This week, Farai speaks with Bridget Todd, technology guru and creator and host of the podcast, “There Are No Girls on the Internet.” In addition to spotlighting Bridget’s fascinating career as a digital creator and futurist, in our series, “Our Body Politic Presents…” we share a conversation between Bridget and freelancer and activist Shafiqah Hudson about how she and other Black women tried to help Twitter block disinformation. In our weekly segment, Sippin’ the Political Tea, Farai speaks to senior adviser at The Lincoln Project and former GOP congressional communications director Tara Setmayer and op-ed columnist for the Washington Post and OBP Contributor Karen Attiah about the latest in U.S. news and politics, particularly how inflation and abortion are affecting current politics and the midterms.
Farai Chideya:
Hi folks, we are so glad that you're listening to Our Body Politic. If you have time, please consider leaving us a review on Apple Podcast. It helps other listeners find us, and we read them for your feedback. We are here for you, with you, and because of you, thank you.
Farai Chideya:
This is Our Body Politic. I'm Farai Chideya. Online culture wields an uncanny amount of influence it's in our day-to-day lives. Now, that's in politics and what we shop for, the conversations we have around our dinner tables. Unpacking the many ways that culture shapes us is a worthwhile endeavor and just as relevant is asking, who is behind online culture, who is forming the cultures in and around the tech industry. The podcast, There are No Girls on the Internet created and hosted by Bridget Todd delves into just that, and it's got a specific focus on the voices at the margins. This is about marginalized voices who have always been at the core of technology and the internet, including helping to create it. Creator and host, Bridget Todd, joins to me now. She does many other jobs in the world of tech, including keeping us all safe from disinformation. Hi, Bridget.
Bridget Todd:
Hi. It's so great to be here. I'm so excited.
Farai Chideya:
And I am so glad to have you on, and I've been really grateful to be kind of learning from folks like you. So later in our show, we're going to be playing an episode of your podcast, There are No Girls on the Internet, about black women fighting disinformation on Twitter. And you published that episode in the summer of 2020, which is a little bit of a way back machine for a show like ours, but we are running it because it is so right on time right now.
Farai Chideya:
I was struck by your opening statement, “People just don't listen to women, especially black women, and it comes with big consequences.” I call this the black Cassandra syndrome, where black women predict the future, but we're not believed and we seem to be kind of resented for our foresight. So what did you mean by black women not being listened to, both on this specific episode and generally?
Bridget Todd:
I think that as black women, not just in technology in the internet, but often around technology in the internet, we have to scream just to be heard. And sometimes it gets kind of enraging to always be the person who is screaming about something happening and not being believed and not being listened or worse, being punished for, to is trying to make our voices heard. When black women try to make internet spaces safer for ourselves, they actually become safer for everyone. And so listening to black women and meaningfully centering our voices when we talk about the internet and technology is going to be better in terms of making these spaces more inclusive for all of us.
Farai Chideya:
I think one reason that we find black Cassandras, black women with highly refined predictive analytic skills is our mix of lived experience and book learning. And I think of you not only as a black Cassandra, but as a futurist, a leader, a visionary, and I'm just curious where your roots lie in terms of your family and your upbringing.
Bridget Todd:
Well, I'll take being called a black visionary futurist any day of the week.
Farai Chideya:
Which you are.
Bridget Todd:
My story is, it's interesting, I grew up in a really small town in Virginia and when I was growing up, I always sort of felt like a little bit of an outsider. I used to think of myself almost like an alien because I just felt so deeply, deeply out of place in all the ways that somebody growing up can feel out of place. And I will never forget the day that my father brought home one of those boxy old school desktop computers that he spent all day setting it up in what would be known in our family as our computer room. And it was like my parents had come home with a pair of wings for me. The first time that I got on the internet, I just had this new access to all of these different ways of being, these different identities, these different ways that people were living their lives that I had no idea about.
Bridget Todd:
You know, I had never left my small town. And so it was just this huge portal of discovery for me in terms of being able to truly connect with who I was and the person that I was becoming and where I might fit it in the world. And so as I got older, I recognized that young black youth might not be having the same experience. I know from just being out in the world that young black folks are showing up online with such a creativity and boldness and fearlessness, but that same online landscape also criminalizes them, also is incredibly biased against them, also is not creating a safe place for them to explore. And so I want to make sure that the future generation gets to have experiences like I did online that feel like identity, that feel like care, that feel like creativity and safety, that feel like being heard and meaningfully centered and valued.
Farai Chideya:
You're also super funny, Bridget, like in one interview you said, “In college, I majored in women's studies and English literature, which felt pretty much like doubling down on future unemployment.” Doubling down on future unemployment, so how did you become who you are coming from that perspective?
