From rumors that Beyonce was going to perform to Uncommitted delegates staging an all-night sit-in outside the United Center to demand that a Palestinian voice be given time to speak on the main stage, there were many storylines that emerged from the 2024 Democratic National Convention. But the DNC also showed how the ruling establishment and corporate media work together to curate a fantasy version of reality, especially when it comes to whitewashing the Biden-Harris Administration’s unequivocal support for Israel’s genocidal assault on Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank. TRNN Editor-in-Chief Maximillian Alvarez speaks with Sarah Lazare and Adam Johnson about what reporting at the DNC taught them about the changed media environment we are all part of. 

Sarah Lazare is the editor of Workday Magazine and a contributing editor for In These Times; she was reporting from Chicago as a freelancer for The Nation magazine, separate from her Workday responsibilities. Adam Johnson is cohost of the podcast Citations Needed, a columnist at TRNN, and the author of the The Column on Substack; he was also reporting from Chicago as a freelancer for The Nation magazine.

Studio Production: Cameron Granadino

Audio Post-Production: Alina Nehlich

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TRANSCRIPT

The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Welcome everyone to the Real News Network podcast. My name is Maximilian Alvarez. I’m the editor in chief here at The Real News, and it’s so great to have you all with us. Before we get going today, I want to remind y’all that the Real News is an independent viewer and listener supported grassroots media network. We don’t take corporate cash, we don’t have ads, and we never put our reporting behind paywalls. Our team is fiercely dedicated to lifting up the voices and stories from the front lines of struggle around the world. But we cannot continue to do this work without your support, and we need you to become a supporter of The Real News now. Just head over to the real news.com/donate and donate today. It really makes a difference. So we are back in Baltimore after an intense week of filming inside and outside the Democratic National Convention in Chicago.

The 2024 DNC concluded on August 22nd with Kamala Harris officially accepting the party’s nomination and addressing the convention. And now it is a full on sprint to the general election on November 5th from the back and forth rumors that Beyonce was going to perform at the convention to Uncommitted delegates, staging an all night sit-in outside the convention center to demand that a Palestinian voice be given time to speak on the main stage from the Gaza Solidarity protest that took place on the streets of Chicago during the convention to the over 200 staffers who worked for George HW Bush, George W. Bush, Senator Mitt Romney in the late Senator John McCain endorsing Harris. There were many storylines that emerged from the DNC all mixed into a frenetic content stream and extruded through a highly fractured digital media ecosystem that is heavily partitioned by class algorithm and ideological preference. As you all know, the real news was there on the ground in Chicago, inside the convention and on the front lines of the protests, and we were there partnering and working in collaboration with the great in these Times Magazine, as well as other vital independent outlets like Truth Out Prism Magazine and other members of the newly formed Movement Media Alliance of which The Real News is a proud member.

Now in this podcast, we want to take a little step back from the immediate storylines that came out of the DNC and we want to talk about the peculiar roles that the media plays in the creation and curation of media spectacles like this, and what reporting at the DNC taught us about the changed media environment we are all a part of now. And to talk about all this, I could not be more excited to be joined by two incredible movement media fellows and coworkers and colleagues with whom we collaborate regularly. The great Sarah Lazar, who is the editor of Workday Magazine and a contributing editor for in these times, both incredible outlets that The Real News is a proud partner with. And Sarah was reporting from Chicago as a freelancer for the Nation magazine, which was separate from her Workday responsibilities. And we are also joined by Adam Johnson. Adam is co-host of the podcast Citations Needed, which everyone should listen to, and he is also a columnist here at the Real News Network, and you can find more of Adam’s writing on his substack titled The Column. Sarah, Adam, thank you both so much for joining me today on The Real News Network. I really appreciate it.

Sarah Lazare:

It’s so good to be here and I really want to give a shout out Real News’ coverage was incredible.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Thank you so much, sister. That means the world to us and right back at you guys doing the incredible work you were doing for the nation and beyond. Really vital stuff that everyone out there should read. We will link to Sarah and Adam’s pieces in the show notes for this episode. And yeah, I want to kind of dive right in here with a big meaty question that I’ve been dying to talk about with you guys specifically. So we’ve had a little time to rest after the DNC. We’ve had a little time to process and decompress, not catch up on sleep enough. I think we are all still in a sleep deficit, but we’ve had some time and some distance to sort of reflect on what we all just took part in. And as members of the media, we were all three of us and my colleague Mel Bier and the great folks who were with us there on the ground, we were all there in Chicago to cover the events unfolding at and around the DNC. But I want to table that for a second and I want to talk specifically about the presence and role of the media at the DNC. So as people who occupy that middle space between the reality on the ground and the viewers, readers and listeners out there who want to see it, what did you guys observe from the media side that you think people who weren’t there at the DNC need to know and consider?

