How medical examiners cover up for police killings and deny justice for grieving families

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

Mansa Musa:

Welcome to this edition of Rattling the Bars. I’m your host, Mansa Musa. Imagine this: that you are on trial and the principal witness against you is getting ready to be certified as an expert witness, to be certified as an expert witness. Your body of work is going to be examined, and then at some point in time, the prosecutor going to say, your Honor, I move to this person. Be certified as an expert witness to give a testimony along these lines. And then the jury hears this and the jury, because of you being certified as an expert witness, believes this person to have the voice of God. But then you later on find out that this person not only was not an expert, but was an expert in lying. Joining me today is Stephen Janis and Taya Graham, two of my colleagues at The Real News, introduce y’all ourselves to the Real News audience or really the Rattling the Bars audience.

Stephen Janis:

Yeah. My name is Stephen Janis. I’m a reporter, investigative reporter at The Real News. I host the Police Accountability Report and the Inequality Watch Show here.

Taya Graham:

Hi, I’m Taya Graham. I’m a reporter here at the Real News Network, an investigative reporter criminal justice system is my primary beat. I co-host the police accountability report with Steven, and I’m also the co-host of the Inequality Watch, which is a government accountability report.

Mansa Musa:

Okay, so in the article written by y’all published on May 15th, 2025, y’all examined the audit fines, dozens of police custody, death in Maryland should have been ruled homicide. And this is relation, as I open up about the expert, talk about this particular expert

Stephen Janis:

And

Mansa Musa:

What went on with that.

Stephen Janis:

Well, Dr. David Fowler was the chief medical examiner for the state of Maryland from I think roughly 2002 to 2019, which meant he had the final say on almost all suspicious deaths in terms of what the manner of death would be. So the manner of death is the way you classify death in, there’s five categories. There’s homicide, accent, natural causes, and suicide. And the last one is undetermined. So if Dr. Fowler at that point and during any of that period of time had a case come in and rule it, let’s say an accident rather than a homicide, well, police can’t really do much because you can’t prosecute a case that’s

Mansa Musa:

Right,

Stephen Janis:

So, the medical examiner has an oversized influence on the outcome of cases in terms of criminality. Now, during that period of time, Dr. Fowler was very liberal in the way he ruled on police involved deaths. Deaths where police were the cause of death, or a person died in police custody. And we had written extensively about this, and he tended to rule in favor of the police. For example, the case of Anton Black, a 19-year-old young man who was killed on the Easter shore after he was chased by police to his mom’s home, and they sat on top of him. And Dr. Fowler ruled that death, I think it was undetermined or accident, an accident. And so the police couldn’t be prosecuted. So we would write about extensively. We would get outside experts to say, this guy’s not a credible person. His science is incredible. He used things like excited delirium, totally discredited theory of why people would die after a taser. So anyway, we didn’t writing about this fear, and I have been reported on it, and no one did anything in Maryland. They letting him off the hook. So one day he testifies in the trial, if you all probably remember the Derek Chauvin trial.

Derek Chauvin was a police officer who sat on George Floyd’s necks and killed him. And he testified that George Floyd did not die because of the positional asphyxiation or the downward pressure on his neck that instead he died because of the tailpipe and a drug overdose. So the scientific community went crazy, and 450 doctors wrote a letter and said that Dr. Fowler should be investigated. So the Attorney General’s office investigated 87 cases of police involved restraint and looked at them and said, did Dr. Fowler rule correctly? And they concluded he did not. They concluded that unanimously concluded, I believe in 36 or 37 cases that Dr. Fowler incorrectly ruled, which is profound because all those police officers could not be investigated, right, Teo?

Taya Graham:

Absolutely. And I don’t think it can be underestimated. Essentially the corruption in Dr. Fowler’s office. Come on. Steven mentioned the case of Anton Black, a 19-year-old track star who came home to visit his mother after walking the catwalk in New York Fashion Week, he had just gotten his first small part in a movie. This young man was about to have an incredible life front of him.