Bridget Todd:
Well, it was a lot of patches of unemployment as my parents can definitely agree. I remember they were like, “Are you sure you don't want to minor in business or education or something just to fall back on?” My career trajectory is all over the place. I always go back to sort of amplifying the stories and voices of traditionally marginalized people. That's been doing the podcast and working with the organization UltraViolet, which is a national gender justice organization to really tell the story of the different ways that women and other traditionally marginalized people are taking up space online and making our online spaces and communities more safe for everybody.
Farai Chideya:
And you recently ran a campaign for UltraViolet around disinformation regarding Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson and her Supreme Court confirmation hearing. So what did you do there and what were you seeking to accomplish?
Bridget Todd:
Yeah, doesn't Justice Jackson have a lovely ring to it? We already know from seeing the way that folks treated Vice President Harris, that when a black woman goes to lead, there is going to be an entire ecosystem ready to amplify racist, sexist attacks on her character and conspiracy theories and misinformation about who she is because that's what always happens to black women. And so we wanted to get started early to create the conditions to make sure that Justice Jackson and every black woman who runs for public office, who gets involved in our democracy has a equal playing field.
Bridget Todd:
And so we looked like a couple of things. One is what we call pre-bunking. Maybe you've heard of the idea debunking. Well, pre-bunking is really sort of getting out in front of things early to educate people on what kind of things you might be seeing. So you might be seeing all kinds of racist, sexist, nonsense. You might be seeing all kinds of ugly caricatures about black women. You might be hearing all kinds of conspiracy theories about who Justice Jackson is. Don't let those dismay you, focus instead on her actual qualifications and her actual record. Early on, we also sent a letter to social media platforms and media companies just to let them know that they are unnoticed and we wanted to make sure early that they understood that the expectation was that they were not going to do the work of extremists and bad actors who are seeking to divide us by carrying water for them. And so if somebody floats a ridiculous conspiracy theory that is absolute nonsense about Justice Jackson, we'd expect them not to amplify that conspiracy theory, not to legitimize it, not to help it spread.
Bridget Todd:
And so we really see this work as not just amplifying Justice Jackson, but really creating a fairer digital media ecosystem where all of us can actually really be judged by the things that we say, our records, our values and not sexism, racism, ugly stereotypes, or misinformation.
Farai Chideya:
I went to a conference about disinformation, where it was emphasized that you should not try to battle disinformation in ways that actually spread it. I found that fascinating. Can you explain a little bit more?
Bridget Todd:
That is exactly right. You know, even in my work working with disinformation professionally, we have what we call a threat matrix, right? And so not every single attack or conspiracy theory or piece of misinformation, or disinformation warrants the same kind of response. Oftentimes, you'll see a piece of content that is inaccurate, that is maybe being tweeted out by a handful of fringe Twitter accounts, or like a handful of fringe, extremist blogs, and it's not actually making its way into the wider media landscape. In those cases, it's actually best to just sort of let it go.
Bridget Todd:
When you see something that is nonsense on social media, sometimes it's very tempting to respond with your perfect little joke or your perfect dunk, but because of the nature of the way that social media platforms work, oftentimes you're actually just helping that piece of inaccurate content grow. A, if you're on a platform that allows for reporting of inaccurate content, definitely do that. But rather than engaging with it and amplifying it, focus instead on sharing accurate, thoughtful, timely, positive information around your little pocket of the internet, because that's a good way that you can actually help make the internet like a healthier, more honest, more thoughtful place.
Farai Chideya:
And I believe that you had mentioned that one of the things that you're going to be working on next is medical dis and misinformation regarding abortion ahead of the upcoming Jackson Women's Health SCOTUS decision, Supreme Court decision, likely to come down this summer. What are you going to be working on there?
Bridget Todd:
It's a little bit tough because I think so many people rightly are really familiar with medical misinformation, and we're talking about things like vaccinations or COVID, and they absolutely should be aware of that. However, I think it can be a little bit trickier when we're talking about medical misinformation as it pertains to things like abortion. We have already seen anti-choice extremists really kind of creating their own language grounded and untrue about our bodies and then using that language to the point where “mainstream outlets” will pick it up and repeat that language, or legitimize that language. And so we really want to correct the record and sort of have a conversation about abortion that is rooted in accuracy and honesty and accurate truthful information. And we also just want to ground the conversation in the fact that the overwhelming majority of Americans are supportive of abortion rights and agree that access to abortion needs to be protected. And so when folks come out here and say that's not the case, really framing that as the extremist opinion that it is, that is wildly out of step with the majority of Americans.
Farai Chideya:
We're going to be listening to There are No Girls on the Internet in the next segment of this show, but what, in addition to your work brings you joy?