Sarah Lazare:

I was struck by the incredible gulf between people who were there mobilizing around Gaza and the grief and desperation and urgency with which they spoke enchanted and marched about the need to stop us support for what Israel is doing in Gaza, the Gulf. Between that and the message of Joy and Brett Summer and celebration at the DNC, it was really, really jarring. I think as a member of the press, I saw how sad and upset and scared people are who are focused on Gaza Right now. Chicago has the biggest Palestinian diaspora community in the United States. I said Chicago, what I mean is a Chicago metropolitan area, including suburbs like Bridgeview, which are sometimes referred to as little Palestine. And there are a lot of people in the Chicago area who are directly impacted by what the US and Israel are doing in Gaza right now.

There are people who have lost dozens of family members. I talked to one person, Narin Hassan, who has a friend who lost a hundred family members. People have family in both Gaza and the West Bank who are scared, who are displaced, who are dispersed all over the place. And those folks have been mobilizing for months. Chicago has seen 1, 2, 3 protests every week, some of them the tens of thousands people protesting at lawmaker’s homes, people doing creative direct actions, and a lot of the grief and anger and outrage that Palestinian Americans and other people of conscience brought to the demos outside was just such a contrast with what was going on inside. The day after the panel that uncommitted organized, there was another separate event on the fourth floor of McCormick Place. It just felt kind of far away from the daytime programming. It felt like it was tucked away in a small corner.

And there doctors who had done medical humanitarian work in Gaza provided moral witness to what they experienced, and it was unbelievably devastating. They shared stories of holding the hands of children as they died with no family members left alive to comfort them. They shared the stories of one woman who was suffering severe burns all over her body and they discovered she was pregnant and they knew she was going to die and there was nothing they could do to keep her alive. And every day she was there, she was in agonizing pain. We heard these stories over and over again. There were a lot of tears. Shed not only by presenters, but honestly members of the press. At one point, an uncommitted delegate held his head in his hands and cried and turned his back to the crowd. Tissues were passed around, there was crying and sobbing, and some of these doctors had traveled from across the country just for that event just to talk to any press outlets that would listen.

And it was a small room. There was definitely press there, but it could never ever feel like enough press for the messages that they carried. We talked to one doctor who traveled all the way from Arkansas and was going to catch a flight later that afternoon, and it just had the feel of these people are so desperate to tell the world what Israel is doing in Gaza with US participation and munitions and arms, and they will do whatever it takes to try to make people listen, including rehashing their trauma over and over and over again. And to go from that incredibly somber event inside of the United Center where there were jubilant signs, there were people cheering. It was an era of festivity and party. People were clearly using that as social time, it as time to have fun. It was deeply disturbing and I feel haunted by that contrast.

Maximillian Alvarez:

And just to add two quick footnotes there before we toss to Adam, just to really flesh out two things that Sarah said when she says that these events at McCormick Place felt far away from the United Center, I want to emphasize for people they were, if you’ve been to Chicago, you know how much of a pain in the ass it is to get from the west side of town where the United Center is to the McCormick Place, which is on the south side of downtown. It’s not an easy place to get to, but they are quite far apart. They’re not right next to each other. If you’re in McCormick place, no one in the United Center is going to know who you are, what you’re doing, or if you even exist. So I just want to emphasize the spatial distance as well to say nothing of how grossly huge and monstrous the McCormick Place itself

Adam Johnson:

Is. Yeah, it’s about seven and a half miles away.

Maximillian Alvarez:

And then to also emphasize the sort of disconnect here, we will link to this as well, but over at Breakthrough News, I’m sure a lot of folks saw the viral video of DNC attendees walking past the security perimeter at the United Center while protesters were reading the names of killed Palestinians and Gaza, and you had DNC attendees literally plugging their ears and walking past with disdain, refusing to hear those names. So that is also what we saw on the ground to give that additional context for what Sarah just put so powerfully. Adam, what about you? What did you see? What do you think folks out there need to see about that media side?

Adam Johnson:

And to be clear, those protesters who I think are terribly courageous, I mean, again, these are people who were there for hours, they have nothing to gain. There’s no career gain. They’re not getting paid to do it. Although of course Fox News would say they are who are literally just trying to get people to pay attention. And I worked on a piece for the nation about what I’m calling or what I call the compartmentalization, which is to say there’s an elaborate regime of excuse making and burden shifting that liberal media has propped up to make it so people can go celebrate at the DNC, including some of our frankly union brothers and sisters who are there celebrating. Again, this is all very complex. We can get into that. While the administration, the current administration and its current replacement running on the Democratic ticket, the vice president, vice President Harris have committed to doubling down, tripling down on the policy of supporting genocide.

Again, this is not, and I think some people have a hard time drawing this connective tissue because ostensibly they sort of use the magical C word. They say they support a ceasefire and that they correctly guess that would be sufficient. And they were right because what they did is they simply redefined the term ceasefire. Something I’ve been writing about since March the second they began doing it because for the first five months of this, so-called conflict, the State Department issued a memo banning people from using the word ceasefire in related terms. And then on the eve of the Michigan primary, when the uncommitted movement was increasingly embarrassing, the administration who at that point of course was running for reelection, they decided to co-opt the term ceasefire and just make the temporary pause hostage exchanges, which they used to call temporary pause and rebranded that ceasefire, which is why activists in concert with that switch from the White House as part started talking about an arms embargo and conditioning aid to Israel as being the ask because that was the implicit ask of a ceasefire demand.