Speaker 4:

He

Taya Graham:

Ends up being chased home by three police officers. They lay on top of him. He’s on just the front steps of his mother’s house, and she’s watching him turn blue. She’s watching her child turn blue right in front of her. Now, what’s amazing is that the officers were actually allowed into the room while the autopsy was being done. One of the things they listed as a contributing cause of death was that Anton had bipolar disorder. So it was as if the fact that they attempted to tase him that he had three grown men on top of him that had nothing to do with his death. Instead, he had bipolar disorder and a heart abnormality. This was a perfectly healthy 19-year-old boy. And it’s deaths like that, that Dr. Fowler would rule accidental and undetermined, making sure that the family could have no chance at justice because there was no way legally to move forward with an investigation.

Mansa Musa:

Okay, let’s unpack this then, because okay, this is already abuse at the highest level.

Speaker 4:

Why

Mansa Musa:

Did it take the medical community

Speaker 4:

So

Mansa Musa:

Long to weigh in? Because now I’m going to give you an example. I had a knee replacement and they put it in wrong. So when I get out, the doctor that examined me took x-rays on both my knees, asked which knee I wanted to get replaced, and I said, one of ’em has already been replaced. So he told me, show me where the one was put in wrong. So then I asked, I said, look, can I get something from you to help me pursue this? And he was reluctant. So I’m asking you why did it take the medical community to got to this point where Freddie Gray, where you can’t ignore it, but all other cases it’s still got the same ominous kind of situation. Oh, this person fell out, fell down. It wasn’t me, my knee on his neck that killed him. It was the fact that he fell and hit his head. He asthmatic.

Taya Graham:

I don’t know if Steven would agree with me here, but I think the media played a role in Dr. Fowler’s crimes. And I am saying

Speaker 4:

Crimes

Taya Graham:

Not being acknowledged. Steven, for years, he was a lone voice reporting on the medical examiner’s office, for example, he did an in-depth investigation on a number of black women who died in Baltimore city whose deaths were not investigated. And yet when you looked at the autopsy report, there was evidence of blunt trauma evidence, asphyxiation evidence that perhaps they had been strangled evidence that they had been experienced sexual assault,

And yet their deaths were ruled undetermined. And you would ask, why would you rule a death like that undetermined? Well, as you know, in Baltimore City, political careers are made on whether or not the homicide rate drops. So by taking these women’s deaths and sliding them into the pile of undetermined, these are women who might’ve had histories of solicitation, drug addiction, et cetera, and they go ahead and they slide their bodies into the undetermined category and the homicide rate is artificially dropped. And so I do think that there’s an area of politics here, and that the larger media ecosystem refused to acknowledge that the medical examiner’s office was absolutely essential in protecting the police department. And Steven was one of the few reporters that called that out.

Stephen Janis:

Well, I mean, I think science is very good at serving injustice.

Mansa Musa:

Come on.

Stephen Janis:

And justice and authoritarianism and science can craft narratives that people will believe despite the evidence. And I think that’s one of the things that we saw with the propaganda of science that Dr. Fowler utilized. Because for example, for years he used excited delirium as a cause of death in police custody and taser death, or even in just police restraints. And excited delirium is just a fiction. It’s a total. So I confronted him on this one time down at the medical examiner’s office. I said, Dr. Fowler, what the hell is excited delirium? And he handed me a book. He gave me a book to read too. So I went home and I read it, and it recounted a condition in 18th century San Asylums where patients would suddenly start to freak out and two weeks later just collapse and die. And that was the entire basis of there was no scientific evidence, just like blood spatter. There’s no scientific

Speaker 4:

Evidence,

Stephen Janis:

Just like hair follicles. There’s no scientific evidence. None of these are supportable. But what are they used for? They’re used for generally in service of our fascist and authoritarian impulses in this country to believe police out of fear, to believe an authoritarian infrastructure that resides in most of these cities. In terms of policing and the medical examiner, Dr. Fowl played a very critical role. As T said, they were cited in this audit for being too cozy with police. They’re supposed to be an objective agency that doesn’t, I mean, they listen to police, but they’re not supposed to be influenced by police. And one of the things that came out is they were constantly influenced by police. So when you let an authoritarian infrastructure infiltrate government, then things like signs tend to become propaganda, not science at all.

Mansa Musa:

And to your point, as I open up one thing in criminal cases, the first thing they do is certify ’em as an expert witness.

Stephen Janis:

Exactly.

Mansa Musa:

And then that gives them this glow of, my word is law. And then when you come and say, bring someone in the counter that, because in most cases you’ll bring somebody in the counter. But in this case, when he’s testifying on behalf of the state and saying, undetermined, cause then there’s no way. There’s no way that

Stephen Janis:

To counter it, to counter it.

