Machine transcript, names and spellings corrected. Click a time to play from that point.

0:00 Joanne Faryon My name's Joanne Faryon. I'm a journalist and I worked for a long time for KPBS and then inewsource and I quit my job last year and I'm working on a book. So anyway, that's how I ended up here. Xavier and I used to work together. So Xavier actually asked me to come and moderate this event. And the reason he wanted to hold this forum in his words is because he said after the election, he started feeling like shit. And he didn't just want to whine. He wanted to feel empowered as though he could take some kind of action. And I think we all kind of feel that way. We're feeling kind of weary post-election and we want to know what can we do? How can we move forward? So one of the things I think the day after inauguration that we all kind of learned is that we're not alone.

0:54 We saw the turnout during the women's march and I think we don't have a huge turnout tonight, but I think what we realize is it feels good to kind of get together and talk about this and feel as though we can somehow take back our democracy. So we're going to begin tonight with a reading by Ted Washington, author, artist, and poet. So I'm going to turn it over to Ted.

1:22 Ted Washington Check, check. Hello everyone. Thank you for having me. Wow. I feel large. I'm honored to be here. As I was discussing earlier, my grandfather was the first licensed black electrician in St. Louis. My brother works for the Gas Fitters Union in St. Louis right now. And so I'm honored to be here. Thank you. Here's just a quick poem. It's called Proletariat. This is not the answer. The beast is still buoyant, but swims with no direction. The common desire of survival as a state of being may not be enough motivation for good behavior from the limbs submerged, working harder than ever, working longer than ever, working better than ever to keep the beast afloat and the dream alive. But the feet realize that the head makes decisions to keep the head dry and aloft. The feet, the legs, the working extremities are driven for the head feels it must survive.

2:31 But the feet tire. There is no time for rest, no reward, no time for recovery, only work. More and more of the beast finds the water and is submerged. What will become of the beast when the head hits the water? Thank you.

3:00 Joanne Faryon Thank you, Ted. I'm going to now start with the panelists and ask them to each introduce themselves and talk a little bit about the organization, the group that you represent. And why don't we start with you, Maria?

3:17 Maria Nieto Senour Hi, I'm Maria Nieto Senour and I am on the community college board of trustees for the San Diego Community College District. And I've been on that board since 1990, so I know quite a bit about the San Diego Community College District. We have three colleges, Mesa, Miramar and San Diego City College. And we have continuing education center in many different places where we hold continuing education programs. I'm also a professor emeritus from San Diego State University where I spent close to 40 years training counselors in a program called the Community Based Block Program that has always been off campus. It's a legitimate, real master's program, but mostly it's been off campus and it's always been committed to educating people to be multiculturally competent right from its inception in 1974 is the first graduating class from that group. And I've been with that program for 40 years. I'm now retired from that, but I'm still on the college board.

4:31 Justin Pearson I'm Justin Pearson. My resume is not quite as impressive, but I run a record label called 31G and I play in bands. But I think more importantly, just am part of a community that's sort of this underground subculture, loosely known as punk. And it's, I don't know, rooted in social justice and activism and stuff like that. So I'll do different things. For instance, a few weeks ago we put on a show that was a benefit for Planned Parenthood, raised some money for Planned Parenthood in light of what's going on with current administration. So that kind of stuff happens. Thanks. Yeah. It was a great response at the show too. Some people have a sort of negative perception of punk and punk rock or whatever, but I think it was pretty fairly positive and we raised some money and more importantly raised the awareness of the organization and how to change things socially.

5:43 Masada Disenhouse Hi, my name is Masada Disenhouse and I'm a co-founder of San Diego 350, which is a local climate activist group. And our organization works to inspire a movement to prevent the worst impacts of climate change. And we do that in five different ways. We raise awareness and educate people. We do a lot of public advocacy work. We mobilize people through marches and actions of different types. We do a lot of coalition building and we also have a strong focus on climate justice and partnering with social and economic justice organizations. And I also a staff person for 350.org, which is the group that inspired us to exist. And I now work with groups like ours around North America. There are about 140 of them who are all independently run and mostly all volunteer organizations kind of working on the same mission.

6:46 Nate Fairman Hello, my name is Nate Fairman. I'm a journeyman lineman. For 10 years I worked for SDG&E. I went through a four year IBEW apprenticeship. Eight months ago I ran for office. My job now is business manager of this labor union. This is our hall and thank you for coming out. We represent 2,600 families in San Diego and Imperial Counties. Our members work in the utility industry, so 1600 work for SDG&E, the linemen, the welders, the tree trimmers, the electricians that work for the power company. We also represent all the tree trimmers in San Diego, all the mechanics that work for MTS that maintain the buses, the flaggers that work for San Diego Trolley that keep people safe and not hit by trolleys. And we also represent 900 people that work for Imperial Irrigation District out in Imperial Valley. So my full-time job, that's my office up there with the light on for some ambient artistic light that X I'm sure likes.

7:40 But my full-time job now is to negotiate contracts and protect the wages and benefits for 2,600 families here in San Diego and Imperial Counties. It's something that I take very serious. It's something that I care about very dearly. And what's really important in the labor movement right now is to reach out to other community groups and build really strong coalitions because in the labor movement, solidarity is everything. An injury to one is an injury to all. So often you hear people say, "Well, why are those people marching?" And you hear terrible things like, "I want to hit them with my car," and just terrible, terrible things. And some of these people are union members. Some of these people are involved in their own churches or other organizations. So my goal in life is to build large coalitions of community groups, labor groups, nonprofits, climate justice groups, because that's the only way we're going to win.

8:34 It's by building these strong coalitions. Labor is my 100% goal in life. That's what I focus my 10 to 12 hours a day. But my broad vision is to build coalitions with community groups as a way to not only fight against Donald Trump and his anti-worker, anti-woman agenda, but just to improve the lives of everyone. We all go to work for a living. The work that we do really unites us all. So thanks again for coming to our hall. I appreciate you all being here. There's an AED right when you walk in. So if anything happens, I am AED and first aid CPR qualified. So I will go and I will grab the AED, but I'm going to need someone to call 911. Do I have a volunteer? Okay. So that is Matt and he's going to call 911 if anything happens. Thank you.

9:26 Andrea Guerrero I'm Andrea Guerrero. I'm the executive director of Alliance San Diego, which is a community empowerment organization working to change policies so that all people in San Diego can achieve their full potential in an environment of harmony, safety, equality, and justice. Thank you, Nate, for hosting us here. It's such a pleasure to come here. I've had such wonderful working relationship with IBEW and I'm getting to know some of the other panelists. Maria, I've known you for a very long time. So our organization does a number of things. We do large scale voter mobilization and we are very proud that in San Diego we have been seeing an uptick of voter participation for several election cycles. In fact, we had more people turn out in the last election than we've ever had. And that was across all demographic groups. So the narrative of low voter participation that's happening nationally doesn't apply here in San Diego.