But because the White House and liberal media more generally started to play stupid, they had to explicitly state what the demand was, which is using the leverage of conditioning aid or arms embargo to compel Israel to agree to a lasting ceasefire, which again, finally the New York Times today said on the daily podcast, Patrick Kingsley, their Jerusalem correspondent, said literally is Netanyahu opposes a lasting ceasefire? So now finally, I guess people are acknowledging that reality that when they talk about ceasefire, when liberal Zionist organizations talk about ceasefire and the White House talks about ceasefire, they’re talking about a temporary pause for a few weeks while they exchange hostages, get leverage from Hamas or whatever, militants have hostages, and then continue doing the sort of genocide which they’ve been carrying out. I think pretty much consensus among genocide scholars who are not in denial, I know that’s a bit of a tology, but it is a genocide as Gaza is not livable.

They are pushing people to a very small airport, LAX airport size piece of land, and they are continuing to punish them with engage in collective punishment and displacement and unleashing diseases, especially polio, which has now taken off and that this is not going to stop unless the US conditions arms to Israel. Everybody knows it. Again, to their credit, although they did not withhold their endorsement on this condition, seven unions representing 6 million workers, including U-A-W-S-E-I-U, demanded that Biden engaged in a full arms embargo of Israel until it ends its genocide, which is now the sort of baseline ask I think of humanitarian organizations. Again, this was always the implied mechanism of the ceasefire, but now I got to say it literally. And so when they did the switcheroo from Biden to Harris in a matter 48 hours because the issue of Gaza was not allowed to be litigated in a primary because there really wasn’t one, there was an attempt to try to push Harris again, to the extent that’s even possible.

The uncommitted, which of course began under Biden during his primary and continued until up until the DNC continues to this day saying, we’re going to withhold our support until you agree to an arms embargo in Israel, which sounds scary to some people, some lay people who say, arms embargo to Israel, but what about blah, blah, blah? But really what it is, another way to phrase it is conditioning aid until Israel is in line with international and US law, which by the way, the US is supposed to be doing anyway, otherwise, I’m not sure what the point of having these laws are. And many experts, many normy experts just today just security had an article showing how, again, this is kind of a very normy publication showing how Israel’s engrossed violation both in Gaza and the West Bank of international law and the Lehe law compels the White House and ought to compel a future Harris White House to comport to that law as Israel commits gross human rights violations.

The state department’s own internal memo a few months ago said they committed human rights violations, but they’re taking the necessary steps to prevent in the future, which everyone knows was a total whitewash job. And so what the protestors are demanding, the baseline ask, obviously protestors outside the perimeter, their asks are more ambitious in apartheid and occupation, liberate Palestine, all that. But the baseline ask that every organization agrees on liberal progressive left far, left Palestinian, even frankly some non Zionist Jewish groups and anti-Zionist Jewish groups over 30, I think at this point, hundreds of Nobel laureates, they say, we have to end selling arms to Israel to compel them to stop this madness. So it’s a very basic ask. I think it’s incredibly reasonable ask. It’s a ask that the Biden White House and a future Harris administration can do unilaterally. They don’t need Congress. There isn’t some parliamentarian who they can appeal to sort of block their way, and it’s something Harris could have agreed to that she decided not to.

And so that’s the connective tissue that again, through the ceasefire, co-option, PR effort and all these kind of other FAE humanitarian efforts through humanitarian peer, all these other public relations campaigns, they’ve undertaken the White House that they’ve confused liberals, and so they kind of put Gaza out of their mind. And so when you’re actually physically going into the dnc, as you know, you’re bombarded by protestors calling out the names of the people that their candidate has agreed to continue, frankly supporting and killing because she has now through her foreign aid advisor or foreign policy advisor, Phil Gordon has reaffirmed their support, unequivocal support for continued arms sales to Israel. So she’s not budging. And so she’s just assuming she can kind of do brat memes and vibe her way beyond the criticism from Gaza protesters, which theoretically ought to be picking up this week with school being back in session.

Sarah Lazare:

If I could just jump in for one second to talk about the demands of protestors. So the Coalition of March on the DNC is composed of more than 250 organizations from across the country, and a lot of Palestinian organizations are numbered among them. For example, US PCN, the US Palestinian Community Network. And so US PCN actually moved to join the coalition before October 7th because their position was what Israel is doing to Palestinians. The injustice, the apartheid, the colonial settler context predates October 7th. And so they had reason to protest before that. But then given what Israel has done over the past 10 months, 40,000 Palestinians killed, this is likely a dramatic underestimate. One Lancet study estimated that 186,000 people have been killed when you consider both direct and indirect death. We’re seeing the most efficient killing campaign in the 21st century if you’re speaking just in terms of daily death toll.