Mansa Musa:

So they get a pass.

Stephen Janis:

Think about this. I mean, why would he be called to testify on behalf of Derek Chauvin, the most notorious cop in the history of this

Mansa Musa:

Country?

Stephen Janis:

Why would he be Who call? Why would you call Dr. David Fowlers specifically? Well, that’s because he was known to work with police and known to be so the science propagandist for police. So of course they would call him. I think the thing that you talk about that why did it take so long? It was just because in that particular instance, his ruling or his assertions were so proably false and so prove ignorant. We all saw with our own eyes, George Floyd died under the knee of Derek Chauvin, and here is this man who has the gall to testify in front of the country, in front of the entire nation that he died because of a tailpipe. I mean, so that showed the world everything that we had been saying for years. And unfortunately it took 19 years for that to happen.

Mansa Musa:

My question is why is it that the prosecutors office across the state or wherever this person insert itself in? So I’m going to give you a case. In that point, federal government had an expert witness that was dealing with hair follicle. And to come to find out he didn’t know nothing about hair, hair at all, but the Justice Department got involved. And everybody that whose Casey testified in, they told him, the Justice Department said, listen, if this person testified in your client’s case, filed for a motion for a new trial, because they couldn’t justify his blatant behavior. So why is it that the prosecutors continue to use this guy in defendant’s case, knowing that he perpetuating a lie?

Stephen Janis:

Well, I mean, remember the state went through some reforms separating police investigations from local prosecutors because prosecutors were found to be biased and compromised by police as well. So I don’t think te there was any incentive really for prosecutors to divorce themselves from Fowler. Right,

Taya Graham:

Right. I mean unfortunately when you have prosecutors and police and the medical examiner’s office, unfortunately they’re just too cozy. They all work together. So honestly, these prosecutors, in a lot of cases, not all of them, but they really can’t see straight, they can’t divorce themselves

Stephen Janis:

From

Taya Graham:

The relationship that they’ve established with these people over the years.

Stephen Janis:

I mean, in fact, we talked to Dwight Petitt when we were doing our investigation and he was talking about in the case of Tyron West where police, where the medical examiner would not rule at a homicide, even though it was like people witnessed Tyre West getting beaten to the ground for 45 minutes. And he said, I’ll never forget this. We were interviewing and he goes, police, were in the autopsy room telling the medical examiners what to think. Now that’s not supposed to happen. Police are supposed to give their investigative report, but the medical examiner is supposed to be an independent body. And as it shows, once you allow the power of policing, which Baltimore, if nothing has been ruled by police for decades, once you let the power of the policing infiltrate all your institutions, those institutions are ultimately corrupted by the authoritarian impulse of American policing.

Mansa Musa:

So do you feel exonerated now? I mean, I know you like somewhere on the Bible screaming in the wild saying, listen man, this is corrupt. I’m telling you it’s corrupt people losing their lives.

Stephen Janis:

I will feel better once the police cases, the 27 cases that Mount side medical examiners unanimously ruled, we’re wrongly determined and we’re homicides. I will feel better once those homicides are investigated and in cases where it’s warranted, prosecuted. And we’re also writing a very long story about some of the cases, like you said, that were looked like murders, but he didn’t rule correctly. I will feel better when those cases are reopened. So I would like to see justice for the people who deserve it and then I’ll feel a little bit better at this point. For me, it’s just I am gratified that the world woke up. I dunno, how do

Taya Graham:

You feel? I mean, I’m also really grateful that he was exposed in front of the entire nation for everyone to see. I mean, this is the same medical office that when we were doing a podcast where we were discussing some of these cases that were ruled as undetermined or accidental and were very suspicious, the press information officer tried to get us fired for the medical examiners, for the medical examiner’s office, tried to get us fired, called the management and said, you should take their podcast off the air. So the medical examiner’s office reached out to attack us for doing this

Speaker 4:

Journalism.

