked to try out the new Bay Area Rapid Transit system.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">At the time it only ran for 11 stops — from the McArthur Station in Oakland down to Fremont.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>BART Commercial:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> The decade of the 1970s, is the decade of the decade of transportation alternatives…but the first large-scale breakthrough in moving great numbers of people rapidly and economically is the SF Bay Area Rapid Transit system, commonly called BART.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ana De Almeida Amaral: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">When BART first opened, there was no live train information for riders. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The only way riders knew when a train was coming was by reading a paper schedule. You might hear an announcement for major occurrences like if a train was completely out of service. But if your train was a little delayed, you’d sit and wait– without any information on when it would actually arrive.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">But then in 2000, everything changed.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">BART developed a piece of technology called the Advanced Passenger Information System. For the first time, BART knew the live locations of trains throughout the system. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Riders now got real time information about when their train would arrive..\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Alicia Trost is the Chief Communications Officer at BART. She told me more about this era.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Alicia Trost:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> We had digital screens on the platform that gave you the, what we call ETAs, estimated time arrivals of the train. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ana De Almeida Amaral: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And this was a pretty big deal… but at a time where new legislation mandated accessibility for disabled people— BART had to ask some important questions…\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Alicia Trost:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> But what if you’re low vision and you can’t see or you’re blind? And so there was this big policy decision to say anything that’s been written down, we need to also verbally say.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ana De Almeida Amaral: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">BART chose a text-to-speech system to voice these announcements. It came from Lucent Technologies– a telecommunications company. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And so in 2000, this synthesized voice speaking for BART was born. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Alicia Trost:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> It’s a computer with zero emotion, and it’s… every… word… is… spaced… apart.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ana De Almeida Amaral: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Voices were tested at different speeds and levels of breathiness. Riders gave input on the versions that were easiest to understand that led to the final version.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The feminine voice of this system was named Gracie.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Gracie:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> 6 car richmond train now approaching platform 1 \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ana De Almeida Amaral: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And the masculine voice was named George.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>George:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> 10 car San Francisco-Milbrae train in 8 minutes\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ana De Almeida Amaral: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">George and Gracie announce a train’s estimated time of arrival, when a train is actively arriving, and when it is boarding. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">In 2000, this was cutting edge technology– announcements made automatically, without any human involvement.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Yes, there were and still also are \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">human voiced\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> announcements when there are big disruptions or delays… but even today, you’ll hear George and Gracie while waiting for a train. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Alicia Trost: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So next time you’re in a bart station, really pay attention. You’ll hear George’s voice for one direction only and Gracie’s voice for the opposite direction.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">[Beat]\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ana De Almeida Amaral: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Since 2000, George and Gracie have been the voices we hear on BART platforms. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And in the past 26 years, there has been very little change. That’s because the actual text-to-speech system is \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">proprietary\u003c/span>\u003c/i> \u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">to Lucent Technologies\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">. And after the demise of the company in the mid 2000s, they haven’t been around to provide any updates. And the kicker is BART doesn’t have access to the source code so they can’t change it. The only thing they can do is change the text that George and Gracie speak. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So, I asked Alicia Jimmy’s question: Why hasn’t this been replaced ?\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Alicia Trost: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Because it works and BART has really limited funding and when we go for capital funds, that’s the type of money we use to replace this system we have to think about the priority and things like replacing our trains is more important.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ana De Almeida Amaral: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">But she says that BART \u003c/span>\u003cb>\u003ci>is\u003c/i>\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">aware of the limitations of this technology– they’ve gotten that feedback and they want to replace it in the future. So, they are looking at piloting a new PA system.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Alicia Trost:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> And part of that is introducing what will be new voices. And it makes me nervous to even say that because this is going to cause great fear and debate among riders and the public… Do we introduce new voices or do we actually replicate the old George and Gracie that sounds so dated, but because people love them. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ana De Almeida Amaral: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And, despite their flaws, it seems like lots of people love these voices.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Alicia Trost:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> We frequently get asked about George and Gracie, and people tell us they love it. And we also know that there’s a lot of young people who adore the sound and have actually built in Roblox full-on BART systems.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ana De Almeida Amaral: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And they include recordings George and Gracie.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So as you’re driving or boarding a virtual BART train in the 3D world of roblox, you’ll hear their voices!\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Sounds of Roblox game\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ana De Almeida Amaral: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Aside from Roblox, George and Gracie have been a topic of discussion on Reddit and Youtube. And while there are the usual criticisms and suggestions to change it, it’s interesting to see what these voices represent for some people who love them: \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ana De Almeida Amaral: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">One person on reddit with the username ‘Get-a-Mac’ says:\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Voice Over:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> “I never want those voices gone. They are the voice of BART!\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ana De Almeida Amaral: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Another user, COD Gamer 19, says:\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Voice Over: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Gracie and George are a part of BART’s history, it wouldn’t feel the same without them, they’re a part of the bay as a whole.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Alicia Trost:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> So I just know that it’s a popular topic because of how much I see it like in the culture of the Bay Area.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ana De Almeida Amaral: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Today, there are questions about the future of BART, especially as \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">“They face a 376 million dollar budget deficit.”\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> It’s forcing us to consider the ways BART impacts our lives and culture. And frankly, what it might be like to live without it.These questions go far beyond George and Gracie.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">But still, this little piece of technology, stuck in time, reminds us of how quickly things have changed. And maybe, it brings you a little joy –or frustration –iin the monotony of your commute. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Gracie:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> George, it’s time to get back to work.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>George:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> You are right as usual, Gracie. Goodbye and thanks for visiting.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Olivia Allen-Price: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">That was KQED’s Ana De Almeida Amaral. Jimmy Tobin thank you for asking the question. There is no question too big or small for Bay Curious – if you’ve got one that’s been itching in your mind, send it our way over at \u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"http://baycurious.org\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">BayCurious.org\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> or shoot us an email. We’re at \u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"mailto:baycurious@kqed.org\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">baycurious@kqed.org\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Bay Curious is made by Katrina Schwartz, Christopher Beale and me Olivia Allen-Price.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Extra support from Maha Sanad, Katie Sprenger, Jen Chien, Ethan Toven-Lindsey and everyone on team KQED.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Some members of the KQED podcast team are represented by The Screen Actors Guild, American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, San Francisco Northern California Local.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I’m Olivia Allen-Price. Thanks for listening.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>\u003cem>\u003ca href=\"#Viewthefullepisodetranscript\">View the full episode transcript.\u003c/a>\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/tag/bart\">Bay Area Rapid Transit\u003c/a> — or BART — was a brand new, cutting-edge transportation system when it opened in 1972. Since then, its reputation has become a bit less high-tech. And while riders hear a variety of voices making announcements throughout the BART system, there are two that sound different — robotic, synthesized voices, one male and one female, that sound like they are from yesteryear.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And at least one rider has taken particular note.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I never understood what it was saying,” Bay Curious listener Jimmy Tobin said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>To Jimmy, the voices sound rudimentary, like the voice of 1990s Microsoft Sam.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I’m baffled by this thing,” he said. “I just can’t justify why this is so hard to understand and so easy to update.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_12078618\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 2000px\">\u003ca href=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/04/250403-BART-VOICES-01-KQED.jpg\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-12078618\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/04/250403-BART-VOICES-01-KQED.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1522\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/04/250403-BART-VOICES-01-KQED.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/04/250403-BART-VOICES-01-KQED-160x122.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/04/250403-BART-VOICES-01-KQED-1536x1169.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Sept. 11, 1972, BART opens to the public. On the first day alone, 15,000 people rode the new trains, despite the fact that they only ran between Fremont and MacArthur Stations in the East Bay. \u003ccite>(Courtesy Bay Area Rapid Transit))\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>It seems like a blatant contradiction to him that trains running through communities at the heart of the AI boom sound like they’re from the first computers ever made. He wants to know why these robotic announcements have never been updated.