So given that emergency, the coalition march on the DNC decided to center Palestine and Gaza in the multiple marches that they held that had thousands of people in the streets. The two demands that they put out were very simple. One was end genocide and two was end all USAID to Israel. The demand to end all USAID is a little different from some of the demands that we’ve been seeing focusing on arms, specifically the seven major unions representing nearly half of all unionized workers in the US that Adam mentioned, their demand was specifically around an arms bargo pursuant to a permanency fire. And then the uncommitted delegates there were 29 who went to the DNC. They were also demanding an arms embargo. That was their demand that they had painted on their banners and that they had put out in terms of their messaging around not another bomb. We all know that they ended up putting out more moderate demands. So they did their sit-in because they were denied a Palestinian American speaker on stage. Any of them would’ve told you that was absolute bottom of the barrel lowest possible bar demand. And they did go in there calling for an arms embargo. And so even though these demands have some variation and difference, that what unites them is a focus on ending material support, which is a recognition that it’s not enough to shift rhetoric, you have to change material reality.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Well, and speaking about shifting rhetoric, I want to just quickly follow up because I got some thoughts on what you guys just said, but I wanted to follow up really quickly on the role that the media was playing in laundering this rhetorical change that we saw manifest on the DNC main stage where some of the loudest applauses I heard throughout the week came when people like Bernie Sanders mentioned the word ceasefire and suddenly the stadium’s clapping. And I know you guys were kind of losing your collective minds. I saw Adam losing it on Twitter in real time as mainstream and corporate media journalists were doing the work of laundering this rhetorical shift. Could you just say a little bit about that, about the role that certain actors and institutions in the media are playing to make that rhetorical shift where Kamala Harris is calling or mentioning a ceasefire, but it’s now meaning something different and the media is there to massage that difference out of perception?

Adam Johnson:

Yeah, this is the most literal minded, this is train clapping seals. I dunno if you’ve ever been to the shed aquarium, but they have a seal that does the clapping. This is lower than that. I mean, when Harris, she’s very clear she’s not going to engage in arms embargo, not going to use real leverage. And I understand why this is confusing to sort of passive media consumers who can’t really keep up. I get it. But those in the know those who track these things know better, and they know that what Harris talks about the word ceasefire, she means exactly what Biden means, which is appeal to these nebulous talks that are like the peace process they’re designed to provide cover for Israel. They’re not in good faith. Israel is very clear to their credit, Israel, again, to Netanyahu’s credit, every single day he’s asked, he goes out and says, we do not support a lasting ceasefire.

We are not going to end this war until we defeat Hamas total victory. He’s very clear about that. But that goes through the liberal media laundry machine and comes out as Israel supports a ceasefire. Hamas is the one holding it back, but Israel is very clear. They support a temporary pause for the purposes of hostage exchanges. So when Harris talks about how we need a ceasefire, that’s what she’s talking about, a genocide cigarette break. And she’s been very clear about this. Biden’s been very clear about this on his May 31st speech, which is one of the most cynical things I’ve ever seen. Biden used the term in the war twice, three times, and then in follow-up questions to their dead eyed zombie press, Matt Miller, these guys, John Kirby, they’d say, well, wait a second. Do you support a lasting ceasefire that keeps Hamas in power? Because that’s implied in the idea of ending the war because obviously insurgent militias, maybe in some normative sense, you may not like them, but typically you don’t just defeat them by magic.

And they’re not even remotely close to defeating Hamas to the extent they could. It would basically be tantamount to genocide, which is why they’re carrying out the plan they’re carrying out and they say, oh, no, no, we’re not going to support an end of the war until Hamas is defeated. Well, okay, so what’s the mechanism here? So clearly it’s bullshit again. When people said ceasefire, they were referencing things like 2009, 2012, 20 14, 20 18, 20 21, when a ceasefire meant Israel ends its current military game. Doesn’t mean kumbaya, doesn’t mean we solved the problem, but it means we stopped killing dozens of people in scores of children per week. That’s what it meant. Everybody knew it, but then they switched the definition to this ambiguous open-ended peace talks. So when Bernie Sanders says, calls for a ceasefire, and he gets all these write-ups, it’s like, well, he’s just appealing to the same bogus ceasefire talks unless he’s explicit.

When the demand shifted months ago from this vague sort of normative appeal of a ceasefire, which again could mean anything from two days to two years, to two decades, to an arms embargo, everybody knows that’s the only mechanism with which Israel will agree to anything. And we know that because that’s what they keep telling us. And so when the trained seals at the shed aquarium started going, ah, ah, when she said the word ceasefire, I was like, oh, here we go. And then people started doing all the bullshit, all the kind of progressive foreign policy adjacent sort of sheep dogging. They started doing all this kind of tea leaf reading like, oh, her empathy speak was slightly better. And she said this words, and then you look it up, and it’s actually the exact language Biden used four months ago. And by the way, the exact language the Trump administration had been using Palestine needs dignity and freedom and sort of these meaningless buzzwords that this doesn’t mean anything, that people don’t need better tone, they don’t need better nonprofit speak, they need her to change her policy and to support an arms embargo.