Taya Graham:

So we were both out there trying to let the public know what was going on. We had people coming to us. One person that we spoke to, Tyra McClary daughter, I spoke to her. This was a woman who was found in an alley partially disrobed covered by debris. And there was a

Stephen Janis:

Plastic bag tied around her

Taya Graham:

Ankles, right? There’s a plastic bag tied around her ankles. And there was evidence she had particular hemorrhaging. So there’s evidence that she had been perhaps strangled and he, because she had a little bit of drugs in her system, decided to rule it undetermined that he couldn’t be absolutely certain what the cause of death was. Well, her family has, all they’ve ever wanted was an investigation. All they’ve ever wanted was to know that our city cared enough to investigate her death because as her sister said, they tried to sweep her under the rug like trash. They didn’t care about her life. So if they open up cases like that, if they can actually do an investigation. So families like that can get some consolation, I think then will feel vindicated.

Speaker 4:

Yeah.

Mansa Musa:

And I think that that’s right there where we want be at because we talking about human beings and what we think, it’s always got to be a human factor associated with this. And the family members deserve the right to know what happened with their family

Speaker 4:

Members. I agree.

Mansa Musa:

And more importantly, I think when we look at this, how this plays out, everybody is involved, the city’s involved because you’re trying to control the crime narrative. So you looked up away because in your mind I’m saying crime is down now how is it down? We manufacturing these numbers then I’m looking the other way when I see this psychopath making these examinations and saying, oh, cause of death, undetermined, somebody threw ’em off the roof and say, oh, the person had some drugs in. So they just jumped off. And everybody in their mind saying, well nah, that’s not that person. You don’t do the investigative thing.

Speaker 4:

And

Mansa Musa:

Then we are left with a situation. How do we trust this particular institution when the police is involved? The institution plan two, which lead me to my next

Speaker 4:

Thing

Mansa Musa:

Where y’all had did a report on John Hopkins, professor say, America’s dissent into authoritarianism have started with policing in blue cities. If that’s true, we are in big trouble. So look, so we can see this as a continuum because absolutely they’re connected. These entities,

Stephen Janis:

They’re totally connected.

Mansa Musa:

They totally connected, right? And they totally connected to the big narrative. But talk about, and when I was looking at this particular article, and I really commend y’all on y’all vision in terms of how y’all get in the weeds and flush ’em out. So it’s not a matter of if somebody confronts you, it’s a matter of like, you will give me the information to contradict this particular, it’s not my opinion. Give me the information to contradict this statement of facts. And so in this case, you got a John Hopkins professor saying, we in big trouble talk about that.

Stephen Janis:

Well, we were interviewing Lester Spence, who’s a political scientist from Johns Hopkins University during our making a documentary, Freddie Gray, 10 Years, a struggle about the Freddie Gray Anniversary. And he said something that struck both of us, I think, which was that because blue cities are incubators of progressive ideas because people here tend to be more liberal and want to see more progress, think about the great American progressive era in Chicago or New York or Baltimore, even with civil rights,

All these things come here. Because of that, the use of authoritarian policing in these cities has diminished the democratic impulse of this country. It’s like we have taken the most progressive people in this country and we quashed them from dissent with policing. And it struck me so hard because for many years I had watched zero tolerance and Taylor will talk about zero tolerance, but I had watched authoritarian policing and I never thought about it in terms of the implications we have for the rest of the country politically. And that’s why we decided to kind of take that idea a little bit further and say,

Huh, how does this play out? And there were several facets. There were two facets that we thought about. And then Taylor, we’ll talk about zero tolerance. Number one was that the more you arrest people, the more you take away their constitutional rights, the less politically active they become, the less likely they are to vote, the less likely they’re to participate. That’s the first. And the second is that this use overuse of policing failed. It failed, it did not do anything. It made everything worse. You know better than anyone how an arrest uproot someone’s life, totally disengaged ’em from the political system and disengaged ’em from the economic

Speaker 4:

System.

Stephen Janis:

So what it ended up doing was creating these blue cities that looked like failures and the Democrats and the Republicans were able to take that narrative and create this idea of liberal failure, that progressive policies are ultimately failure. So that’s what really struck me. And of course, and take and talk about this, but number one, zero tolerance and of course what we’re seeing now. So if you want to talk about that a little

Taya Graham:

Bit, well, zero tolerance policing, what Stephen was talking about

Stephen Janis:

In Baltimore

Taya Graham:

And what he’s talking about is political efficacy, which is when you have an interaction with law enforcement that there’s research that shows that when you have a negative interaction with law enforcement, you are less likely to vote. You’re less likely to believe that your voice will be heard. You’re less likely to believe you can influence your government. So when our city experienced zero tolerance policing, which occurred from about 2000 to 2007, where roughly 100,000 Baltimore residents were arrested per year. Now this is a city of 600,000 people. So think about it, 100,000 residents were arrested per year. Now of course there were a few repeat arrests in there, but that’s an incredible number of people arrested. But what were they arrested for? Nuisance crimes, quality of life crimes. And I went through hundreds, hundreds of statements of probable cause. And I can tell you I saw with my own eyes, expectorating spitting on a sidewalk was a reason that someone would be taken down to central booking loitering. So what that can mean is you’re standing with your friends on the corner, a cop says move, and you don’t move fast enough. You’re taken in, you’re sitting your own stoop of your house with an open container taken in. Okay? So for all these reasons, people were being taken in. And that’s based off of that broken windows theory of policing where

If you take care of these nuisance crimes, it’ll help take care of the bigger ones in your neighborhood. Well, all it did was criminalize an entire population as well as take away their political efficacy.

Stephen Janis:

Okay, go ahead. Sorry. Ahead. Do you want to finish?

Taya Graham:

So in relation to taking away your ability to feel like you can influence your government, you have an entire generation of young people who have been harassed, who have seen their civil rights violated, who’ve seen their constitutional rights violated on a daily basis. You have disempowered an entire community and it’s hard to believe that’s not purposeful.

Mansa Musa:

And they become apathetic. They be like, man, why would I do something? If I say something, they going to lock me up. If I

Speaker 4:

Roll

Mansa Musa:

My eyes, they’re going to lock me up. If I shuffle my feet, they’re going to lock me up. So stop from being locked up. I’m not going to do nothing.

Stephen Janis:

It was also very a constitutionally aggressive. And there are more examples. There was a training called Diamond training, which was literally the brochure. This was in the 2000 tens, was training Baltimore police officers, was supposed to be things learned in the streets of Fallujah. And they trained Baltimore police officers. They used Eric Reon Reon, he’s a discredited politician who was also a Navy seal. And he came in and he trained officers to be militarily aggressive. And that led to something called Visa Violent Impact Crimes Division, which was a group of 80 officers not tied to any district dressed in jeans going around and just the idea was to disrupt. But of course the idea was to impose an unconstitutional regime and order on the neighborhoods that they destroyed. I mean, they really did. They would come in, I would do stories where they just ransacked the whole neighborhood, arrested everybody, threw people around. This was going on in a democratic, allegedly democratic city. And we used to confront the city solicitor about it. And we would say jokingly, well, the Constitution doesn’t imply in Baltimore. And he would just smirk

Mansa Musa:

Because

Stephen Janis:

I think they felt like anything was justified. And so this set the roots of authoritarians in this country. Go ahead.

Mansa Musa:

And other part of it is this is like a continuum of what has been going on forever because we had no knock laws and blue cities. We had stop and frisk.

Stephen Janis:

Absolutely.

Mansa Musa:

And we was talking about this, you had the shotgun squad in Baltimore jump out, boys jump out boys in DC they had the same thing where, so this attitude,

Stephen Janis:

Gun trace, task force, gun

Mansa Musa:

Trace, yeah. Attitude. It goes on and on and on. And they reinvent and they redefined.

Stephen Janis:

Let me give you a perfect example. When I was reporting on Zeto in the s, I got a list of quotas that police officers had. They had quotas for arrests, they had to make a certain number of arrests regardless of if someone broke the law. Well, now what are we hearing now that federal immigration officers have quotas?

Mansa Musa:

Right?

Stephen Janis:

Right. It’s very similar and parallel. Unfortunately, it happened in a place that is most likely to push back against authoritarians became subject to it.

Mansa Musa:

And as we see now, to juxtapose that to what we see today, we see right today that now the first thing that president did, and he made a speech at the Justice Department, he recogniz the Justice Department.

Stephen Janis:

That’s true.

Mansa Musa:

He said, yeah, look, I’ll pity deal with Pam because we getting ready to unleash the line. And right after that, now we find ourselves that any type of dissent, any type of descent, it could be no more than holding up a sign saying Impeach trumps. Under any given circumstance, you can find yourself locked up. But more importantly, we’ve seen the situation in California with the state Senator and where voting on your budget, we’re responsible for regulating your behavior.