Bridget Todd:
I have to really say it's being able to connect with other black women like yourself. When we talk about these issues of being online as black women, so often we're talking about things that are painful or traumatic or negative, and that is definitely a part of the conversation, but also part of the conversation is the times that are joyful or funny or warm or bold, or make you feel grounded and held. And so those are always the moments that really reconnect me to my joy, definitely being able to connect with other black women like yourself.
Farai Chideya:
And connecting with you, Bridget, has indeed been a joy. Thanks so much for joining us.
Farai Chideya:
That's Bridget Todd, creator and host of the podcast, There are No Girls on the Internet. You can subscribe wherever you get your podcast. You can find them online tangoti.com. That is T-A-N-G-O-T-I.com. And you can find Bridget on Twitter, @BridgetMarie.
Farai Chideya:
Coming up next, as a part of the Our Body Politic Present series, you'll hear selections from the podcast, There Are No Girls on the Internet plus Sippin' the Political Tea on all things in U.S. news. That's on Our Body Politic.
Farai Chideya:
Welcome back to Our Body Politic. During our earlier interview with Bridget Todd, the host and creator of There Are No Girls on the Internet, we said that we would be sharing her podcast episode on how black women tried to fight disinformation on Twitter. Now, Twitter has certainly been making headlines and at the time we are publishing this show, billionaire Elon Musk announced that he's launching a hostile takeover bid for Twitter. He wants to take the company private to make it a “platform for free speech.” Some interpret Musk's statement as hints that he would relax rules on deplatforming people who violate the terms of service on hate speech and also return to an era where Twitter was a major conduit of disinformation, but only he knows for sure what his plans are. So what are the stakes of how Twitter is owned and governed?
Farai Chideya:
According to a Senate intelligence report, black Americans were the number one target of Russian disinformation designed to discourage voting in 2016. And there were plenty of domestic efforts to suppress black votes online, both in 2016 and 2020. So when we talk about the ways social media can harm black users, we're not just talking about hurt feelings. We're talking about big political and social costs and not just for black folks either, yet black women have been out in front trying to call out harms and change systems for the better. This episode of There are No Girls on the Internet, the one you're about to hear, aired in the summer of 2020, but under the circumstances, it bears another listen right now. We asked creator Bridget Todd why she did this episode.
Bridget Todd:
Black women have been doing the difficult, dangerous, often unpaid work of making the internet and technology safer. And I really wanted to honor that. And I want us to take up more room in the conversation around the internet and how it plays out in our world.
Farai Chideya:
And now as a part of the Our Body Politic Present series, we are bringing you excerpts of There are No Girls on the Internet.
Bridget Todd:
Okay. So let's just get this out of the way right now. Twitter is a cesspool. If you spend any time there, you probably already know this. Bad faith commentary, reply guys, trolls, harassment. It can really just be an unpleasant place. In May, Twitter announced they would start labeling tweets that spread misleading information, but this comes years after black feminists raised the alarm about it and were ignored. These women weren't just being attacked. They were learning about the tactics that bad actors used to infiltrate online communities. They spoke up about what they were experiencing online. So why didn't anyone listen and what might have happened if they had?
Shafiqah Hudson:
Shafiqah Hudson, freelancer, cat lady, sometimes activist.
Bridget Todd:
Shafiqah had been using Twitter regularly since almost its very beginning, where she spent most of her time online connecting with other black feminists. In 2014, while job searching, she noticed a hashtag that just did not make sense, End Father's Day. The people pushing the End Father's Day hashtag on Twitter appeared to be black feminists. They talked about how we should abolish father's day because too many black men date outside of their race, or because black men don't support their children. Stuff that just seemed really out there.
Shafiqah Hudson:
It wasn't anything that any black feminist anywhere would say. It was like, what was it? Oh, gosh, yeah. “In Father's Day, I wish these white women would stop stealing our men.” Something just completely off the wall that had nothing to do with anything. And in this particular instance, I clicked on the person, well, the account's profile, I said, “Okay, who is this?” I've never seen this person and it looks like they just joined two days ago and they have the photo of a black woman, but it just nothing adds up. So that drove me to click on the #EndFathersDay and lo and behold, when I did a Twitter search, there's a bunch of accounts that are saying things that are completely left, not left like politically, just kind of left, like left field, where are you coming from? Left. And I didn't recognize any of them.
Shafiqah Hudson:
At that point, I just kind of asked a general question from my timeline to say, “Okay, you guys, what's going on? I keep seeing this hashtag and these accounts that I don't recognize with people who look like they just joined like five seconds ago.” And someone said, “Yeah, it looks like this is like some kind of 4chan thing.” That's when I really started digging. I said, “Okay, well, this is really awful because they're pretending to be black women who are saying these awful things.” And I'm smart enough to know that nothing here that they're saying is even remotely what a real black feminist would say.