And it’s a very clear ask. It’s an ask with material consequence. It’s actually an ask that’ll make APAC have a five alarm meltdown. And that’s how you know this bullshit rhetoric doesn’t matter because they’re not saying anything. They don’t care. And in fact, they praised her speech, which reinforced every basic premise of this genocide. Israel is a right to defend. It’s always kind of this sort of liberal code for we’re going to keep sending arms and let them do as they wish in Gaza. And so I know that was immensely frustrating because they’re just rebranding the same policies with a different face. It’s just the same thing Biden did. And then whenever she’s asked to clarify, she’s very clear that she has the exact same position as Biden. I’m not sure how much clearer she can make it. She keeps saying it.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Well, and that goes double for the party’s policy on immigration and the border as well. I mean, I think two things were made abundantly clear at the policy level that even though there is a new name at the top of the Democratic ticket as far as policy goes towards Israel and its genocidal war on Gaza and the immigration debate and the quote border crisis, the policy is going to be the same as it was before. And I want to talk about that disconnect between policy and rhetoric, policy and spectacle here in this next question. But just to kind of add a couple of thoughts and observations from my side on the ground there as well, you guys covering the protests going inside the convention center, getting to see both sides of that really made me think about the core of what media is, what it does, what functions it serves.

I mean, in a past life, I was a media historian when I still wanted to be an academic. And I think a lot about how going back to its Latin root media means middle, it is the middle space. It is the place between two things that are unconnected. It is the connector between those things. And what I saw in Chicago last week was as much a lesson in where those connections are and how they shape what we see and hear, and also where they are not and how that shapes our politics. I mean, even some of the examples that have come up in this conversation so far, the heavier panels focused on things like Gaza that were taking place almost two miles away at the McCormick Center on the other side of town where no one could really see or hear them if they were going to the United Center.

So you have that sort of partitioning off. You had the battle by the organizations represented in the coalition to march on the DNC. They were battling with the city of Chicago and with federal courts for months over the protest route demanding that they be allowed to march, quote with sight and sound of the DNC, right? That’s a media question. It’s like we want to be immediately heard and seen by the people who are walking into that United Center. Otherwise, what you see if you’re there on the ground is the caveat to the American religion of free speech, which is that people may have a right to speak, they have no right to be heard. And the DNC and the powers that be, this is not particular to the DNC. My colleague Steven, Janice and Te Graham showed us that the barriers around the RNC in Milwaukee in July were just as high, especially after the assassination attempt on Donald Trump.

So from that to delegates literally plugging their ears, walking past protestors, I think that’s a question I want to really leave listeners with. What do we have to be heard and seen and what mechanisms are being put in place seen and unseen to prevent us from seeing and hearing the truth? And I think that to add on that too, two things that covering the DNC really taught me about the media environment that we are in. I feel like I did learn a lot by being there in that environment about the industry that we’re in, that maybe I hadn’t ever covered anything like this before. Maybe this is the first time that I’d cover something like this since the Covid lockdown in 2020, where that forced a lot of evolutions in the digital media ecosystem. I don’t know. But what I did really take note of is that at so many of these marches, there were as many media and police as there were protestors.

I mean, that was very apparent to me on Sunday during the bodies march where the street Michigan Avenue was lined with hundreds of police and cameras everywhere, not to diminish the efforts of the protestors, but to those who maybe saw pictures, it may have felt like it was a more overwhelming presence than it actually was because there were so many police I press there. And to add onto that, whether it was at the march, whether it was at the Uncommitted Delegate, sit-in, another thing that really struck me when I was standing there holding my camera focused on the shot, and then I’m looking around and I see dozens and dozens of other cameras focus on the same thing being held by people who represent such radically different media projects, knowing at that moment that we were all looking at the same thing, but the feeds that we’re going to be reaching viewers and listeners out there, we’re not going to be showing the same thing.

And there’s a lot to unpack in that we don’t have time to, but I want to leave you guys with that thought because I was there. I was with Sarah and Adam. I was standing right next to them outside the United Center filming the Uncommitted Delegate, but we were also there with folks that people will know, like Amy Goodman from Democracy Now, Coates was right behind me, Kaaboo really great folks that we know. At the same time, there were a bunch of grifters and douche bags. There was News Nation out there, right? NBC Chicago was there, right? And again, what that taught me was that even though the physical space we shared was the same, what we were watching was the same. I knew for a fact that the people who were watching it through the media that was projecting that image back to their audiences on their phones and their cameras, were not going to be seeing the same thing.

And that really is a testament to where we are in the 21st century hyper digitalized media ecosystem that we’re going to kind of circle back to here at the end of the conversation. But guys, I want to turn this into kind of a broader meta question here, which I know you guys have lots of thoughts on, and we don’t have to get to everything, but I want to kind get your thoughts on this, which is that conventions like these, as we said, they are an object lesson in how politics becomes spectacle and how spectacle replaces policy as the primary vehicle of politics. I guess put another way, conventions are the height of politics crafted for the camera. Now looking at it through that lens, pun not intended, what did the DNC reveal to you both about how the spectacle of party politics is crafted, the disconnect between the media spectacle and the concrete reality of policy and what role we as viewers, readers, and listeners are expected to play in all of this?