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>\u003cstrong>Passengers used to just wait\u003c/strong>\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Before the late 1990s, BART had no live train information or announcements for passengers. There would occasionally be voiced announcements in the case of major disruptions, but on a regular day, riders would consult a paper schedule to see when a train was supposed to arrive. In the case of delays, riders would wait on the platform, without any information on when the train might actually come.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Then, in 2000, BART began using a new piece of technology.\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp> The Advance Passenger Information System (APIS) is a data hub that allows BART to calculate and communicate live train locations. For the first time, BART had the ability to share real-time information with riders, like the estimated time of arrival of a train. They initially did this with digital signage on the train platforms.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The data would later be made publicly available, allowing for other platforms like navigation apps to utilize the live train information.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>When this technology was rolling out in 2000, BART was also assessing the accessibility of its system for blind and visually impaired riders. BART’s policy became, “Anything that’s been written down, we need to also verbally say,” said Alicia Trost, chief communications officer at BART.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In order to translate the digital signs with real-time updates into verbal announcements, BART acquired a text-to-speech system from Lucent Technologies, a telecommunications company. And those synthesized voices that bug Tobin so much, they have names — George and Gracie. Listen closely, and you’ll hear that George announces trains in one direction and the Gracie announces trains in the opposite direction.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>At the time, this was cutting-edge technology — the system could vocalize thousands of announcements per day with real-time information, all without any human involvement.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But in the past 26 years, George and Gracie have stayed mostly the same, and their limitations have become apparent. For an accessibility tool, they can be hard to understand, and compared to today’s voice synthesizing technology, they don’t sound very human.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>\u003cstrong>Why hasn’t BART updated George and Gracie?\u003c/strong>\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>George and Gracie are proprietary to Lucent Technologies, which went out of business in the mid-2000s. The company is no longer around to provide updates, and BART doesn’t have access to the source code to make its own changes. The only thing that can be updated is the text that George and Gracie read.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“BART has really limited funding, and we have to think about the priority,” Trost said. “Things like replacing our trains are more important.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_12044953\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 2000px\">\u003ca href=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/06/20241204-BART-JY-009_qed.jpg\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-12044953\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/06/20241204-BART-JY-009_qed.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1333\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/06/20241204-BART-JY-009_qed.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/06/20241204-BART-JY-009_qed-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/06/20241204-BART-JY-009_qed-1536x1024.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Passengers wait to board BART at Daly City Station in Daly City, on Dec. 4, 2024. \u003ccite>(Juliana Yamada/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>George and Gracie may be a bit outdated, but the system works, so updating it isn’t a top priority, Trost said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It’s also clear that some Bay Area residents love George and Gracie.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In the computer game Roblox, users have \u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=24yglNNGJZ4\">featured their voices\u003c/a> in recreations of the BART system. As players drive or board a virtual BART train, George and Gracie are there announcing: “Now boarding at Embarcadero.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>They have also been a topic of discussion on Reddit and YouTube. \u003ca href=\"https://www.reddit.com/r/Bart/comments/1g130wj/the_voices_of_bart/?solution=4a4ea784b52b90a34a4ea784b52b90a3&js_challenge=1&token=bbbe4bf1c9a2b5160829c4be34da586108bdd3256eb2920042534355492efd5e\">One Reddit user, ‘get-a-mac,’\u003c/a> wrote, “I never want those voices gone. They are the voice of BART!”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Another with the handle StreetyMcCarface wrote, “Keep George and Gracie, they are iconic.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Still, Trost said BART \u003cem>is \u003c/em>looking to replace the announcement system at some point, which will force some tough decisions.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Do we introduce new voices or do we actually replicate the old George and Gracie that sound so dated, because people love them?” Trost said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>BART is currently facing a $376 million deficit, raising big questions about its future. It’s forcing Bay Area residents to consider a world without BART and its role in the culture of the bay, big and small.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>\u003ca id=\"Viewthefullepisodetranscript\">\u003c/a>Episode transcript\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Olivia Allen-Price:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Bay Area Rapid Transit. Our dear friend, BART. \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">For regular riders, your whirs, squeaks and horns are part of the everyday soundtrack of life.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">We \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">always\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> hear you coming. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Whir of a train pulling into the station\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cb>Olivia Allen-Price: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">We appreciate those timely warnings… \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The doors are closing please stand clear of the doors\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Olivia Allen-Price: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And how you help us not miss our stop. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Arriving at 16th street Mission\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cb>Olivia Allen-Price: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Every now and then, someone \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">real\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> pops in\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">This is BART operation control…\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Olivia Allen-Price: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Jimmy Tobin, our question asker, has been fixated on one particular sound in the BART ecosystem. A set of announcements …\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Jimmy Tobin:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> So sometimes it feels like there’s like a lower kind of male voice that’s like, feels like it’s from like war games, like WOPR kind of style. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Wargames Clip:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> This box interprets signals from the computer and turns it into sounds. “Shall we play a game?” \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Jimmy Tobin:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> And there’s a higher female voice is kind of like 90s Microsoft Sam style.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Microsoft Sam: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Hello, I am Microsoft Sam. I am the most popular voice of Microsoft.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Olivia Allen-Price: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">There are a variety of voices riders hear throughout BART, some of which are voiced by actual people. But it’s \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">these\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> robotic and synthesized voices that Jimmy can’t stop hearing … \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Three car Fremont Train now boarding, platform 2.\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Olivia Allen-Price: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Jimmy is an audio engineer at Google who actually works on synthesized speech models, and these voices really \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">bothered\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> him. One day when he was waiting for a BART train and heard an announcement for a train heading toward the Oakland Airport.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">6-car Blue line train for OAK Airport Dublin in 15 minutes. 6-car Green line train for OAK Airport Barryessa in 19 minutes\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Jimmy Tobin:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> I never understood what it was saying. I always thought it was, like, Oasis? And so I was just like, what is this word? And then I look at the board and it’s like, OAK, and I’m like, why didn’t it say Oakland? Like, and so I’m baffled by this thing.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Olivia Allen-Price: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">It felt like such a contradiction to him that \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">this \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">was a voice of the transit system going through the home to the AI Boom… where all the newest tech is being developed.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Jimmy Tobin:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> And I kept being like, it must be for, like, accessibility or maybe it’s like, it doesn’t have accents or something. And I was just like, I just can’t justify why this is so hard to understand and so easy to update. That’s why I came to you guys.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Olivia Allen-Price: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">He wants to know the backstory behind these voices – and where they came from.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Jimmy Tobin: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">What has been the decision-making to keep it?\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Olivia Allen-Price: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I’m Olivia Allen-Price and you’re listening to Bay Curious. Today on the show we answer Jimmy’s questions. Stay with us. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Sponsor Break\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Olivia Allen-Price: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">To tell us more about the voices behind BART, we pass it to KQED’s Ana De Almeida Amaral…\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ana De Almeida Amaral: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">When BART first opened to the public on Sept. 11, 1972, the world looked different.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">1970s music plays\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ana De Almeida Amaral: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Richard Nixon was president of the United States. Elvis Presley’s “Burning Love” was charting. And Bay Area residents flocked to try out the new Bay Area Rapid Transit system.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">At the time it only ran for 11 stops — from the McArthur Station in Oakland down to Fremont.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>BART Commercial:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> The decade of the 1970s, is the decade of the decade of transportation alternatives…but the first large-scale breakthrough in moving great numbers of people rapidly and economically is the SF Bay Area Rapid Transit system, commonly called BART.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ana De Almeida Amaral: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">When BART first opened, there was no live train information for riders. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The only way riders knew when a train was coming was by reading a paper schedule. You might hear an announcement for major occurrences like if a train was completely out of service. But if your train was a little delayed, you’d sit and wait– without any information on when it would actually arrive.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">But then in 2000, everything changed.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">BART developed a piece of technology called the Advanced Passenger Information System. For the first time, BART knew the live locations of trains throughout the system. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Riders now got real time information about when their train would arrive..