Bridget Todd:
She knew the Twitter accounts pushing End Father's Day weren't actually black women. They were just impersonating black women and pretty badly at that. But there were too many of them for this to be a one off thing. It had to be coordinated. And there were also too many for her to tackle alone. She wanted to give other black feminists a tool to sniff out these imposters. So she fought back with a hashtag of her own, #YourSlipisShowing.
Shafiqah Hudson:
I went ahead with Your Slip is Showing. I might have run another line like, I don't know, your mascara's running, something like that. But your slip is showing just seemed to work. It really just seemed to work.
Bridget Todd:
Okay. So if you're not a lady from the south, the phrase, “your slip is showing” might not mean anything to you. Literally, it means when your slip is peeking out from underneath your skirt or dress, a big fashion no-no. But where I come from, that one phrase really highlights a subversiveness, what I'll call auntie speak. Think of it a bit like the phrase, “bless your heart.” A lady at church might tell you that your slip is peeking out from the bottom of your skirt because they care about you looking your best, or they could tell you your slip is showing because they don't like you and they're pointing out publicly that you aren't looking as good and put together as you think you are.
Shafiqah Hudson:
You know, just the sort of thing that one of your aunties might say to you in church, when it's, “Oh, honey, you need to ... you need to fix your slip because it's showing.” Except mean because ... Right? There's a difference between “your slip is showing” from what one of your aunties and “your slip is showing” from somebody who doesn't like you.
Bridget Todd:
What's also funny is that I would imagine the people who are impersonating black women, that nuance probably goes right over their head.
Shafiqah Hudson:
Yes. Yes. That was that. Also, one of the things that I also delighted in, because of course they wouldn't get it. I mean, you have to be somewhat embedded within certain communities to pick up on the nuance, and they really weren't.
Bridget Todd:
It's fitting that we're talking about getting the nuance. That certain something you can't really teach. This would ultimately be the undoing of people impersonating black women online. They're inability to offend sound like black women. Ultimately, it seemed like the point of End Father's Day was to see what kind of discord, bad actors organizing on message boards like 4chan could sell within feminist online communities and to make actual feminists and our issues look like petty, stupid man haters whose issues were so outlandish, they could never be taken seriously. It turns out this is actually a pretty common disinformation tactic. Hijacking public conversations about sensitive topics or wedge issues through media manipulation is a way of making people afraid of having an opinion in public and ultimately trying to silence them. It makes it tough for anyone to have a good faith dialogue online.
Shafiqah Hudson:
And then dawned on me that these are people who could not possibly understand feminism, possibly women in general, black people, or too much of anything outside of their little Fox News bubble. That was the impression that I got. Like, basically, if you fell for this it's because you already had a certain set of bigotries in place to fall for it.
Bridget Todd:
Shafiqah thinks it was ignored because the women who were targeted were black. Not only was she helping to create a tool to stamp out this kind of disinformation online, she also wanted to document that it was happening, so it wouldn't go forgotten or erased just because it was happening to black women.
Farai Chideya:
You're listening to Our Body Politic. We are bringing you as a part of Our Body Politic's Present series selections from the podcast, There Are No Girls on the Internet. Let's get back to it.
Bridget Todd:
People who are traditionally marginalized online like black women are specifically impacted by things like disinformation and harassment on social media. The ultimate goal is to freak them out so much that they'll shut down their social media and just stop talking. So did the powers, that be at Twitter or any other social media company or any other official do anything to fix this?
Shafiqah Hudson:
No. The short answer there is no. Now, the longer explanation is that we repeatedly brought this whole thing to the attention of Twitter support. The general impression that I got from Twitter support was that, “Oh, well, you know, this is ... We're so sorry. Our hands are tied and blah, blah, blah.” And I started looking into the tech side of everything and I realized that, that wasn't the truth. They absolutely have and had tools on hand to stop this and they just didn't. They just let it happen and they just let us clean up the mess and defend our communities ourselves.
Bridget Todd:
As much as being left to fend for her own community online sucked, it did teach Shafiqah that her online community could do a lot with a little.
Shafiqah Hudson:
And while that wasn't cool at all and hopefully, at some point down the line, they will be sufficiently shamed for it because it was just really awful, we learned what we could do on the ground with just of the very basic tool of like community organization and a hashtag. We were able to do a whole lot to just stop something that could have gotten way out of hand. We outed it early and we ended it early.