10:26 So we've got something good going on. We also have a rich ecosystem of social justice organizations that we regularly partner with. And so beyond the voter mobilization work that we're doing specifically to turn out low turnout communities, we also do a lot of immigrant rights work and immigrant outreach work. And our focus of late has really been in making sure that people know how to protect themselves and their families.

10:53 Joanne Faryon Great. So we're a small group. We're going to keep this really casual. I have questions that I'm going to toss out to the panelists, but also I'm really counting on you guys to speak up, ask questions and participate as well. But let's start off with, I'm going to toss it again back to Xavier. What he said that one of the reasons he wanted to organize this forum is that initially after the election, he realized he was going through the five stages of grief. So it begins with, and we've got a graphic up there, it begins with denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. And so when he got to acceptance, he said, "Okay, I can't accept," which is one of the reasons we're here today. So I'd like to ask our panelists, first of all, your initial reaction after the election and then where you think you might be now some two months later in terms of the stages of grief or where we might be as a community and how you're feeling.

11:53 And why don't we start with you, Andrea? We'll work our way back now.

11:59 Andrea Guerrero Sure. So in the work that we do, especially around immigrant rights work, that work has always been challenging. We live in a border region where we have more enforcement agents than any other county in the country. And so our reality has already been heartbreaking. And so everything that's been happening with the new administration is not new for San Diego, it's new for the country. So where I am at is I think I was already at acceptance on hour one because I knew what we had already been facing and I knew that our reality was certainly possibly going to get worse, but it was already bad in many ways. And we didn't have the luxury to linger in any of those stages. We really had to move through those quite quickly because the very next day we have staff who are undocumented and we have a number of constituents who are undocumented and we needed to be able to respond to them right away.

13:03 And I'm proud to say that we were able to do that. We ran a very aggressive information campaign in the five weeks before the new administration took over just with our undocumented youth community to make sure they had very specific pieces of information that they needed before the turnover.

13:24 Joanne Faryon So what specifically were you hearing then from undocumented youth or other people in terms of their concerns now compared to maybe three months ago?

13:32 Andrea Guerrero Right. So just to remind us all that the undocumented community lives with fear every single day. There's nothing that would prevent them from being deported any single day. And the worst of the Obama administration is being repeated now, but what we're seeing now is not any, any worse than what we saw in the first term of Obama. The immediate fear for the undocumented youth was that their program, DACA, was going to be eliminated because that had been a campaign promise. And so they were facing the possibility of losing their jobs, losing in some cases their scholarships if they were in school, losing their stability and having to step back into the shadows. Here in the border region, deportations can happen very quickly. They can happen within the hour or within the day. And so that reality shift was of grave concern to us, which is why we needed to make sure that the young people understood what they should do about applications that were pending, what they should do about travel, what they should do if they encountered an officer, because we just didn't know how quickly that change would come.

14:41 We saw how quickly the executive orders were issued. Fortunately, none have been issued around DACA. That's not to say that none won't be issued, but that was the threat.

14:54 Joanne Faryon Nate, your initial reaction?

14:56 Nate Fairman So my initial reaction, I was terrified. I was a Bernie Sanders delegate. I campaigned extremely hard for Bernie. And when Hillary won the Democratic nomination, I was okay with it. I wasn't thrilled. And I can kind of feel that sentiment with a lot of my friends, a lot of my coworkers and a lot of my colleagues from out of state. We campaigned, but unfortunately a lot of us, we didn't campaign as hard as we would have for Bernie. So I woke up and I first though I said Bernie would have won. And there was just all my friends who were strong, Berniecrats were saying the same thing. But in the labor movement, the first thing that really hit me was right to work. For those of you who don't know what right to work is, it's a piece of legislation that makes it illegal for unions to have dues check off.

15:48 So we cannot have mandatory dues or fair share fee payer obligations for our members. So people can come in, they can sign a card and they can say, "I don't want to pay union dues to the union." And unfortunately under right to work legislation, the union still has to negotiate contracts for them. They still have to file grievances for them and protect their job. So they have to spend union finances to protect a member that's not paying in for that service. So this legislation was written by the Koch brothers as extremely anti-union and it's a way to weaken unions' voices in the political atmosphere because traditionally labor unions have been a bedrock boots on the ground organization for the Democratic Party. We get people out, we mobilize people in the AFL-CIO. We have teachers, firefighters, electricians. It's a very powerful tool for a lot of campaigns to use.

16:48 Unfortunately, under right to work legislation, unions are so busy internally organizing their members that they don't have the wherewithal to invest in political campaigns and most union members vote Democrat. So I immediately thought, well, if National Right to Work passes, we're all going to be in a lot of trouble. Union density is at all time low. It's right where it was at the turn of the 19th century and it's extremely disheartening to see as union density goes down, so does income inequality. It goes up actually. So the middle class is shrinking, union power is shrinking. So I was extremely terrified that it's just going to continue down that bar graph that's going to run the middle class into the ground. Now I'm a little bit more excited. I see right to work legislation being fought back at different state houses around the United States and we're going to have to fight.

17:46 I feel energized. I feel that the people that are hitting the streets, the number of people that are being mobilized now, that's inspiring. And if we just sink our head and drop our shoulders down, we're all going to lose. But if we look at these movements and we build these coalitions, we can really win. We can fight back and we're going to have to if we're going to want to survive. So I would say initially I was terrified. Now I'm less terrified and more ready to get to work. And I think that's what we all have to be. We all have to be ready to get to work and work extremely hard and sacrifice time where we would be going on vacation and spending time with our families. We're going to have to organize. We're going to have to mobilize. We're going to have to sacrifice a lot of things if we're going to win.

18:29 But clearly people are doing it and I think it's exciting and I think we are going to win.

18:33 Joanne Faryon I'm sorry.

18:35 Nate Fairman I'm feeling promise. I'm feeling good, I guess.

18:41 Joanne Faryon Masada?

18:43 Masada Disenhouse Yeah. A lot of what Andrea and Nate said definitely resonates with me and I will just to follow up on what Nate was saying. I would say I'm tired, but in a good way. And I'm tired because there has been such an influx of people being interested in taking action since the election that we've had… I feel like a lot of us on the left were kind of building towards the election and had this idea that after the election we were going to have a period of rest where we could sort of restructure and stuff. And instead where we ended up with was everybody going through these stages and getting to that anger point pretty quickly, I think. We had just to throw out some numbers, we had 10 times as many people sign up on our website in the month of November as we had in any other month.

19:39 And on the national level, we had 12 new groups form, 12 new 350 affiliate groups form last year and we've had 30 since the election. So people are very fired up. I wish they were more fired up before because what Andrea was saying, I really feel also from a climate perspective and what Nate was saying also, things have not been great to begin with. I mean, every little step under arguably the most progressive president in my lifetime was still very hard fought and even under that administration, we had massive corporate influence that was really limiting what our government could do nationally and locally. And so it's not like things were good before anyway. And in some ways I do feel that between people getting fired up about this and because a lot of that corporate influence and a lot of the tensions within the country are much more at the surface now.