Sarah Lazare:

So that’s a really important question and a question that I’ve been finding myself grappling with too. The thing that is so frustrating is that those who showed up to air their concerns about what the US and Israel are doing in Gaza, they are not a fringe element. They’re not a small force. They represent people in the many, many tens and tens of thousands. So the 29 uncommitted delegates who were there collectively represent an estimated 740,000 voters. The unions that have called for an arms embargo pursuant to a permanency fire represent roughly 6 million workers. The Chicagoans and people who came from across the country to mobilize in the streets represent as we know, a far greater public that’s concerned about what the US and Israel are doing in Gaza. Polling shows that a clear overwhelming majority of people who identify themselves as democratic voters want a ceasefire and say that what Israel is suing in Gaza is unpopular and setting aside democratic voters, we know that a majority of the public wants a ceasefire.

So those bringing grievances to the DNC represent a large number of people. That’s a serious base of people. Yes, we always want the base of those who are mobilizing to grow, but this is not a fringe movement at all, not to dismiss all fringe movements because some are really important and morally righteous, which is to say this is a gigantic base of people. So to see that gigantic base of people just sidelined over and over and over, whether it was the repression in the streets or whether it was the way that the DNC sanitized any mention of Gaza was truly discouraging. You mentioned the police presence, and I did want to just share an update from the Chicago chapter of the National Lawyers Guild. Chicago has a wonderful vibrant ecosystem of movement lawyers and movement legal workers and mass defense organizers, and so they condemned massive shows of force brutality and mass arrests, which they say define the police response to protests.

During the week, CPD conducted a total of 76 arrests from Sunday through Tuesday, two on Sunday, 13 on Monday, 59 on Tuesday and two on Thursday, which resulted mainly in municipal citations for disorderly conduct, but also several people charged with misdemeanors as well as four felonies. NLG Chicago received reports of several people who were injured as a result of the police melee on Tuesday outside the Israeli consulate, one protestors in the court process and all other protestors arrested this week were ordered, released on their DNC related cases. So that’s just a reminder that there are sectors of Chicago movements that are still going to be dealing with the consequences of that mobilization for some time.

Adam Johnson:

Yeah. Let me talk a bit about the DNC because on some level, people talk about the gross spectacle of the DNC, and they may say, well, you’re like a vegan who shows up to a barbecue restaurant, complains they don’t have quinoa, right? I mean, it’s what it is by definition. It’s a vulgar media spectacle. It used to be a place where you go and contest and you’d accidentally nominate James Garfield or whatever, but that’s obviously all done behind closed doors or done through primary systems. So on the one hand, yeah, it’s to be expected, but just because something is expected or something that is sort of by its very nature, it doesn’t mean that it doesn’t come off as incredibly glib and cruel to those who are trying to change this. Again, this is ostensibly the liberal party, ostensibly the left-wing party in this country that is actively supporting a genocide and continues to support the basic premises of an ongoing genocide.

So there really was a real kind of other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play element? Again, we’re taught from a young age that genocide is the crime of crimes. It’s the worst thing you can possibly do, never again, this is what we’re taught, whether it’s the Holocaust, whether it’s Rwanda, whatever it is, we’re sort of taught that that’s the thing you’re not supposed to do, and then to seen have it be viewed as this kind of separate issue or yeah, it’s a little muddy or it’s a war, it’s kind. Well, well, Trump would be worse. That’s their kind of favorite zombie rejoinder as if Democrats don’t have control over their own destiny. This kind of trolley problem, which again, is a trolley problem. Democrats can end at any point they want to, and at which point they do, I’ll get a coconut meme tattooed on my face.

This is not an unachievable goal that activists are pleading for the White House to do. They’re just saying, we can’t just vibe through it. You can’t just sort of ignore it like you would a cancerous mold and sort of say, well, it’ll just go away because the fact of genocide is very real and it’s ongoing, and the reality is that there’s no real news at the conventions. Nothing news happens, and this is what you have to realize is that the vast bulk of media who go television, people got to go because a television spectacle, but mostly it’s to party. I mean, let’s just be honest here. It’s people especially because there really wasn’t one in 2020. This are people that haven’t seen a lot of the same, and a majority of the political media is liberal, is Democrat. I don’t think that’s a controversial claim.

That doesn’t mean they’re left wing, it doesn’t mean they have good politics, but they’re mostly lever pulls. They have friendly relationships with a lot of these people. They have the $500,000 corporate suites that sort of wrap around the United Center where the big dogs are, and they want to kind of just go and party, and they don’t want to think about dead children and women with third degree burns dying while pregnant. They don’t want to think about these things. I think the desperation and anger and bitterness, I think from the Gaza activists, which is to say morally sound human beings, was that this was seen as the last opportunity to really put any pressure. There wasn’t a primary, there wasn’t a meaningful primary. None of the protests worked. They were subject in the sense that they were subject to police brutality, arbitrary campus changes in rules and suppression and firing people and doxing and all these kind of sophisticated counterinsurgency tactics, although they don’t typically work that well against Palestinians.