Bridget Todd:
So in a kind of way, it sounds like your work with Your Slip is Showing and your work organizing community responses online was kind of this canary in the coal mine, and you all did all that. You could to prevent this, to stamp this out. But if only the powers that be at Twitter or elsewhere had done anything, then it might not be the sort of wide scale situation that it is now.
Shafiqah Hudson:
That is exactly correct. I know that sounds damning, but that's accurate. They could have stopped it. They could still stop it. But the reason why, unfortunately, and this was absolutely pointed out by the people at the time and people later taking a look the whole situation from like the whole postmortem of the whole incident. The reason why they didn't is because of the profit model at the time was based on number of accounts and interaction. So then when you're selling your product basically to, and we are the product, to advertisers and whatever have you, the more users it looks like you have, the better. So it really wasn't in Twitter's best interest to say, “Okay, well, we have 20 accounts with one IP address that's suspicious and we should look into it.” And that's why they didn't. They didn't. Took them a full two and a half years, I think, to even really address it in a serious way. And I think that was only after the whole congressional meeting. I'm pretty sure that was after everybody who was like the head of social media got called in front of Congress.
Bridget Todd:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Shafiqah Hudson:
That's what it took.
Speaker 4:
Again, a Senate intelligence committee report claiming Russian agents use social media sites like Facebook to target African Americans in an effort to suppress voter turnout.
Bridget Todd:
We already know that Russia used social media to interfere with the 2016 election. And in case you needed a Senate report to confirm what black women have been saying all along, a Senate inquiry cited an Oxford University report on Russian interference on social media. They found that campaigns targeted no single group more than African Americans on social media. They posed as black people and ran phony black activist groups to influence black voters to either stay home or vote for Trump on election day.
Bridget Todd:
The Senate intelligence report says, “The posts were aimed at making Americans suspicious of each other.” Sound familiar? These are the very same kind of tactics that black women like Shafiqah were complaining about years earlier, accounts posing as black people and infiltrating our online communities to create chaos and distrust. But because the people with power didn't really do anything or take it seriously, it kind of exposed this massive vulnerability. Think of it as an online disinformation test balloon. It showed that these kinds of attacks could happen and they'd pretty much go unaddressed. Instead of identifying and learning to spot tactics used to make our social media communities less safe and less stable, the powers that be just let it happen again and again and again.
Bridget Todd:
I asked Shafiqah if she thinks that if someone had listened to black women when they spoke up about being targeted online, things might be different now. It's a tough question for her.
Shafiqah Hudson:
This always going to be a question that kind of hangs in my mind because while I understand that black voters were absolutely targeted, I'm not entirely sure that we were fooled. Do you know what I mean? Right. Like honestly, I ... Because it seems like to me, we kind of all got out and voted anyway. And it also seems like to me, Donald Trump may have lost the popular vote by three million votes, but that's neither here nor there. I get ...
Bridget Todd:
Not if you ask him, he didn't.
Shafiqah Hudson:
But we don't ask him things because we like honest answers. But yeah, I mean, just the fact that this happened, it left us arguably vulnerable. Even though I'm not sure how ultimately successful it was, just the fact that we had foreign agents targeting voting populations in the United States of America should have been serious and do cause for alarm because we left a door open. Like that was a failure that was ... I don't want to say it was on me because I feel like it definitely wasn't on me and it definitely wasn't on you, but it was a failure on the side of whatever agents are supposed to be protecting us.
Bridget Todd:
That's the thing about the internet, there's so much darkness lurking in its corner just waiting to spill out. But where there's darkness, there's light too. Where there's someone being ugly online, there's someone else reaching out to make a genuine connection. There's real community to be built and laughs to be had, the kind of laughs that can sustain you through difficult times. Being online is a constant tight rope walk of acknowledging that darkness while still being able to see the corners of light peeking through. And even while waiting through all of that darkness and ugliness, it's the light that has really sustained Shafiqah. After everything she's been through, she's still grateful for Twitter as a platform and all the good things it's brought to her life.
Shafiqah Hudson:
Honestly, it really helps that I have a strong and supportive community, both online and off. I really am super grateful for Twitter for so many reasons, not the least of which is because it's helped me expand my network and I've met amazing people and connected people who are like me, people who aren't like me, and gotten to know so much about them and learn about their lived experiences. And that has saved me because it helps me kind of get out of my own head space or likewise connect with people who understand 100% where I'm coming from. In a world where we're frequently gas lit about the things that we see and experience, that is absolutely invaluable.
Bridget Todd:
Oh, and one more thing that helps.
Shafiqah Hudson:
It also helps that I'm funny. Honestly, having a sense of humor and a wit will get you through pretty much ... I don't want to say pretty much anything, but how about this? It's gotten me through pretty much everything.
Bridget Todd:
And you've been through some stuff
Shafiqah Hudson:
I've been through it.