20:47 And I feel like in some ways there's an opportunity there to deal with them in a much more straightforward way and maybe make possibly, I hope, who knows, make more progress than we've been able to. So I guess I'm feeling tired, but also energized.

21:02 Joanne Faryon Great. Justin?

21:04 Justin Pearson I'm probably with how Xavier felt. I guess I'm not very optimistic. I think that the system is not really a democracy and I think it's an illusion to let people feel empowered. I just don't really have faith in how it works, especially even with the DNC working against Bernie and his campaign. And then people just sort of accepted that and they're like, "Oh, that's cool. We're going to go ahead and vote for Hillary now." And it's like, well, to me, and I've been shunned by a lot of people for voting third party saying I'm the reason why Trump is the, I'm sorry, why number 45 is the administration leader, but both of the choices led to war. They would lead to war. So in my heart, it's hard to find that place to go like, "Oh yeah, I'm going to rally behind this other administration who's just as corrupt as the other ones." And I do see what everybody's saying on this panel, I do see the sort of optimism and the energization of certain elements in society, but what it comes down to is capitalism and it comes down to the powers that be and even mentioning the Koch brothers and it's just the powers that be aren't going to give it up.

22:30 So as much as I want to say like, "Oh, I'm on board for this and we can vote and I vote." I think that there are baby steps, but I think it's going to have to be something more radical, like a legitimate revolution. And if it's going to be violent, it might be violent. We're in a borderline police state at this point. So it's pretty questionable the world that we're living in, the world that we're about to go into. So another thing too though, I think is for the last eight years, the administration was still partaking in illegal drone strikes and still doing things that were unconstitutional and things that were not cool with human rights and not cool with the environment. And a lot of people on the left or Democrats or whatever were a little bit more apathetic or at ease. And I think that that sucks because I mean, I joked around a little bit with this when Trump was elected.

23:28 I'm sorry, when number 45 was elected, I got to get that right. And I was like, people kept saying like, "Oh, punk will be good again." Because there's the '80s and there's Dead Kennedys and bands like that that were so good because of Reagan.

23:43 But for the last eight years, there was some pretty rad punk bans and people were just kind of lazy and were like, "It's cool." But some of us were still pissed about those things that existed and conceivably have always existed, at least in my lifetime. So yeah, I'm not very optimistic and I apologize to myself for that. It's a weird world.

24:08 Joanne Faryon So Justin, you mentioned two things that I just want to say we're going to get to later on in the discussion in terms of the third party candidates and also civil disobedience. So we're going to talk more about that too because I think there were two hot buttons there.

24:22 Justin Pearson Yeah.

24:23 Joanne Faryon Great. And Maria, your initial reactions.

24:26 Maria Nieto Senour Well, I was also a Bernie supporter and it took me, it was very difficult for me to mark the Hillary box, but I did. And it was because I thought she would be less bad. And I still think she would have been less bad. I haven't changed my mind on that. I think the people that Trump has put in place are horrible. I have yet to see somebody that I think, oh, that was a good one, a good cabinet member. There might be one, but I haven't figured out who it is, if there is. But I'm 73 and three quarters years old.

25:16 I have been around this process a while. My first language, although I'm an American and my parents were American citizens, they were born in the US. And on my father's side, we were many generations American. As a child, I didn't know English because there was so much segregation that I didn't need to know it. We spoke Spanish because that's the only language we used until we went to school. And then when we went to school speaking Spanish, they'd wash our mouth out with soap or they'd paddle us. So I remember those days. I remember the '60s and I have a very good friend who's now a dean at Grossmont College, and I'm not going to name him, but he was part of the Chicano walkouts in LA. I don't know if you're familiar with the walkouts in LA that were really powerful in our movement.

26:11 And he, along with some of his friends, took out lots of student loans to go to UCLA. That's where they went to school. And they figured they'd never have to pay them back because the revolution was going to come. And of course they had to pay them back. And I don't think the revolution is going to come. I don't believe that people are going to. So we have to figure out what we're going to do without a revolution. How are we going to change things? What can we do to combat all this? And I am energized to some degree. I'm also sad a lot.

26:51 I avoid television because I might see that face or one of those faces and I dislike all of them. I don't want to see Bannon or Kellyanne or any of those people. I don't want to see them. I don't want to hear their voices. I didn't invite them into my home and I don't want to have them there, but every now and then there they are. And my partner Ernie and I do a lot of talking about this, about what this means. I have lived through abortion being illegal. I have lived through segregation. I went through segregated schools. I have lived through the demeaning of women in the ways that nobody even thought it was sexual harassment. We were all sexually harassed. I was sexually harassed so much by so many people, but nobody ever thought that was part of being a professional. You just had to figure out how to deal with the men.

27:53 Ernie's lived through Jim Crow. I hate to go backwards. It feels like we're going back at least 60 years. And I'm at the end of my life, not at the beginning of my life. And it's exhausting to be here with this kind of shit going on when we fought so many battles to make progress and it was never great, but it was progress. And I've been very worried about the unions. I've been very worried about that. I totally am in sync with you on that one, that without unions, we don't have a middle class. I'm very worried about my undocumented friends and my DACA students at the community college district. We have people that are afraid to go to class. I have Muslim students that are… I just met with one of them yesterday that are scared. I have LGBT students that were legally married, but now what's going to happen?

29:00 Transgender student, and now it just feels like all of the things that we did to progress a little bit, and I think one of the problems is that people don't know the difference between capitalism and democracy. And so they've got all the big capitalists running the shit out of everything and that's considered democracy in a lot of people's minds. If you talk about any other system, political system, socialism is such a bad word. I'm not convinced that Bernie could have won if we had run him because he proudly claimed his status as a democratic socialist, but the word socialist scares too many people because they're not educated. I've been an educator since 1960, that's before some of the people in this room were born or thought about. And in 1960, I first started teaching school and up until now there's been some progress, but Oh, not enough.

30:01 And people just don't know things that they ought to know, like the fact that capitalism is a system of economics, not a system of people having a voice. People don't know the difference.

30:15 Joanne Faryon You talked about taking action. And I know initially the day after inauguration, we saw the Women's March, right? Record numbers. We heard a lot too about ACLU got tons of donations, Planned Parenthood, let's give money. I want to ask a double barreled question, which is a really terrible thing to do, but it picks up on what should we be doing? We're out marching or we're giving money, so what can we be doing? And when you talk about the revolution isn't coming, I just want to throw out this question. This came from on Facebook. I asked my friends, "What should we be talking about tonight?" And this is from a writer in New York and it sort of dovetails into what you've just been saying. And he said, "Ask the people here to describe an event or an action that would compel them to abandon political discourse and engage in the kind of civil disobedience that helped shape the country in the first place." So I'm going to put those two questions together, those two things together.

31:14 So what should we be doing and should that be beyond maybe what we thought we might do that maybe we thought we didn't have to walk out and start the revolution, you thought that was maybe over, but maybe that's what it's going to take. So I want to throw that out to first. How about Justin first? What should people be doing?