Speaker 4:

We arrest

Stephen Janis:

You.

Mansa Musa:

You don’t give me the common decency. Come forward and let me hear what you got to say. You say arrest them, get ’em out, and then come back and say, anybody would know that that was out of order. With that person did.

Stephen Janis:

Let me give you the most important point of why blue cities are so important and how they prove progressive policies despite the fact that this authoritarian impulse, which of course was imposed by a political regime that wanted to bolster tax breaks for developers and gentrification, all sort of stuff. But this year Baltimore’s homicide is down significantly as it is across the country, and most people are giving credit for that to community-based programs, not police. While this is happening, the Baltimore Police Department is down between five to a thousand officers, in other words, at historic low staffing level. So less policing, less crime, less crime, community programs, less crime, less crime. And these all things like safe streets started in places like Baltimore in blue cities, and yet they have proven to be more effective. So that’s why I think it’s so important for the Trump administration feels like it’s so important to attack blue cities because here we are open to progressive ideas and that’s the last thing he wants.

Mansa Musa:

And to go back to your point, you can pick up from this, go back to your point where the impact that it has on the psychic of the population, because if you attack of Blue city, which is progressive and have the potential to do progressive things, that’s going to become the standard across the country. If I can attack that thinking, if I can get people to become apathetic, if I can get people to become fearful, then now I can come in and say, well, crime is up, carjacking is up. I’m your savior, I’m doing this for you. But now you know it ain’t for you, but I’ve been beat down so much psychologically I don’t care. I say, well, long as they ain’t come and knock my door down, I don’t care. I know ain’t nobody carjacking. I know this neighborhood is safe, but I don’t have they done beat me down psychologically. Talk about that.

Taya Graham:

This is something that is really important for people to understand. The Trump administration is purposefully attacking progressive cities. The arrest of Senator Alex Padilla, that was no accident that occurred that that man was taken out of that meeting with Christie Nome, that he was forced face down on the floor, forced to have his hands behind his back and put in cuffs. That was a message loud and clear to the rest of the country to let you know that any form of dissent, even a senator can be arrested and cuffed and have his rights taken away. We saw the mayor of New York Baraka when he was simply trying to take a look at one of the detention centers in his city,

Mansa Musa:

Right? He was mandated,

Taya Graham:

Right? He was simply doing proper oversight. He was arrested, representative vers, she was charged with resisting arrest interference and the charges, these are federal charges against her. They actually carry one to eight years as actual sentences. Representative McIver is facing this. So this is very purposeful to tell the public that if this can be done to a mayor, if this can be done to a senator, we’ve seen members of the media detained. We’ve seen members of the media. I don’t know if people saw that video of that Australian reporter where you saw, and this was during the LA protest against the raids of ice. And she’s standing there talking, it’s obvious she’s a reporter, has a big blue microphone, and you see a police officer turn around behind her and shoot her right in the back of the leg. You can see it clear as day. It was purposeful. There’s no other way. There’s no way to describe it. And that was a message to the American people. Just lock your doors, stay home and don’t speak up.

Stephen Janis:

How you were talking about why did people know about Dr. Fowler and his bad science? Well, similarly, Baltimore had unconstitutional racist policing for decades. But you know how we finally found out about it and was certain about it was because a bunch of people in Baltimore rose up and had the uprising and the uprising brought such attention to Baltimore and also the people not comprising and saying, we’re not going to take this anymore. That the Justice Department came in, did an investigation and found that we had unconstitutional policing. Now Tay and I knew this and we had reported on it, but the people of Baltimore rose up and some people look at the uprising and say, oh, it was a riot. No, it was an uprising of democratically conscious people who didn’t want to live under the regime of fascist policing anymore. And they show the world and then the world listen, and now we have all these reforms and now we have lower crime.

Mansa Musa:

You know what? And crazy part about, for the people that don’t know about the history of Baltimore, all the figureheads, Bishop Robinson Black, everybody that was in authority in terms of the police, you would never think, oh, racist police. But they was complicit

Stephen Janis:

Absolutely

Mansa Musa:

With that. But talk about the connection between, because this is interesting, and I think our orders really need to understand this, the blue cities and sanctuary cities, because most of the sanctuary cities are blue

Speaker 4:

Cities.