Farai Chideya:
That was from the podcast, There Are No Girls On The Internet hosted and created by Bridget Todd. You can subscribe wherever you get your podcast and also find them online at tangoti.com. That is T-A-N-G-O-T-I.com.
Farai Chideya:
Coming up next, our weekly roundtable, Sippin' the Political Tea dives into the latest in domestic affairs with Washington Post columnist, Karen Attiah and resident scholar at the University of Virginia Center Politics, Tara Setmayer. You're listening to Our Body Politic.
Farai Chideya:
Welcome back to Our Body Politic. Before we continue with the show, we want to ask for your help on an upcoming show. Now, people have a lot of different perspectives on abortion and bodily autonomy, but the question about criminalization is unprecedented in this generation. With the reality and threat of criminalization of people who seek abortions looming over the heads of birthing people, educator, journalist, and writer of Nomadland, Jessica Bruder, investigates the covert network preparing for a post Roe future. This week, we're asking our listeners to share their questions concerning the fight for bodily autonomy, and what's sometimes called the abortion underground for Jessica by phoning in and leaving us a voicemail at (929) 3537-006.
Farai Chideya:
And now onto our weekly roundtable, Sippin' the Political Tea. Joining me this week is resident scholar at the University of Virginia Center for Politics and senior advisor at The Lincoln Project, Tara Setmayer. Welcome back, Tara.
Tara Setmayer:
Thank you so much for having me
Farai Chideya:
And Our Body Politic contributor and opinions columnist at The Washington Post, Karen Attiah. Hey, Karen.
Karen Attiah:
Hey, Farai. Good to be back.
Farai Chideya:
So this week, the Bureau of Labor released the latest inflation numbers and it shows prices rising by 8.5% in March compared to a year ago. That's the largest annual increase since December of 1981. Karen, how are you thinking about these extreme price hikes and how they're affecting people on a day to day level?
Karen Attiah:
On a day to day level, this is something that affects everyone, but affects everyone obviously, unequally, right? You think of people who already were living, not just paycheck to paycheck, but budgeting almost to the penny, to the dollar. So it's not a small thing when gas goes up to nearly $5 a gallon, right? And to keep in mind, even before all of this, wages we're not keeping up with inflation already. Add to this, a pandemic, add to this people already feeling the increases in rents. It's just adding to so much uncertainty for the average American,
Farai Chideya:
Tara, thinking about these gas prices, the White House announced it's going to allow E15 gasoline to be sold this summer. It's a type of gasoline that uses 15% ethanol blend. It's generally banned during the summer because of air pollution concerns. And we've seen the Biden-Harris administration try to distance themselves from the rising prices of gas calling it Putin's price hike. But what do you make of the White House's handling of inflation and gas prices and the messaging question?
Tara Setmayer:
So this has been a political challenge for the White House for some time. The slow burn of the increase of inflation since last year has been creeping up, creeping up. And right now, it's politically damaging for them, because all we hear about every day is the increase in inflation, cost of living, the increased prices in food and gas. These are terrible combinations for a party in charge and for a president facing a historically challenging midterm election environment. Most folks, they're like, “Gas is over $4 a gallon, food prices are increasing, and we can't afford this. What are you going to do to change it?”
Tara Setmayer:
The idea of the waiver for E15 gas over the summer, it's really not going to make a dent in things. It's only going to maybe shave off 10 cents on the gallon. It's only applied at 2,300 gas stations. There's 150,000 gas stations in the country. Right now, a recent ABC poll shows that the American people only feel 29% confident that President Biden is handling the inflation issue well. Whether it's his fault or not, he's president and he gets the blame.
Farai Chideya:
And going along with that, there was this ABC News/Ipsos Poll finding that only 29% of Americans approve of Biden's handling of inflation. So I want to kind of cast ahead to the midterms. Tara, staying with you for a minute. How do you think this is affecting midterm math?
Tara Setmayer:
This could be the dagger in Democrats' hopes for maintaining control of the House and Senate this year. Like I said, historically, the party in power loses seats during a midterm election, and then recalibrates. You can just look back to what happened to Bill Clinton in the early ‘90s and the wave of Republicans that came in, in 1994 with the largest win for Republicans in 40 years. It's also looking a lot like what happened in 2010 with President Obama's first midterm when the Tea Party wave was ushered in. The economy is usually the number one kitchen table issue for folks because that's what impacts people's lives every day. So unless there's a turnaround there, I don't know how the administration is able to overcome all of these factors.