It is a cause that is somewhat difficult to be co-opted by the nonprofit industrial complex, and obviously they’ll kick back up again soon, and they’re always ongoing, but there was no sense that anyone was going to listen and that this was kind of the final nail in the coffin that this, they had switched out Biden with Harris. She continued his policy and that because of the understandable threat of Trump in Project 2025 and all that, we were just going to have to. Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play a genocide? And again, this is a problem entirely of Harris’s creation. It’s a problem she can solve overnight by making a simple commitment to follow us and international law. This is not some exotic ask, this isn’t asking for her to arrange Congress for some impossible Medicare for all or whatever. This is something she can do overnight whenever she wants, and every single day she and President Biden wake up and decide not to do the right thing.

And there’s a finality to it. And so when you see people like Alexander Ocasio-Cortez go on stage and say, Harris is working tirelessly for a ceasefire, you become very, very, very cynical because that is actively trivializing the protests and the uncommitted movement and the doctors who flew all the way from California, Arkansas, North Carolina to come plead to the Democrats to pay attention. Otherwise, if she’s working for a ceasefire, why are they there? And so that is kind of direct counterinsurgency direct. Well, thankfully it’s a lie. It’s not true. Not in any meaningful sense. And when these people talk about, oh, they’re fighting for a ceasefire, I’m like, so is it your opinion that China is a people’s republic of China? I mean, not to say it is or it isn’t, but obviously this is just a fucking label and people reject labels all the time.

So there was a finality to it, and I was there Monday when a OC was giving her speech, and it was actually going on as I was leaving, and then I looked around and I turned to Sarah and I was like, I hate to say it. This is not about my own kind of feelings, but it was profoundly depressing. It really did show that the one pathway to getting this administration and as vice president to change course, there was some sense that the one thing they were going to listen to, because obviously they were stubborn and racist and very pro-Israel sort of, again, Harris went to APAC for every single year until she ran for primary or the primary 2019, that the idea of electoral suffering was the one thing they may respond to, but they may respond to this idea they’re going to lose tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of votes.

They had youth depression and then they switched to Harris. And then youth support poll show goes skyrocketing, volunteers, social media sort of vibes, which are important. They skyrocket and you say, oh, the one thing that may have worked is no longer an arrow in the quiver. That’s it. It’s like game over pretty much. That isn’t to say you don’t keep trying. Don’t keep pressing. I’m not trying to so cynicism, but you saw the way in which this co-option of ceasefire, this kind of brat summer stuff, all these vibes, this sort of positive media coverage, it worked and the bad guys won, or at least they’re winning so far.

Maximillian Alvarez:

There’s another point there to be teased out that about the function that these spectacles really serve in our political milieu, right? I felt what you guys are describing, I mean, I expressed many of the same sentiments, and whether it be the continuing news coming out of Gaza and the West Bank, whether it be more updates of people, migrants like my foster daughter and her friends, and people like my family dying in the heat, trying to cross the border to find a life for themselves, whether it be texts that I got from residents living in and around East Palestine, Ohio where the train derailed notifying me that a resident took her own life the very week that the convention was happening, and the people living there are still being poisoned. They’re still sick from that derailment. They’ve been abandoned by their own government along with Norfolk Southern.

That cognitive and emotional dissonance between the reality that we know all too well as conscious human beings, conscientious human beings and people in the media, we can’t turn our blind eye to that literally our job to look right and try to get others to look. So I was feeling that dissonance along with you guys, and it left me feeling broken and depressed and just existentially unmoored at the same time. I think if there’s one thing I hope people take away from the work that I do, that emotional intelligence is a thing and that political emotions are worth analyzing and play a critical role in shaping who we are and how we act in that way. I saw what people need out of a spectacle like the DNC and the RNC, I want to be very clear, this applies across the board to both parties, both conventions. It is like mots to a flame. It is a spectacle that is so chock full of carefully curated vibes that people desperately want and need. And we are not here to tell you dear listener, that it’s bad to want to feel joy.

Adam Johnson:

And to be clear, I want to be clear, there’s not, when you’re there, you realize very quickly that yes, there’s the big wigs and the corporate money, but it’s a lot of rank and file normy Democrats. It’s not like a bunch of people with monocle smoking cigars mean that is up there, right? Yeah. And then you quickly realize that you can have a party with working people to an extent, but as long as the people with a $500,000 suites are up there and sanction everything they’re doing, then that’s sort of the way you contain it. But it is inaccurate to say that again, I think the Republican parties we’re evil, yay. And they celebrate Democrats perhaps promote a different message. But look, you look around and nobody wants to be a bummer. You don’t want to go around saying you’re a postal worker, you’re with the NEA with the teacher’s union.