Mansa Musa:

Talk about that because you said that they’re intentionally targeting blue cities. But to give our audience an understanding what a blue city look like and why when we say a blue city, what that is,

Speaker 4:

Because

Mansa Musa:

Most people might think otherwise, oh, sanctuary city people got same-sex merge anywhere. Anything that’s progressive in terms of supporting the populace and adhering to the descent or the views of the

Speaker 4:

Population.

Mansa Musa:

If you not that then you rock robotics. So talk about that.

Taya Graham:

The one thing I would say, I know Steven has a really interesting theory behind this of the authoritarian impulse of the Trump administration, but the one thing I’d say is one of the reasons why they’re attacking these progressive cities and the ice raids are happening in la, San Diego, Denver, Austin, Texas, Chicago. Why these raids are happening in these cities is very purposeful. It’s because it’s in these progressive cities where we are most likely to push back. We are the ones who stand up for constitutional rights. We are the ones who have fought for civil rights and they know they have to essentially make the population here fearful of coming forward, of coming out. If you can make the population fearful, you can make them quiescent and you can keep them silent because they know the toughest points of resistance is not coming from rural America. It’s coming from these blue progressive cities where we have fought day in and day out for our civil rights. So that is why they’re doing their best to que descent in this way. Well,

Stephen Janis:

Just to add on to the thesis of how blue cities incubate new ideas that create progress. So yes, places like Baltimore are technically sanctuary cities, but if you look at the statistics of this country, we have a lower birth rate, 75% of our workforce growth, the growth of the people that work in this country came from immigration and blue cities have embraced those people because we need those people economically. Without them, we can’t grow without them. We can’t take care of our elder or farm our food. So that’s why progressive cities have pushed a welcoming. It wasn’t just the idea of America being open, which it is, but it’s also the idea that we need more people and we need to grow our cities and we need to embrace people from other

Speaker 4:

Countries.

Stephen Janis:

They bring vitality and strength and that’s why they’re attacking it because it’s an idea that actually is a counter to their idea, which is Baltimore. The country has to go backwards somehow, intellectually and morally, and also legally has to go backwards. And here are these blue cities that are diverse and thriving. I mean, most blue cities are the economic engines of this country.

Speaker 4:

That’s right.

Stephen Janis:

Like Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, Washington, DC are the economic engines that make this country grow. And it’s just ironic that they’re attacking them, but I think they’re attacking them for a reason because if we prove these progressive ideas are right, what hope do they have to push their faster?

Mansa Musa:

And to the professors, he said authoritarianism, it’s just experiment is working, is like they looking at blue cities and if this is the case, we’re in trouble. And so how do we unpack that? Because

The reality is we know that we are dealing with the fastest authoritarian government right now. There’s no question about that. Monuments is being like, next thing we are going to see is confederate flag in the White House, simple as that confederate flag, American flag and a Nazi flag and saying that this is not the flag, what the flag represent, this is history that we’ve been ignoring. And that’s not right. But the reality is that we dealing with a fastest regime, and like you say now, the attack of the blue city, and to your point, Jan, that’s a correct because the migration to

Speaker 4:

Chicago, when

Mansa Musa:

You look at everybody,

Speaker 4:

Great migration,

Mansa Musa:

Regardless of what went on, the contradiction that went on between the groups they eventually found, got together and say, okay, it’s better to work together than work against each other because all of us come out the same

Speaker 4:

Area.

Mansa Musa:

But talk about that. Talk about how do we counter this or what is the counter to this?

Taya Graham:

Well, one thing I would say is that this is an ideological battle because as student rightly said, these progressive cities and progressive states like California, California has one of the biggest economies in the world.

Stephen Janis:

Six largest economy in the world,

Taya Graham:

Sixth largest economy in the world compared to other whole entire countries. So we know progressive policies work. We wouldn’t have an iPhone if it wasn’t for letting immigrants into our country. So we have to understand that they are part of the economic engine of growth in our country. And that these progressive policies, these freedoms actually make us more productive. They make us innovators and it actually makes money. And I do think behind this that for years even see the old school Republican party, they knew that we needed immigrants. I mean even George W. Bush was trying to find a path to citizenship for people.