\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Alicia Trost is the Chief Communications Officer at BART. She told me more about this era.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Alicia Trost:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> We had digital screens on the platform that gave you the, what we call ETAs, estimated time arrivals of the train. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ana De Almeida Amaral: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And this was a pretty big deal… but at a time where new legislation mandated accessibility for disabled people— BART had to ask some important questions…\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Alicia Trost:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> But what if you’re low vision and you can’t see or you’re blind? And so there was this big policy decision to say anything that’s been written down, we need to also verbally say.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ana De Almeida Amaral: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">BART chose a text-to-speech system to voice these announcements. It came from Lucent Technologies– a telecommunications company. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And so in 2000, this synthesized voice speaking for BART was born. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Alicia Trost:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> It’s a computer with zero emotion, and it’s… every… word… is… spaced… apart.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ana De Almeida Amaral: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Voices were tested at different speeds and levels of breathiness. Riders gave input on the versions that were easiest to understand that led to the final version.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The feminine voice of this system was named Gracie.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Gracie:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> 6 car richmond train now approaching platform 1 \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ana De Almeida Amaral: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And the masculine voice was named George.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>George:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> 10 car San Francisco-Milbrae train in 8 minutes\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ana De Almeida Amaral: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">George and Gracie announce a train’s estimated time of arrival, when a train is actively arriving, and when it is boarding. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">In 2000, this was cutting edge technology– announcements made automatically, without any human involvement.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Yes, there were and still also are \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">human voiced\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> announcements when there are big disruptions or delays… but even today, you’ll hear George and Gracie while waiting for a train. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Alicia Trost: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So next time you’re in a bart station, really pay attention. You’ll hear George’s voice for one direction only and Gracie’s voice for the opposite direction.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">[Beat]\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ana De Almeida Amaral: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Since 2000, George and Gracie have been the voices we hear on BART platforms. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And in the past 26 years, there has been very little change. That’s because the actual text-to-speech system is \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">proprietary\u003c/span>\u003c/i> \u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">to Lucent Technologies\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">. And after the demise of the company in the mid 2000s, they haven’t been around to provide any updates. And the kicker is BART doesn’t have access to the source code so they can’t change it. The only thing they can do is change the text that George and Gracie speak. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So, I asked Alicia Jimmy’s question: Why hasn’t this been replaced ?\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Alicia Trost: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Because it works and BART has really limited funding and when we go for capital funds, that’s the type of money we use to replace this system we have to think about the priority and things like replacing our trains is more important.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ana De Almeida Amaral: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">But she says that BART \u003c/span>\u003cb>\u003ci>is\u003c/i>\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">aware of the limitations of this technology– they’ve gotten that feedback and they want to replace it in the future. So, they are looking at piloting a new PA system.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Alicia Trost:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> And part of that is introducing what will be new voices. And it makes me nervous to even say that because this is going to cause great fear and debate among riders and the public… Do we introduce new voices or do we actually replicate the old George and Gracie that sounds so dated, but because people love them. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ana De Almeida Amaral: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And, despite their flaws, it seems like lots of people love these voices.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Alicia Trost:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> We frequently get asked about George and Gracie, and people tell us they love it. And we also know that there’s a lot of young people who adore the sound and have actually built in Roblox full-on BART systems.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ana De Almeida Amaral: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And they include recordings George and Gracie.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So as you’re driving or boarding a virtual BART train in the 3D world of roblox, you’ll hear their voices!\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Sounds of Roblox game\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ana De Almeida Amaral: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Aside from Roblox, George and Gracie have been a topic of discussion on Reddit and Youtube. And while there are the usual criticisms and suggestions to change it, it’s interesting to see what these voices represent for some people who love them: \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ana De Almeida Amaral: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">One person on reddit with the username ‘Get-a-Mac’ says:\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Voice Over:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> “I never want those voices gone. They are the voice of BART!