31:39 Justin Pearson If I had the answer to that, I would sell it and I'd be one of the corporations running this thing. It's a great question. I think on a basic level, it'd be living your life. It's like where you spend your money, that's a huge vote. Do you want to really shop at Walmart? Well, a lot of people have to, but you probably should start focusing on buying local. And I think the way you live your life, if you can live your life that's more environmentally friendly, just little things that you can do, it all adds up. So I mean, that's one thing, but on a larger scale, I think you do have to start to fight and not just fight by voting, but there's the whole thing where there was, I hate to reference social media, but there was the punching the Nazi thing that happened.

32:28 And there was people defending him. And I think, you know what, sorry to say this, but fuck that. I'm going to punch a Nazi in the face. That's just how it needs to be. It's 2017. There doesn't need to be that kind of rhetoric. And the weird thing is though is we have a political administration that identifies with that rhetoric. So it's like now you're out there essentially about to punch authority and that's kind of the –

32:59 Joanne Faryon But how do you punch authority?

33:01 Justin Pearson You can do it physically, you can do it with your mind. Again, if I had this answer, it'd be fantastic. I would love to just be like, "Here it is, this is it." We've settled that. And people before my time have done that. And people have lived in worse… I keep referencing something like the Vietnam War era. That probably was way more screwed up than it is right now. But the point is we're the future from that. So we need to identify with that and the future isn't written yet. So yeah, I'm not really sure. Metaphorically, we need to do more than punch a Nazi. We need to destroy it and eliminate it and get rid of it forever. It's a cancer that's on this planet and that mindset is for whatever reason tied into capitalism and that's part of the system. So I think that the system's rotten to the core and we need to identify that and change that.

33:57 Instead of trying to mask the issues that are on top or vote things out, it's in the root. It needs to be eliminated. And how to do that, I don't know.

34:11 Joanne Faryon Maria, I want to throw it back to you because you mentioned about the various things that you lived through and you witnessed and things that we overcame, right? We made progress.

34:19 Maria Nieto Senour We stopped a war.

34:21 Joanne Faryon So how do you do it? That

34:23 Maria Nieto Senour Students saw it in the streets. I mean, you're talking about Vietnam. It was more hopeful. I mean, it was a terrible war and we lost friends and family members in that war, but we marched and we stopped it. Now there's so many things to stop. So what do I think? What am I willing to break the law for? I'm going to register as a Muslim if they start a Muslim registry. We all need to be registered as Muslims. I think maybe go to Planned Parenthood clinics to support the women that are there to get services and to keep the people that are intimidating them away from them. I think we need to put our bodies on the line to the degree that we can. They used to say you have to throw your body on the machine. Who was it that said that? You have to throw your body on the spokes of the machine.

35:18 This was in the '60s. It was one of the things they talked about. We got to stop the machine and how do you stop it? I think you get out of the Bank of America, you get out of Walmart, you do it. I think some of what you say is absolutely right on, but it's bigger than all of that, obviously.

35:36 Joanne Faryon Masada?

35:39 Masada Disenhouse I think that at the basic level, what people need to do is become more educated about all these issues and make a commitment to be a participatory citizen. I think the US for a long time has been at the bottom of the scale of developed nations in terms of how much its citizens participate. And I think for different people that might look like different things, and I think there are a lot of ways people can get involved, but I think that people need to make a commitment to not sit by. And I think one of the things that Justin said that resonated with me is I think part of it is about acceptance. I think all of us, and just hearing what Maria was saying about how sexual harassment just used to be kind of part of the job. And I feel like the reason it's not part of the job now is because there were enough women who said, "We are not going to accept this.

36:33 We have to do something to change this and enough men hopefully also." And I really feel like this is a time where people need to step that up even more than we were before and say it's not acceptable for our government to be using Nazi rhetoric. It's not acceptable if my sister, my sister is a Trump voter, I need to call out my own sister if she says things that I find racist or whatever. And so I think people need to do that. I think there are a lot of ways people can engage. I mean, I think there were three town halls today with Congress people that were all packed and where people are pushing their Congress people to take positions. I think that's one tactic. I think people getting involved with local groups on different issues to either advocate for policy or just help protect people who might get deported or whatever it is.

37:32 I think people need to take physical actions. And I really think the climate movement honestly was at the point of civil disobedience already. We've trained over a hundred people in San Diego to take civil disobedience action because on top of all this other stuff that everybody's dealing with, we have a very small window to address climate change before we're basically guaranteeing that our kids and grandkids are going to have an uninhabitable planet. So I think civil disobedience should be a tool that people embrace. And I think the reason it's so effective is because it helps other people see that people who are just like them take this so seriously that they're willing to risk their safety or their job or whatever it is. And so I think as a movement we need to escalate. And then the last thing I think is that I think going to the systemic stuff that Justin was talking about, I think people need to realize that all our struggles are related and that it's a time where we should be more supporting each other and working more cohesively to address some of these issues and to call out those systemic things.

38:56 Because like you were saying, I know we're going to get to the third party thing. I'm a third party person and because of those systemic reasons, and I think in a lot of circles on the left, it's unacceptable for people to be a third party voter. It's unacceptable to say that you won't support the moderate Democrat or whatever. And I'm back to look where this gets us. Anyway, I think we need to recognize the forces that are arraigned against us and try to deal with them more cohesively in a way that really gets at some of those systemic problems.

39:39 Joanne Faryon Great. Nate?

39:42 Nate Fairman So I don't know where I read it, but I read something really great recently. The world needs less lawyers and more organizers. And that just kind of blew me away because it's absolutely correct. We need more people to organize, organize people into marches, organize phone banks. Trump's first couple days in office, they were going to gut the congressional ethics office pretty much so there would be nobody investigating anything in Congress. And the only thing that really stopped that was there was hundreds and thousands of phone calls into congressional offices saying, "What are you doing? That's literally the first thing you're doing in office." And they backed away from that. That took a lot of organizing. That took a lot of people talking to their friends, talking to their neighborhoods, creating Facebook events and organizing. In the labor movement, in the 1930s, there was this amazing sit down strike.

40:38 It happened in Flint, Michigan and it was United Auto Workers. They brought the biggest corporation in the world to their knees. It was General Motors and the workers there, they organized and they decided to come to work one day and just sit down on the job and they stopped working and they took over the means of production to the biggest corporation in the world and completely shut it down. That was civil disobedience, that was a strike, that was a great action. And you're starting to see more of that. And in the labor movement, all of the laws that we have, all the protections that we have, it wasn't from unions lobbying Congress. It was from hundreds of thousands of people hitting the streets and coal miners marching down the middle of Main Street saying, "Is it okay that I have 10 times more the cancer rate than your kids do?" Or people who live in areas that their kids have asthma because there's this huge thing called environmental racism where a lot of the side effects of coal burning power plants or toxic runoff is not happening in Rancho Santa Fe, it's happening in Barrio Logan in Southeast San Diego with areas like that.