Speaker 4:

But

Taya Graham:

I think in the background that big agriculture people who like Tyson’s chicken people have those meat processing plants, those folks wanted to keep a certain segment of the population undocumented so they could remain exploited. So they could pay them nothing so that they could hold deportation over their heads as a threat. So they couldn’t bargain for any type of labor rights whatsoever. And now they’re realizing, oh, we might’ve pushed it too far because we’re about to lose all of our farm markers. We’re about to lose all the people who work in that meat processing

Speaker 4:

Plant.

Taya Graham:

And the thing is, this is an ideological war because we literally have economic proof that these progressive policies work. When you take a look at red states, they’re the ones who have the worst education. They’re the ones where people have the lowest medium incomes,

Speaker 4:

Progressive

Taya Graham:

Policies work. But what the Trump administration is trying to do is say he’s fighting the ideological war to say no. See, their cities are chaos. Their cities are in disarray. Their cities are crime ridden. And that’s one of the reasons he’s putting that military on the streets. He wants to condition the American public to be used to seeing military on the street. And he wants our military to get used to trying to pacify the American public.

Stephen Janis:

I think at its core, this fight and how we fight against it is over America’s original sin, which of course is slavery. And the idea that you have an economy that’s purely extractive, that exploits one set of people for the benefit of another. And I think that’s really what underlies Trump’s and the conservative movement here in the United States. That’s why they worry about Confederate statues and that’s why they worry about naming bases after Confederates. They do not want to acknowledge the original sin of this country because for some reason they think it challenges the order of things for them, which is to exploit people, is to make well, to have an extractive economy. And that’s where this battle, and that’s why what we have to do is call attention to that. Call attention to the root

Of what? Yeah, the root of racism, the drives, all of this. Racism drives every aspect. There’s nothing. That’s why it’s so irrational. That’s why you look at it and you’re like, why do they keep making these ridiculously counterintuitive moves like the trade wars and things? It’s because Trump’s brain is baked by racism in many ways, and so is the conservative movement at this point. So I think the best way to fight back against it is to acknowledge that and to understand it through that prism, and then it starts to make sense and then you can fight back.

Taya Graham:

Steven, I think you make a really good point. My concern in this ideological war is that to some extent the Trump administration and their allies have been telling the American public that the media cannot be trusted. Good point. And we know as members of the media that our job is to help people tell their stories, to help amplify their voices. And if the public doesn’t trust the media to help them get government accountability, the public, our community has lost one of the weapons in its arsenal to push back against this government. So there’s so many different ways that the Trump administration has tried to isolate the public from their natural sources of government accountability, whether that’s the freedom to protest, whether that’s trusting a member of the media to tell your story and amplify your story. There are all these different ways that the Trump administration is trying to silence people. And it really does concern me. And I’m just hoping that the public can know that they can trust their independent members of the media to help amplify their voices because everybody needs to get into the fight. You cannot be on the sidelines anymore.

Mansa Musa:

And I agree, and as we close out, I agree with that because at the end of the day, we recognize that one thing about this country, we can say what we want to say, but people, we’ve been spoiled and believe that we have our rights. We have a right to self determine. We have an inevitable. So this is something that we’ve been indoctrinated to think. So regardless of how they try to beat us down, know saying, when they go low, we go high. Well, this is our logical battle. And I think at the end of the process, our ideas going to prevail because our ideas is ideas of humanity, our ideas and ideas of inclusiveness. DEI, you doing DEI and you doing the same thing that you opposed to you’re doing in the form of bringing back statues. You’re doing in the form of saying that I’m bringing these South Africans to this country because they’re being, oh, oh my God, it even hard to get out.

But I appreciate, and you know what I really appreciate y’all my best, my favorite couple. Now when we sit down, we had these conversations. It’s like when I was in the prison in the penitentiary, we used to be sit on milk crazy and we used to do political, have political conversations, but we always had an area where we were always politics. And this is what I get when y’all come, y’all very knowledgeable in what y’all talking about. Y’all very invested in making sure the pigs be held accountable. Y’all very invested in making sure the people rights be recognized and that they don’t be trampled on. This is something that we take for granted, but I think at the end of the day, we’re going to be better off because we got people like yourselves. Thank you. And then you have it real news, rallying the bars. As you can see, I got the heavy hitters on the couch today. We unpacked this police state, this authoritarian state, but more importantly, we pulled back the cover off of so-called Expert Witnesses, and that’s not the last you’re going to hear on that. But we asked that you continue to support the Real News and Rambling Bar because guess what? We are really the news.