\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ana De Almeida Amaral: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Another user, COD Gamer 19, says:\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Voice Over: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Gracie and George are a part of BART’s history, it wouldn’t feel the same without them, they’re a part of the bay as a whole.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Alicia Trost:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> So I just know that it’s a popular topic because of how much I see it like in the culture of the Bay Area.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ana De Almeida Amaral: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Today, there are questions about the future of BART, especially as \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">“They face a 376 million dollar budget deficit.”\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> It’s forcing us to consider the ways BART impacts our lives and culture. And frankly, what it might be like to live without it.These questions go far beyond George and Gracie.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">But still, this little piece of technology, stuck in time, reminds us of how quickly things have changed. And maybe, it brings you a little joy –or frustration –iin the monotony of your commute. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Gracie:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> George, it’s time to get back to work.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>George:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> You are right as usual, Gracie. Goodbye and thanks for visiting.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Olivia Allen-Price: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">That was KQED’s Ana De Almeida Amaral. Jimmy Tobin thank you for asking the question. There is no question too big or small for Bay Curious – if you’ve got one that’s been itching in your mind, send it our way over at \u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"http://baycurious.org\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">BayCurious.org\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> or shoot us an email. We’re at \u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"mailto:baycurious@kqed.org\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">baycurious@kqed.org\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Bay Curious is made by Katrina Schwartz, Christopher Beale and me Olivia Allen-Price.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Extra support from Maha Sanad, Katie Sprenger, Jen Chien, Ethan Toven-Lindsey and everyone on team KQED.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Some members of the KQED podcast team are represented by The Screen Actors Guild, American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, San Francisco Northern California Local.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I’m Olivia Allen-Price. Thanks for listening.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"info": "The day's top stories from BBC News compiled twice daily in the week, once at weekends.",
"airtime": "MON-FRI 9pm-10pm, TUE-FRI 1am-2am",
"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/BBC-World-Service-Podcast-Tile-360x360-1.jpg",
"officialWebsiteLink": "https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/live:bbc_world_service",
"meta": {
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"source": "BBC World Service"
},
"link": "/radio/program/bbc-world-service",
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"tuneIn": "https://tunein.com/radio/BBC-World-Service-p455581/",
"rss": "https://podcasts.files.bbci.co.uk/p02nq0gn.rss"
}
},
"californiareport": {
"id": "californiareport",
"title": "The California Report",
"tagline": "California, day by day",
"info": "KQED’s statewide radio news program providing daily coverage of issues, trends and public policy decisions.",
"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/The-California-Report-Podcast-Tile-703x703-1.jpg",
"imageAlt": "KQED The California Report",
"officialWebsiteLink": "/californiareport",
"meta": {
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"source": "kqed",
"order": 8
},
"link": "/californiareport",
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"amazon": "https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/26099305-72af-4542-9dde-ac1807fe36d5/kqed-s-the-california-report",
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}
},
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"id": "californiareportmagazine",
"title": "The California Report Magazine",
"tagline": "Your state, your stories",
"info": "Every week, The California Report Magazine takes you on a road trip for the ears: to visit the places and meet the people who make California unique. The in-depth storytelling podcast from the California Report.",
"airtime": "FRI 4:30pm-5pm, 6:30pm-7pm, 11pm-11:30pm",
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"officialWebsiteLink": "/californiareportmagazine",
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"order": 10
},
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"google": "https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkcy5tZWdhcGhvbmUuZm0vS1FJTkM3NjkwNjk1OTAz",
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}
},
"city-arts": {
"id": "city-arts",
"title": "City Arts & Lectures",
"info": "A one-hour radio program to hear celebrated writers, artists and thinkers address contemporary ideas and values, often discussing the creative process. Please note: tapes or transcripts are not available",
"imageSrc": "https://ww2.kqed.org/radio/wp-content/uploads/sites/50/2018/05/cityartsandlecture-300x300.jpg",
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"airtime": "SUN 1pm-2pm, TUE 10pm, WED 1am",
"meta": {
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"source": "City Arts & Lectures"
},
"link": "https://www.cityarts.net",
"subscribe": {
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"rss": "https://www.cityarts.net/feed/"
}
},
"closealltabs": {
"id": "closealltabs",
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"info": "Close All Tabs breaks down how digital culture shapes our world through thoughtful insights and irreverent humor.",
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"officialWebsiteLink": "/podcasts/closealltabs",
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"order": 1
},
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"id": "code-switch-life-kit",
"title": "Code Switch / Life Kit",