Tara Setmayer:
Now, there could be other issues that motivate democratic voters, which comes from the idea of Republicans taking Congress back and showing the contrast of how Republicans have governed and what they intend to do. The idea of abortion and Supreme Court cases, if abortion is somehow overturned in the Roe v. Wade case with what's being examined with the Supreme Court, that could motivate people. But there are a lot of other factors will have to contribute to what gets democratic voters motivated to get out and vote and not feel depressed because the economic situation hasn't improved.
Farai Chideya:
Karen, what are your thoughts there on the midterms, inflation, and just everyday people's lives?
Karen Attiah:
I'm thinking about these inflation numbers, but I'm also thinking about how, again, back to politics and perception, we think very often about the jobs report that comes out every month and politicians and Biden administration touting strong job growth, and hirings, and openings. But I think this is also perhaps a wake up call for even how we talk about the strength of America's economy. When we are talking about jobs and livable wages, these jobs that are open, is it allowing for people to be able to keep up with inflation? Are these good jobs? I was reading a few weeks ago, this is not the time to shame people into thinking that they're failure somehow for not being able to keep up and not being able to realize that this is a systemic issue and a systemic problem.
Farai Chideya:
You are listening to Sippin' the Political Tea on Our Body Politic this week with Tara Setmayer, resident scholar at the University of Virginia Center For Politics and senior advisor at The Lincoln Project and Karen Attiah, Our Body Politic contributor and opinions columnist at The Washington Post.
Farai Chideya:
You know, thinking about all of these different things, we are looking at a matrix of economics, culture, war, politics. And I want to switch to something that seems very different that you wrote about in your most recent column, Karen, but which is also about just how people navigate everyday life. And you wrote a column about what appears to be misuse of funds and lack of transparency at Black Lives Matter. This to me is related to the big picture in the sense that people sometimes feel like there's stuff outside of their control and they want someone else to help fix it. And the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation was seen by some people as a force that wasn't constructive in society and by others as something that really was a place of hope, but it secretly used donated funds to purchase a $6 million mansion near Malibu, California. Can you just give us a little bit of that? What did you write about, Karen?
Karen Attiah:
Many others saw the report that came out in New York Magazine's The Intelligencer last week that finally got some answers about real estate purchases by Black Lives Matters Global Network. And I want to stress that this is about the overarching national organization, which set up a foundation to basically be able to channel the huge amount of funds that came in, in the wake of the George Floyd murder in 2020. So for years, ever since Ferguson really, there have been activists, victims' families who have been questioning, like, “Where is the money going? The millions of dollars.” And finally, AP reported last year that Black Lives Matters Global Network Foundation took in $90 million in 2020.
Karen Attiah:
In the wake of those revelations by New York Magazine, I wrote a piece, just this feeling, both a sense of irritation and a bit of betrayal. Again, I think for a lot of people, Black Lives Matters, the organization, having something kind of tangible to give money to in the hopes that it could support the efforts for black liberation. And now, what we're seeing is so much money concentrated in the hands of a very few, very prominent, very visible, almost celebrity activists, and yet there are activists who are going homeless. I've talked to other local chapters since the story saying, “We haven't seen any sort of support. We've been doing all this on our own.”
Karen Attiah:
The Black Lives Matters Global Network Foundation's feeling understandably under assault, and so they've promised to show more transparency, but it's a complicated issue. Look, there's so many stories from megachurches to the Red Cross, promising to build houses for Haiti in the wake of the 2011 earthquake, taking in $500 million and only building six houses at the time. There's a lot to be said for corruption in general, but I think this just hits so close to home and it's just disappointing.
Farai Chideya:
We have been doing a number of interviews on this question of like, how do you find justice in a world that doesn't feel just. Family members of people who have been slained by law enforcement officers or in other ways, people like Tamir Rice's moms, Samaria Rice, have been talking about their questions about some of the movements. And Samaria Rice came on our show in April of last year. I want to play a clip from that interview.
Samaria Rice:
I did not know there was a hustle on black death, and that's disturbing because my son is no hustle. So the things that I have seen in the media when it comes to these protestors, these protests, these rallies, especially when I see certain individuals leading them, I can't never take them seriously.
Farai Chideya:
Tara, when you think about Samaria Rice and what she's been through, losing her son and the questions that she's had about some of the organizing that has raised big money, but that hasn't flowed to families, how do you think that through?
Tara Setmayer:
I just think that it is disappointing because it's a missed opportunity to really move the needle on an issue that I think the country wasn't prepared for until George Floyd. We saw the uptick in these tragic shooting deaths of young black men, but then we also saw that there was this turn against police and painting police with a broad brush, which turned off some Americans to what I think the Black Lives Matter overall premise was actually about for some time. And then George Floyd happened and you saw a unification across the country with groups coming together that we hadn't really seen since the civil rights era, I don't think. And it's just a squandered opportunity.