41:50 So people get fed up, workers get fed up and they say, "You know what? We're going to organize. We're going to shut it down. We're going to hit the streets." And that's how we really send a message to elected officials in Washington. We occupy their congressional offices, we phone bank their congressional offices, we shut down intersections. And if you make life incredibly difficult for elected officials, it's only a matter of time before they wake up and say, "I don't represent these corporations who donate money to me. I represent the people that voted me in office." And the only way that we can change that, because that's not the mindset of most elected officials today, they are strictly beholden to their large corporate donors. And that is an absolute fact. And on the Democrat side and the Republican side, until we really reform our campaign finance legislation or overturn Citizens United, it's not going to change.

42:42 But the way that we can really affect change between now and that time is organizing people into actions, into groups, into unions, and also educating people. I would probably say most people in unions don't know that right to work is a bad thing. Most people in unions don't know the benefits of what the union does. So it's all of our jobs is to educate our members, educate the people that are in our groups, in our climate groups, in our social circles about the terrible things that this administration is doing. And it's time to organize and hit the streets and occupy congressional offices. So I think right now we should be organizing, organizing people, organizing money, organizing campaign contributions, contributions to ACLU, but we need less lawyers and more organizers. Less lawyers and more organizers.

43:41 Joanne Faryon Andrea?

43:42 Andrea Guerrero So I am a lawyer and an organizer. In fact, most lawyers are organizers. In fact, we all need to be organizers, whatever our chosen profession is, whether you're an electrician or a teacher or a lawyer, we all need to be organizers. So what we don't need is to start pitting ourselves against each other. We need to act and not react. We need to look for the levers of change and we need to move in a strategic way together as much as possible. And even though we're fighting many things, we, at least in San Diego, have excellent leadership. We have excellent organizations. We have a lot of things going for us that we can plug into, right? So I live by the mantra rest and reason and move in passion. In that place when you're resting, you're getting informed, you're understanding the issue, you're understanding the players, you're mapping the power so that when you start moving in passion, whether that's in civil disobedience or in litigation or in legislative advocacy, you know where you're headed.

44:55 You know where you're headed, right? So civil disobedience is a tool, but it needs to be a strategic tool. If we're using it to react, we're not using it effectively. And I say that as someone who's engaged in civil disobedience throughout my life, but it's always been done in a strategic way. You know when you're going to do it, you know who's going to be arrested. People are trained to do it as Masada has been doing with her folks, we've been doing with our folks. And you make sure it's moving the ball forward because we need to keep moving the ball forward. We live in San Diego, so things are not all bad in so far as we did not elect Trump in San Diego. We in California did not elect Trump, right? So we have a dual reality. We are the subject of national decisions that we did not contribute to, we did not make.

45:57 Locally, we are more progressive every day. We have higher voter participation every day and that voter participation is making structural changes, right? So we just won what I consider to be a major campaign in San Diego, passing measures K and L. Measure K in particular will force runoffs between the top two candidates in elections going forward. We may have just seen the last Republican mayor get elected ever, right? And we did that. We did that against all odds. We did that when the polling told us that we couldn't do that because we were able to turn out the right voters and we were able to organize the right players to do something like that. So there's a lot to be hopeful for. I think we do have to look at the core problems as Justin said, and I think we have opportunities to do that.

46:54 And where we can't do it at the national level because we're only one state or only one community, we can look to our own state and we can look to our own city. And so I just want to flag one very specific things that we can all do, and that is to support, excuse me, California Senate Bill 54, which is moving through the legislature right now on an urgency clause, meaning it's on an expedited calendar. And this is the firewall between the Trump administration's draconian enforcement policies and our communities. This is the bill that will prevent the cross deputization of our local and state police from becoming immigration agents, and it will prevent the sharing of information from our public facilities to DHS. It'll do a couple of other important things, but I mean, that's a structural change. We do that and we do it strategically.

47:54 We don't have to fight city by city to get agreements from all of the police departments to not become immigration agents, right? We do that at the state level all at once. That's a strategic move if we all pull in that direction. So that's just a flag for something we can do right now. And I'll just be honest and tell you at the national level, we're actually working with a senator, a Republican senator and a Democratic Senator to roll back some of the powers that DHS has because they're overreaching right now. And there are a lot of Republicans who are freaked out about the overreach as well. So I think we created some crazy powers for DHS in particular, and if we can roll those back while everybody's awake, let's do it.

48:40 Joanne Faryon I want to now sort of toss this to the audience and ask all of you what you've done so far. Have you marched? Have you given money? Have you done something that we haven't talked about? Have you taken action that you never thought you would since the election? I'll start. Okay. So I'm a reporter. I've been a reporter my whole life. Never marched, never participated. I'm not allowed to, but I don't have a job right now, right? I'm writing this book. So I went to DC to march and it felt amazing even though it's just marching, but the fact that you could be somewhere and say, "I have to take a stand." And I want to talk later about the media, if you think the local media is responding in the way that you want to see them respond. But I mean, that was my only ever step and it was nothing, right?

49:39 And even on Facebook, all of my friends were saying, "So what should we be doing? Should we be marching? Should we be spending money, giving money to the ACLU? What is it we should be doing?" And so I think there's a lot of that out there, like what do we do next? But anybody else want to talk about… I'm going to bring the microphone over. Oh, well, just because we're being streamed. We're being streamed. So this way everybody online listening can hear you.

50:01 Audience member Well, I was just going to say I've taken part in the marches. I've donated money. I've done this all the time anyway. I haven't done any more direct action because no one has asked me to and I haven't organized it. But if somebody said, "Hey, Wednesday at five o'clock, we're going to do this or that," I'd most likely be there. But I just wanted to say, I'm 78 years old and this is the most hopeful I've ever felt in my whole life within the grieving, because no sooner than Trump came out with some stuff, people were at airports and stuff, and that's what we have to do nonstop. I've noticed over my lifetime, people, they want to make a better world and they think you can do this in two or three years or something. It's a lifetime commitment, and especially now because everything is turned around.

50:54 But Americans have finally woke up, and that just makes me feel better than I've ever felt before, even better than the '60s, because that's what we haven't been. We haven't been awake. We haven't joined forces with each other. We can't acknowledge our racism and our sexism, and now we're questioning ourselves. It doesn't get any better than that.

51:20 Joanne Faryon Thank you. Oh, I'll go here and then there.

51:25 Audience member I'm one of those people over 70 who's been demonstrating and marching since the 60s, and what I've been doing in the last year, I retired from my regular job as a psychologist doing human rights work in 2016, and I joined the San Diego 350 and decided that I wanted to spend the next chapter working in a new area of justice. And my thought was we're not going to let Hillary have a honeymoon. We're going to keep fighting. She's going to get elected and then we're going to fight her really strong right from the first day. So I had to recalibrate a little bit there, but we are doing exactly that and much more vigorously and in much huger numbers than we ever would have had Hillary Clinton been elected because I agree that Obama has done a lot of things, including deportations and drone strikes that were terrible, but there weren't people in the streets and it's because he was a moderately progressive Democrat and not a Republican.