You make $80,000 a year. This is your time to party, or you’re just some obscure delegate. This is not all sort of smoky backroom type stuff. It’s a lot of people who want to be excited, who are understandably scared of Trump. And you’re right. That’s a very, any, I think kind of left wing messaging around again, what we consider to be the crime of crimes has to sort of understand that and calibrate for that. It’s not about shaming random people, but there are bigger forces at work that are not about that. Again, it’s all understandable. It’s not like you don’t understand why people don’t want to sit around feeling dour all the time. Lord knows it’s not the funnest existence,

Maximillian Alvarez:

Right? And again, it’s a very sinister sort of outcome where people’s genuine desire and need for things like joy that I think the democratic messaging is capitalizing on, especially after the last decade we’ve been through, especially with the prospect of Trump and a campaign filled and fueled by fear. I guess what I’m pleading to listeners is to be able to walk and chew gum at the same time. I mean that joy was both real and sinister in the role, the function that it was being deployed for to provide a salve and an enforced complacency when it comes to the issues that no one wants to encroach on their joy. And I guess that’s really the thing we would want y’all to sit and think with not that joy is bad, but that it is bad to use joy to try to silence the need and cries of our fellow human beings around the country and around the world, especially those who are being slaughtered and obliterated by bombs that are manufactured here with our own tax dollars. We got to be able to understand those two things at once. And guys, I could talk to you about this for hours, but I know I got to let you go. And so in a rapid fire final wrap up, I wanted to just end this by focusing on an action question here. I wanted to ask if you had sort of basic tools, tips, critical media literacy strategies that we can offer our listeners for helping them navigate this media environment, especially over the next two months and beyond?

Adam Johnson:

Donate to my Patreon. No, I’m kidding. Sorry. You want to go ahead?

Sarah Lazare:

Yeah. So first of all, max, I want to say, I’m so sorry to hear that a resident of East Palestine took their own life. That’s horrific. I’m so sorry to hear that. I think that the greatest resource right now is the people who are continuing to mobilize despite the very muddled, confusing, and whiplash inducing political climate that we’ve been discussing. I have a lot of respect. I know that there are really tough strategic questions that people are navigating right now with respect to how to deal with the fact that Harris is doubling down on US weapons to Israel. I know that those questions are not easy, and I’m just so impressed that people are forging ahead in this difficult climate, especially given that so many of them are experiencing direct loss at this moment, whether it’s because they have family members in Gaza, the West Bank, or because their broader community is impacted, people in their schools, religious institutions, extended community networks. I mean, this is a real moment of collective grief. Nere Hassan told me every day is a funeral. Rine is an organizer with Palestinian feminist collective in U-S-P-C-N. And so I think that the people who are steadfastly pushing forward an alternative message are the people who are continuing to mobilize, and I’m just very impressed because that’s a really hard moment. So I would point people to learn more about organizing happening in their community.

Adam Johnson:

Yeah, I mean, again, I know I had somewhat of a downer note, but I mean, I am inspired by the seven or eight protesters who were outside the DNC simply reading off the names of the people being killed. I mean, this was obviously a popular protest tactic during Vietnam. It provides humanizes them. They’re not just numbers. They’re not just random sort of violent images on your social media timeline. These are people who had whole world’s whole universes, and I found that kind of inspiring. It’s like, oh, again, as I said earlier, there’s there’s no ulterior motive here. This is an entirely moral act, and that is one part of a broader ecosystem of activism around this issue that is not going to give up and has made it clear they’re not going to give up regardless of my existential dread as I left the convention center on Monday night.

And I think that so long as that fire burns, I think it’s something that let that be your guiding light, right? Don’t let bullshit think pieces in the Atlantic or New York Times be your guiding light. Think about people who are doing this for no, again, these are people who can’t afford to do this and do it anyway. These are people who are already traumatized 10 times over from losing loved ones and Palestine and do it anyway. And I think that as long as you sort of keep that as your North star and you don’t get lost in all the discourse and jockeying and trying to get this person elected over that person, I think in terms of media consumption, I think that’ll help one, keep some perspective.

Sarah Lazare:

And I just want to say one thing. I want to speak to the limitations of our conversations. So Adam and I went to the DNC with the intention to solely focus on Gaza. It was a capacity issue and it made sense to us strategically. But you have brought into this conversation really important things that also are dire and urgent and extremely harmful. For example, US Border Policy, also Real News did really excellent reporting about climate and the fact that we’re careening towards an existentially threatening ever worsening climate crisis that could kill people in the hundreds of millions or even billions. So I just want to acknowledge that those are not topics that Adam and I discussed just now, but are incredibly important, and I would just encourage listeners to check out Real News’ coverage because I found that coverage very strong

Adam Johnson:

Indeed.

Maximillian Alvarez:

So that is the great Sarah Lazar editor of Workday Magazine, a contributing editor for In these times. Sarah was working as a freelance reporter on the ground in Chicago reporting for the Nation Magazine, separate from her workday responsibilities. Adam Johnson, of course, is the co-host of the great podcast citations needed. He’s a columnist here at the Real News Network. You guys should check out his great writing and you should go support Adam and his writing at substack. Subscribe to his substack, the column, Adam. Sarah, thank you both so much for joining me today on the Real News Network podcast. I really appreciate it. And to all of you guys out there listening, please one more time, head on over to the real news.com/donate so we can bring you more important coverage and conversations just like this. Take care of yourselves, take care of each other, solidarity forever.

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