Tara Setmayer:
It speaks to the more cynical aspect of some of these activist movements. I just don't understand why it's so hard to be transparent and to think about the greater purpose. When you have that kind of money coming in, sometimes the priorities of the original cause get mixed up, and it saddens me to see that seems to be what's happened. I just hope that the overall conversation about how we fix some of these issues, that it's not lost on the mistakes of a few in this movement, because the work is too important.
Farai Chideya:
Karen, now, let's pivot to Texas. It's a state at the center of the extreme attacks on abortion rights and bodily autonomy. And this week, charges were dropped against a woman in connection with what has been described as a self-induced abortion. We don't know all the details in this case and the fact that a woman can now have murder charges brought against her. What does this say about kind of where we stand, Tara?
Tara Setmayer:
Well, I think that the foundation for this has been laid for several years in the Republican wishlist of issues. Abortion has been a single voting political hot button issue for decades since Roe v. Wade was decided, and there is an element of the right wing that never given up on this. Even when abortion has ranked in some of the lowest issue rankings of people's minds every day, they have remained steadfast. And the fruits of their labor are starting to come forward as we see in places like Texas and other states, several other states that are trying to replicate what Texas has done.
Tara Setmayer:
And much to the chagrin of women and women's health advocates and women's rights in this country, however you feel about the issue of abortion personally, or whether you have a religious objection or a moral objection to it, it has been the law of the land. And to try to reverse it in such a callous way the way Texas has on a state level, that's been in the Republican approach as states rights folks, the way people manipulated states rights in the civil rights era to deny black Americans their equal rights, they're doing the same now to women using states. So that's why this Supreme Court decision coming up this summer is so important. But the way Texas has done it, not only how draconian it is with the timeframe, but also the vigilantism part of it, which is basically turning citizens against each other and turning them in. There's a certain amount of even more alarming in that respect.
Tara Setmayer:
So the fact that we're even having this conversation, I think is scary in and of itself in 2021 and very Handmaid's Tale, to be honest. But I also think politically, this is exposing the Republican agenda and it should really motivate women in this country to make sure that their rights are not reversed in an underhanded, very authoritarian draconian way.
Farai Chideya:
And Karen, how are you approaching this and thinking about this?
Karen Attiah:
So much of what Tara said is so true. It's this nefarious kind of culture of vigilantism that's frankly, quite chilling. This particular case in Texas, this woman went to a hospital, she had a miscarriage from the reporting I've seen, was honest with her care ... supposedly, people who were supposed to care for her. And from what I understand, someone within the staff, within the hospital made this report, I think this will also send a chilling message to women in general who want to go to hospitals and be honest about their own bodies and about their choices. I mean, it makes it so that people may be afraid to even go to the hospitals here in Texas. And the fact that this SB8 is offering citizens a nice little 10K, like bounty bag if they report their citizens, it's really just this toxic storm of women not being able to be safe, people not being able to be safe about even being honest to each other about their plans for their own bodies when it comes to giving birth.
Farai Chideya:
Karen, thank you.
Karen Attiah:
Farai, thank you so much.
Farai Chideya:
Tara, thank you.
Tara Setmayer:
Always a pleasure. Thank you.
Farai Chideya:
That was Tara Setmayer, resident scholar at the University of Virginia Center for Politics and senior advisor at The Lincoln Project and Karen Attiah, Our Body Politic contributor and opinions columnist at The Washington Post.
Farai Chideya:
Thanks for listening to Our Body Politic. We're on the air each week -- and everywhere you listen to podcasts. Our Body Politic is produced by Diaspora Farms. I'm the executive producer and host, Farai Chideya. Our Co-executive producer is Jonathan Blakely. Bianca Martin is our senior producer. Bridget McAllister is our booker and producer. Emily J. Daly is our producer. Our associate producer is Natyna Bean.
Farai Chideya:
Production and editing services are by Clean Cuts at Three Seas and today Cutting Room. Today's episode was produced with the help of Steve Lack and Lauren Schild. And engineered by Archie Moore.
Farai Chideya:
And a special thanks to Bridget Todd, host and creator of the podcast “There are No Girls on the Internet”... plus her team, Tari [TAR-ee] Harrison, supervising producer and audio engineer, Jonathan Strickland, executive producer, and contributing producer Michael Amato. "There are No Girls on the Internet" is a production of iHeartRadio and Unbossed Creative.
Farai Chideya:
This program is produced with support from the Ford Foundation, Craig Newmark Philanthropies, the Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Philanthropies, Democracy Fund, The Harnisch Foundation, Compton Foundation, the Heising-Simons Foundation, the BMe Community, Katie McGrath & JJ Abrams Family Foundation, and from generous contributions from listeners like you.