52:34 So we do have an opportunity here. The thing I want to say is I really agree about everybody being an organizer. I have been sort of an informal organizer in a lot of different ways over my career, but I've been thinking about trying to upgrade my skills. I came across through a website, a book that I've been reading and that I highly recommend called Hegemony How-To by a man called Jonathan Smucker. It's about a guy who, about 40 years old, who spent a lot of time with Occupy. He's been an organizer for 20 years, and he's telling us that nuts and bolts, not so much policy, but nuts and bolts of how you do effective organizing. So I'm reading that book and I recommend it, Hegemony How-To.

53:21 Joanne Faryon You both kind of moved forward to one of my questions, which was, is there something positive in this because it's been an awakening? And we can talk more about that too if other people want to add to that because I think you used the word even in terms of awakening, but I know someone here wants to talk about what they've done.

53:38 Audience member So I am an organizer. That's my job. I'm a union organizer, so I march and I do rallies and stuff, but besides marching, I'm also taking it a little personal and educating my children. I have a 19-year-old daughter that she actually voted for the first time and she went with me to a Bernie rally and stuff, so she was excited. I have two boys. I have a 15-year-old son and a 10-year-old son, and I am teaching them to be feminist, and I am teaching them and showing them this administration is not who we are. Especially my 10-year-old, it's really impacted him a lot because he comes home and he was scared. He cried when he found out that Trump… The fear in their face when this was on TV, it was like, "Wow, I don't even have cable. I don't have TV because for the same reason, I don't want to be exposed to that kind of stuff." But that's what I'm doing.

54:34 I feel like I'm more angry now to be able to speak out more about injustices and things that this administration is making it seem like it's okay to do. So on my end, besides marching and doing rallies and stuff, I'm taking it personal and educating and trying to inform my children along with my nieces and my nephews, because from the family that I come from, they're not very engaged. I come from a very…

55:05 I come from a barrio, so my family is not really engaged in that way, and not even my nieces and my nephews. So that's what I'm doing on my end, trying to educate and inform and engage my nieces, my nephews, and especially my sons. So that's what I'm doing.

55:22 Joanne Faryon So do other people feel that way too in terms of the conversations? Even everyday conversations that you're having are changing. We'll think about that for a minute.

55:31 Ted Washington I just want to say that I've been in a fight my entire life. I don't know what else there is other than the fight. So that's fine with me where we are. I think things, like you said, we woke up, but I've always been woke up. This past election, I don't know if anybody knows, but San Diego County got changed from a red county to a blue county. And me and my friends, we decided that if someone wanted to go vote, it's no reason for them not to be able to go vote. We put together some money and rented a van to go get people who could not get to the polling places, found out where the polling places were, had a map, could go pick up people and drop them off to vote and take them home. So for people who did not have cars, who were elderly, who could not get around, we did that.

56:16 You can get off your butt. Instead of taking a vacation, you could go rent a van and take people to go vote.

56:23 The problem now is outside of California, and me and my brother are thinking about going into the enemy territory, going down to Texas, figuring out how to get people to register to vote because they're trying… If you don't know what's going on right now, the way they're attacking it is making it more and more difficult to actually vote. They're not making it impossible. They're just making it very difficult. You got to figure out what those rules are, go get those people, educate them how to get around those rules or how to get through those rules, get them registered to vote so they can vote, make it possible to go vote. I found that working with churches is always good because there's always a ready-made structure there. Schools, you got to just find where people are en masse, go to those places, find out who needs help and help them.

57:12 It's not that hard and you just got to do it. But I don't fear for California, although San Diego County has the greatest amount of hate groups of all the counties in California. You all may not know that, but it's the truth. You just got to get out there. You can't be afraid. You got to go. Like I said, me and my brother think about going down to Texas. I don't know anybody. I got one friend in Texas and I'm not worried about him, but you got to go to those places where you need to make the fight happen and take it to them because they're going to bring it to you. You got to take it to them.

57:48 Justin Pearson I want to say one thing. I'm really sorry to interject, but based on what she said and then what she said, I think, and then also what all of you just said, it's weird because there was the Vietnam War and humanity did fight that and there was environmental issues and we did fight that. But what happened was then the government figured out another way to make another kind of war, which we're in right now. Majority of the population of America doesn't even know which countries we're at war with. And then there was environmentalism. Now if you are environmentalist, you are labeled as a green terrorist, an eco-terrorist. You will do prison time for being an environmentalist, and that's some crazy stuff. So while I think what all four of you said is so brilliant, and I feel like it is activism and educating and educating other people. My question right now, and not to put someone on the spot, is I want to ask this gentleman right here with the orange shirt, you with the broken arm.

58:46 Yeah. How old are you? Let me just ask you, how old are you?

58:52 Audience member, age 12 I'm 12.

58:54 Justin Pearson I think that's awesome that you're here. I would like to know what you think about this and what you think your peers or people at your school think about this because you're the future, you're the one… It's you that's going to be able to create some new… You're going to maybe be the next person that creates the Occupy Wall Street and this time the government won't be able to secretly squash it. You'll be able to actually organize because of elders that have been pushing for organization and then we can kick some real ass and then we can make some real change. So I would like to know what you think about it.

59:28 Audience member, age 12 Yeah. Like what you said about my peers and all that, the environment here that I've been experiencing in San Diego here, you see things on TV that seem totally, how could that even happen? Because here in San Diego, all the people that just, maybe this is just me, but everyone that I hang around is just kind of, they all have the same mindset and that's kind of why a lot of people don't really understand how other people can be thinking this way. And so they just think, "Well, these people are just crazy. There's nothing to do about that. There's something wrong."

1:00:13 Joanne Faryon That's exactly leading into the next question, which is Trump got elected. Enough people voted for Trump to elect him, right? And maybe they weren't the people in San Diego County, but he got elected. And so what's going on at some deeper level, right? And how do you address that deeper level? And I want to go to you, Andrea, because I know you have a 7:30 hard out. So maybe if you could talk a little bit about that as well. That was awesome.

1:00:36 Andrea Guerrero Yeah. So it seems like no one here voted for Hillary in the first round at this panel. I think Bernie was and is trying to help us ask that question. I think the system doesn't work. I think democracy is a little bit of a farce. And I think we got to figure out how to change the structure. And there are a lot of discontent people here, and I think neither party is really addressing that. So it created a vacuum for a populist candidate in the form of Trump to step forward. Bernie was also a bit of a populist candidate. And so he appealed to a lot of people and they appealed to people for similar and different reasons. But I'm not hearing it. I'm going to bash on the Democratic Party for just a second here because I feel like my whole lifetime, I've been listening to them and they haven't been listening to me.