"info": "\u003cem>Code Switch\u003c/em>, which listeners will hear in the first part of the hour, has fearless and much-needed conversations about race. Hosted by journalists of color, the show tackles the subject of race head-on, exploring how it impacts every part of society — from politics and pop culture to history, sports and more.\u003cbr />\u003cbr />\u003cem>Life Kit\u003c/em>, which will be in the second part of the hour, guides you through spaces and feelings no one prepares you for — from finances to mental health, from workplace microaggressions to imposter syndrome, from relationships to parenting. The show features experts with real world experience and shares their knowledge. Because everyone needs a little help being human.\u003cbr />\u003cbr />\u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/podcasts/510312/codeswitch\">\u003cem>Code Switch\u003c/em> offical site and podcast\u003c/a>\u003cbr />\u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/lifekit\">\u003cem>Life Kit\u003c/em> offical site and podcast\u003c/a>\u003cbr />",
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"meta": {
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"id": "commonwealth-club",
"title": "Commonwealth Club of California Podcast",
"info": "The Commonwealth Club of California is the nation's oldest and largest public affairs forum. As a non-partisan forum, The Club brings to the public airwaves diverse viewpoints on important topics. The Club's weekly radio broadcast - the oldest in the U.S., dating back to 1924 - is carried across the nation on public radio stations and is now podcasting. Our website archive features audio of our recent programs, as well as selected speeches from our long and distinguished history. This podcast feed is usually updated twice a week and is always un-edited.",
"airtime": "THU 10pm, FRI 1am",
"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/Commonwealth-Club-Podcast-Tile-360x360-1.jpg",
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"meta": {
"site": "news",
"source": "Commonwealth Club of California"
},
"link": "/radio/program/commonwealth-club",
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"apple": "https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/commonwealth-club-of-california-podcast/id976334034?mt=2",
"google": "https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL3d3dy5jb21tb253ZWFsdGhjbHViLm9yZy9hdWRpby9wb2RjYXN0L3dlZWtseS54bWw",
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},
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"id": "forum",
"title": "Forum",
"tagline": "The conversation starts here",
"info": "KQED’s live call-in program discussing local, state, national and international issues, as well as in-depth interviews.",
"airtime": "MON-FRI 9am-11am, 10pm-11pm",
"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/Forum-Podcast-Tile-703x703-1.jpg",
"imageAlt": "KQED Forum with Mina Kim and Alexis Madrigal",
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"source": "kqed",
"order": 9
},
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"google": "https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkcy5tZWdhcGhvbmUuZm0vS1FJTkM5NTU3MzgxNjMz",
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},
"freakonomics-radio": {
"id": "freakonomics-radio",
"title": "Freakonomics Radio",
"info": "Freakonomics Radio is a one-hour award-winning podcast and public-radio project hosted by Stephen Dubner, with co-author Steve Levitt as a regular guest. It is produced in partnership with WNYC.",
"imageSrc": "https://ww2.kqed.org/news/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2018/05/freakonomicsRadio.png",
"officialWebsiteLink": "http://freakonomics.com/",
"airtime": "SUN 1am-2am, SAT 3pm-4pm",
"meta": {
"site": "radio",
"source": "WNYC"
},
"link": "/radio/program/freakonomics-radio",
"subscribe": {
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"apple": "https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/freakonomics-radio/id354668519",
"tuneIn": "https://tunein.com/podcasts/WNYC-Podcasts/Freakonomics-Radio-p272293/",
"rss": "https://feeds.feedburner.com/freakonomicsradio"
}
},
"fresh-air": {
"id": "fresh-air",
"title": "Fresh Air",
"info": "Hosted by Terry Gross, \u003cem>Fresh Air from WHYY\u003c/em> is the Peabody Award-winning weekday magazine of contemporary arts and issues. One of public radio's most popular programs, Fresh Air features intimate conversations with today's biggest luminaries.",
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"apple": "https://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?s=143441&mt=2&id=214089682&at=11l79Y&ct=nprdirectory",
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"rss": "https://feeds.npr.org/381444908/podcast.xml"
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"here-and-now": {
"id": "here-and-now",
"title": "Here & Now",
"info": "A live production of NPR and WBUR Boston, in collaboration with stations across the country, Here & Now reflects the fluid world of news as it's happening in the middle of the day, with timely, in-depth news, interviews and conversation. Hosted by Robin Young, Jeremy Hobson and Tonya Mosley.",
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"rss": "https://feeds.npr.org/510051/podcast.xml"
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},
"hidden-brain": {
"id": "hidden-brain",
"title": "Hidden Brain",
"info": "Shankar Vedantam uses science and storytelling to reveal the unconscious patterns that drive human behavior, shape our choices and direct our relationships.",
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"officialWebsiteLink": "https://www.npr.org/series/423302056/hidden-brain",
"airtime": "SUN 7pm-8pm",
"meta": {
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"source": "NPR"
},
"link": "/radio/program/hidden-brain",
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},
"how-i-built-this": {
"id": "how-i-built-this",
"title": "How I Built This with Guy Raz",
"info": "Guy Raz dives into the stories behind some of the world's best known companies. How I Built This weaves a narrative journey about innovators, entrepreneurs and idealists—and the movements they built.",
"imageSrc": "https://ww2.kqed.org/news/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2018/05/howIBuiltThis.png",
"officialWebsiteLink": "https://www.npr.org/podcasts/510313/how-i-built-this",
"airtime": "SUN 7:30pm-8pm",
"meta": {
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"source": "npr"
},
"link": "/radio/program/how-i-built-this",
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"apple": "https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/how-i-built-this-with-guy-raz/id1150510297?mt=2",
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},
"hyphenacion": {
"id": "hyphenacion",
"title": "Hyphenación",
"tagline": "Where conversation and cultura meet",
"info": "What kind of no sabo word is Hyphenación? For us, it’s about living within a hyphenation. Like being a third-gen Mexican-American from the Texas border now living that Bay Area Chicano life. Like Xorje! Each week we bring together a couple of hyphenated Latinos to talk all about personal life choices: family, careers, relationships, belonging … everything is on the table. ",
"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/Hyphenacion_FinalAssets_PodcastTile.png",