1:01:42 And I feel that that's true of a lot of my peers. And I feel it's especially true of communities of color, of which I am a part, of immigrant communities of which I'm a part. I feel like we are used tactically, but we are not listened to. And so I'm waiting for that wake up moment. And I thought the wake up moment was going to be when Trump was elected, but instead what I heard was we need to work harder to try to convince swing white voters to support the Democratic party. So that was yet another indicator to me that I don't work inside the party structure because the party structure doesn't work for me. If I'm lucky, we're aligned, but it's not because they're listening. So I do work for individual candidates at times because I believe in the policies that they're pushing forward.

1:02:42 But I really am looking at policies and structures and I'm looking for ways that people can drive the machine rather than individual candidates because the system is set up to entice candidates, whoever they are, to respond to the kind of large scale donations that they get. We have a Citizens United decision that allows large corporate interests to engage in heavy influence. So I mean, there's hope in all of that because I agree with Ernie.

1:03:22 My professional life has been spent on trying to get people educated on some of our border issues and the border powers. And we haven't been able to get anyone's attention until now when we have a president who's going to exercise those to the fullest. And that's not just going to mean border on the borderline, but it's going to mean throughout our communities. The border patrol sector, the San Diego border patrol sector reaches from the border to the Oregon border. It is the entirety of the state. So we got a lot of work to do, but we have to create that energy and that power in the people. And it's not a surprise to me that for the last 10 years, the fastest growing political affiliation in San Diego County is decline to state. Young people are not identifying with the parties. Immigrants are not identifying with the parties.

1:04:19 So some of the historical relationships that we have had with the parties is disintegrating. Is that an opportunity to really elevate a third party? I don't know. If nothing else, I think it's an opportunity for us as active citizen voters and even those who cannot vote to start wielding that power, whether that's through civil disobedience or whether that's through all of the kinds of things that we've been talking about.

1:04:48 Joanne Faryon Maria, I know you had something to say.

1:04:51 Maria Nieto Senour I could talk a lot and I'm trying to keep my remarks limited. It's so hard. I have spent my life in social justice work in different ways. I became a counselor at a school because I didn't like… I thought that there were children whose needs weren't being met in the classroom and who were in trouble all the time and I was trying to figure out what was going on with them. And then once I became a counselor, I wanted to change what was going on in the schools in a more profound way. So that's why I went to get my doctorate and began training counselors. And I worked in a program called a community based block that was always under attack by the university because it was always a program that was for multicultural education and social justice. And it always had black and brown faculty and the students were always majority minority, as they say, from the beginning of its inception.

1:05:47 And so we were always suspect. What are all those people doing over there because we weren't on campus? So just keeping the program alive was a social justice issue. Then I ran for the college board in order to have a stronger voice at the university for my program. But guess what? I won. I didn't think I was going to win because I represent La Jolla and University City and North Clairemont and Del Mar. Those people are not going to vote for Mexican, but they did. And I was elected in 1990. I'm the first Mexican person to ever get elected on a school or college board and I'm still there. And since being there, one of the things I've gotten real involved with is restorative justice issues. I want to have us offering classes in the prisons and the jails and I want to make sure that we train the police at Miramar College.

1:06:43 How do I know that our police are not racially profiling or not shooting mentally ill people, all the things that I worry about. So I'm on the police review board. So my point in saying this is that we can take big actions or small actions, but there's a lot that can be done. And one of the ways to change the system is to get into it and change it from the inside. I'm the president of the board of trustees. The chancellor has to communicate with me every week about what we're going to do. What topics are we dealing with? What are we doing? And I'm in that position very strategically because we are a very big system that is very democratic. Everybody can go to the community colleges. You don't have to pass any tests to get in. And we want to keep it that way and we have to protect our students.

1:07:35 There's a lot of our students that aren't going to class. They're scared right now. And so we're sending out immigration, we're handing out these little red things that they can put at the door to say, "No, I'm not cooperating." So we're doing all these very progressive things. And how do you do that? You get into the system. When I first got in and I started asking for ethnic data, people looked at me like, "What?" When I said, "Well, okay, so this is a number of people that are transferring from City College to San Diego State, but how does it break down by ethnicity?" And people never had taken care of that, never thought about that. So you can change systems by the questions you ask, by your presence there. I believe I'm beginning to have a little bit of an impact on the police review board.

1:08:19 It's a very frustrating job. I was there this morning looking at complaints. It's very frustrating, but somebody that has a social conscience needs to be doing those things.

1:08:32 Joanne Faryon I know Andrea, you have to leave. We just want to thank you so much for being here. I'm going to switch just a little bit and I obviously have a keen interest in the response to this. I'm wondering if you think local media has been responding in a way that you would like to see. Are they sort of covering the issues and the areas in the way that you think they ought to be? And I'll have a confession to make, I spent the last five weeks in New York and I listened to public radio nonstop, WNYC. And I found that they really were giving voice to people in the community. It was like nonstop and they responded to, because news was happening all the time and I felt like I was hearing about what had just happened and people were reacting and they were giving voice to it.

1:09:23 But I'm wondering in San Diego, do you feel like whether if you can bear to watch TV or if you're listening to the radio or you're reading the paper, are local journalists responding in a way that you'd like to see them and I'll go to the panel first and I'll go to the audience. Anybody want to chime in on that one?

1:09:43 Nate Fairman Okay. I would say no. San Diego, I listen to NPR every morning when I drive to work and they pride themselves on being bipartisan. They always have somebody from the left and somebody from the right. They always have somebody from both sides of every issue they talk about. And what that creates a lot of times is somebody will call in, a progressive guest will call in and an extremely conservative guest will call in and they'll argue and nothing will really get resolved. And what we as the listener really came from that is, okay, there's a division, but did we learn where to go from here? Did we learn what to do? Did we learn how is that affecting San Diego? No. We just saw two people argue on the radio. The right has been extremely effective on messaging and they have their extremely right wing news groups and now they have become mainstream news groups unfortunately.

1:10:36 And in San Diego, we're a progressive city. Maybe we should capitalize on that and reform our media and our news outlets and push them further to the left and make sure that they talk about workers' rights and not just necessarily a dispute between local labor unions that's going on right now, but what workers are doing, good stuff that our workers are doing, that doesn't barely ever get talked about. So I would say no, they don't do an effective job.

1:11:04 Joanne Faryon And I want to say as someone who's worked at KPBS for a long time and inewsource and been in the media, I absolutely agree with you because what happens is that as a reporter or newsrooms say, we'll get someone on this side and someone on that side rather than what's the truth? Our job is really getting to the truth, but getting to the truth takes way more time and effort than just getting someone on this side and on that side. And so I think too, if you're going to be calling your local media outlets, I mean that's what you want to ask them for. What's the truth in all of this? But anybody else want to sort of weigh in on this in terms of the media?

1:11:38 Maria Nieto Senour Where these people are equally wrong. No, no. It's not the case. And that's one of the problems with trying to get… So I'm very annoyed with NPR too. It's the only one I listen to, but sometimes I switch it off and listen to music, Mexican music instead because then I feel calmed down.