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"order": 15
},
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},
"jerrybrown": {
"id": "jerrybrown",
"title": "The Political Mind of Jerry Brown",
"tagline": "Lessons from a lifetime in politics",
"info": "The Political Mind of Jerry Brown brings listeners the wisdom of the former Governor, Mayor, and presidential candidate. Scott Shafer interviewed Brown for more than 40 hours, covering the former governor's life and half-century in the political game – and Brown has some lessons he'd like to share. ",
"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/The-Political-Mind-of-Jerry-Brown-Podcast-Tile-703x703-1.jpg",
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"officialWebsiteLink": "/podcasts/jerrybrown",
"meta": {
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"order": 18
},
"link": "/podcasts/jerrybrown",
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"apple": "https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/id1492194549",
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}
},
"latino-usa": {
"id": "latino-usa",
"title": "Latino USA",
"airtime": "MON 1am-2am, SUN 6pm-7pm",
"info": "Latino USA, the radio journal of news and culture, is the only national, English-language radio program produced from a Latino perspective.",
"imageSrc": "https://ww2.kqed.org/radio/wp-content/uploads/sites/50/2018/04/latinoUsa.jpg",
"officialWebsiteLink": "http://latinousa.org/",
"meta": {
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"source": "npr"
},
"link": "/radio/program/latino-usa",
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"apple": "https://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?s=143441&mt=2&id=79681317&at=11l79Y&ct=nprdirectory",
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"rss": "https://feeds.npr.org/510016/podcast.xml"
}
},
"marketplace": {
"id": "marketplace",
"title": "Marketplace",
"info": "Our flagship program, helmed by Kai Ryssdal, examines what the day in money delivered, through stories, conversations, newsworthy numbers and more. Updated Monday through Friday at about 3:30 p.m. PT.",
"airtime": "MON-FRI 4pm-4:30pm, MON-WED 6:30pm-7pm",
"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/Marketplace-Podcast-Tile-360x360-1.jpg",
"officialWebsiteLink": "https://www.marketplace.org/",
"meta": {
"site": "news",
"source": "American Public Media"
},
"link": "/radio/program/marketplace",
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"rss": "https://feeds.publicradio.org/public_feeds/marketplace-pm/rss/rss"
}
},
"masters-of-scale": {
"id": "masters-of-scale",
"title": "Masters of Scale",
"info": "Masters of Scale is an original podcast in which LinkedIn co-founder and Greylock Partner Reid Hoffman sets out to describe and prove theories that explain how great entrepreneurs take their companies from zero to a gazillion in ingenious fashion.",
"airtime": "Every other Wednesday June 12 through October 16 at 8pm (repeats Thursdays at 2am)",
"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/Masters-of-Scale-Podcast-Tile-360x360-1.jpg",
"officialWebsiteLink": "https://mastersofscale.com/",
"meta": {
"site": "radio",
"source": "WaitWhat"
},
"link": "/radio/program/masters-of-scale",
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"apple": "http://mastersofscale.app.link/",
"rss": "https://rss.art19.com/masters-of-scale"
}
},
"mindshift": {
"id": "mindshift",
"title": "MindShift",
"tagline": "A podcast about the future of learning and how we raise our kids",
"info": "The MindShift podcast explores the innovations in education that are shaping how kids learn. Hosts Ki Sung and Katrina Schwartz introduce listeners to educators, researchers, parents and students who are developing effective ways to improve how kids learn. We cover topics like how fed-up administrators are developing surprising tactics to deal with classroom disruptions; how listening to podcasts are helping kids develop reading skills; the consequences of overparenting; and why interdisciplinary learning can engage students on all ends of the traditional achievement spectrum. This podcast is part of the MindShift education site, a division of KQED News. KQED is an NPR/PBS member station based in San Francisco. You can also visit the MindShift website for episodes and supplemental blog posts or tweet us \u003ca href=\"https://twitter.com/MindShiftKQED\">@MindShiftKQED\u003c/a> or visit us at \u003ca href=\"/mindshift\">MindShift.KQED.org\u003c/a>",
"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/Mindshift-Podcast-Tile-703x703-1.jpg",
"imageAlt": "KQED MindShift: How We Will Learn",
"officialWebsiteLink": "/mindshift/",
"meta": {
"site": "news",
"source": "kqed",
"order": 12
},
"link": "/podcasts/mindshift",
"subscribe": {
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"google": "https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkcy5tZWdhcGhvbmUuZm0vS1FJTkM1NzY0NjAwNDI5",
"npr": "https://www.npr.org/podcasts/464615685/mind-shift-podcast",
"stitcher": "https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/kqed/stories-teachers-share",
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}
},
"morning-edition": {
"id": "morning-edition",
"title": "Morning Edition",
"info": "\u003cem>Morning Edition\u003c/em> takes listeners around the country and the world with multi-faceted stories and commentaries every weekday. Hosts Steve Inskeep, David Greene and Rachel Martin bring you the latest breaking news and features to prepare you for the day.",
"airtime": "MON-FRI 3am-9am",
"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/Morning-Edition-Podcast-Tile-360x360-1.jpg",
"officialWebsiteLink": "https://www.npr.org/programs/morning-edition/",
"meta": {
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"link": "/radio/program/morning-edition"
},
"onourwatch": {
"id": "onourwatch",
"title": "On Our Watch",
"tagline": "Deeply-reported investigative journalism",
"info": "For decades, the process for how police police themselves has been inconsistent – if not opaque. In some states, like California, these proceedings were completely hidden. After a new police transparency law unsealed scores of internal affairs files, our reporters set out to examine these cases and the shadow world of police discipline. On Our Watch brings listeners into the rooms where officers are questioned and witnesses are interrogated to find out who this system is really protecting. Is it the officers, or the public they've sworn to serve?",
"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/On-Our-Watch-Podcast-Tile-703x703-1.jpg",
"imageAlt": "On Our Watch from NPR and KQED",
"officialWebsiteLink": "/podcasts/onourwatch",
"meta": {
"site": "news",
"source": "kqed",
"order": 11
},
"link": "/podcasts/onourwatch",
"subscribe": {
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"google": "https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkcy5ucHIub3JnLzUxMDM2MC9wb2RjYXN0LnhtbD9zYz1nb29nbGVwb2RjYXN0cw",
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