1:12:02 Joanne Faryon Anybody else?

1:12:04 Justin Pearson Okay. Sure. I think that the internet plays a big part in it too because you can get a more global sense of news. And if you're speaking about local, that's one thing, but still going to things like sites like Democracy Now and… Yeah, sorry. I mean, I do listen to NPR too, and I think I have a lot of anxiety from it. Especially as a musician, I prefer to listen to NPR or music for whatever reason because I feel like I need to be engaged and I don't get an answer, but I don't know if there is an answer or if there or anything is capable of going, "Here's the answer because you have the right and the left and there's no answer to the situation." But I don't know if the right or the left is correct. It's like a more humanitarian issue, if anything, comes down to what's the better for cause or the better cause for humanity than the answer to something specific that NPR is covering.

1:13:11 Joanne Faryon I do feel too that we're in a unique location where we're on the border. I mean, so much about where we are geographically and who we are, that this is also an opportunity for newsrooms just to have people on the ground as bearing witness. That's a lot of our job as well, right? And I'm wondering if you're even getting that. I mean, are you hearing when the whole ban went into effect, are you hearing reports from our airport? Just bearing witnesses to what is happening or at the border. Okay, so I'm going to go into the audience and then throw it back to you, Masada. Hi.

1:13:48 Audience member I think one of the problems with the media is the fact that it's very partisan. And so there are certain people that go to Democracy Now, and then there's people that go to Breitbart and they're going to keep going to those. And so they're going to get selective news. And so that's just a fundamental problem I think with media is that it is partisan now and there are so many different places and sources for people to get their information and they selectively choose it kind of like what… Well, he's gone now. The young man before was saying is that you're kind of insulated and you don't hear what's happening on the other side. And so media then becomes kind of useless. I mean, you hear what you want to hear or what is helpful for you to hear or what echoes what you believe, but then you're not necessarily hearing the other side of it.

1:14:41 Joanne Faryon Did you want to add? No. I don't know. Maybe…

1:14:46 Audience member I find it interesting. I have Snapchat and I find it interesting that even on there they have stories and Snapchat's usually geared more towards younger people. And so my kids sometimes are on there, they're like, "Oh mom, this happened." I'm like, "How did you know that? Oh, it was on Snapchat." So I think that's interesting. And sometimes they actually do do a pretty good job of reporting issues that are going on because I think it's actually real people on there doing their snaps. So I find that interesting how it's crazy how now social media is the place where people go get their news, which is kind of sad. And I echo what she's saying as well too, because yeah, you're basically preaching to the choir on the radio stations and the news that you read because that's where you go to. That's the news you want to hear.

1:15:34 You don't want to hear all the other stuff. But even with

1:15:38 Justin Pearson Social media, maybe I'm not a normal person to be trying to portray this situation, but for instance, on Facebook there was an article and I referenced this in an interview that I did recently, but there was a member of the Ku Klux Klan. He was a grand wizard. He was murdered and there was an article on it and I'm pretty sure it wasn't fake news and I posted it and I found myself instantly engaged with people that were defending him and me saying that I was celebrating the fact that this member of the Ku Klux Klan was murdered and they were saying, "Well, that's really poor of you to be identifying with hate and negativity." I was like, "He was a member of the Klan. I'm pretty sure this world's okay without him." I was engaged with these people that are not my friends on social media.

1:16:29 There are people that I do not know and somehow I had a reach or somehow I was able to connect with them and it sucked because I wasted hours and hours defending this story and it blew my mind and that kind of stuff happens a lot for me. I am a little bit dumbfounded how that happens, but I will also come across the other side or the more conservative stuff and I'm like, "What the hell?" I will be engaged with these people and I'm not even sure if it's getting anywhere. I don't think it is. I think it's just creating more animosity and more anxiety, I guess. Yeah, it sucks. So social media just is horrible and it sucks in all my time, but it is something where I was engaged with people, not of my choir. There was both sides. There was people that were felt the same way like, "Yeah, we're glad this guy's dead." There were people in support of the Klan.

1:17:26 I've actually had arguments with members of the Ku Klux Klan on Facebook. It's insane and I'm not sure why that happens, but it does and it's insane. It blows my mind.

1:17:41 Joanne Faryon People mentioned something about you go to listen to what you want to hear, right? The news you want. And it's funny, I sometimes am part of this thing with students teaching them about the media, and that's one of the examples I give. I'll take an issue. I'll show them MSNBC, I'll show them Fox News and I'll show them PBS, and you get a completely different story, no matter what you're watching a different take. So I don't know what the answer to that is, but yeah, it's out there all the time, right?

1:18:06 Audience member I watch too much television news and I listen to the NPR a lot and I get way more of the right wing than I want to hear. Even on Facebook, Facebook is kind of a relief because you can just delete people who are jerks or whom you don't agree with. I just want to point to Nate, what Nate was saying about… I just noticed, this is just a small detail. First, I want to say Maureen Cavanaugh has done good work reporting on things like the nuclear issue and environmental things. She is doing good work and she's doing local work. When you're in LA, for example, listening to the stations there, they're doing really frivolous and stupid shows that are similar to her local shows that are… I mean, what she's doing is much more substantial. But in all of NPR that I have seen and all of the news, including the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, they used to have a labor column.

1:19:21 I mean, labor is like the majority of the population, vast majority of the population is interested in labor issues. We're all kind of workers and they've eliminated… Actually, they had a labor column in the Wall Street Journal they used to, and in the New York Times. That is all subsumed under business now. And in NPR, there is no labor thing. It's completely subsumed to the… I forget what the business show is called, which is endlessly, endlessly on NPR. Marketplace. Marketplace is endlessly on here in this city. I mean, much more than in other places. And the guy that, whatever his name is, he's an ass, but the guy who sponsors it is also on. I mean, he's advertising. It's just kind of like this little loop there. So I'm just pointing out that I really think labor should be much more representative in the news.

1:20:27 And we also, in the national news, like CBS and all of that, we don't get any, except for PBS. PBS does do it in BBC. We get almost no international news. We get these stupid things about a dog doing something or something, but we don't get it. I mean, people are getting invaded and children are dying and we don't get that. It's just dumbfounding to me.

1:20:53 Joanne Faryon Thank you. And I can tell you, I know from working at KPBS that if you call or you send an email to the news director or the news producer or to a show, they actually will listen and pay attention that you actually have a lot more power than you think you do in terms of saying, "I just heard this story or I'm not hearing enough of this." You are taken very seriously, at least locally at KPBS. So you do have some power there and you definitely have influence. So use it.

1:21:27 Justin Pearson I also do PR and I've tried to contact more so for music related stuff, but I'm try to contact NPR and I'll never hear from them. I will not just write them a form letter or say, "I'm doing PR for this." I have a specific agenda. It's always socially driven and I never hear back from them and it's really frustrating, but I do agree with the local show too. I think that if Marketplace had Nate on there as some kind of labor spokesperson, you would probably engage a lot of the people that felt disenfranchised and that ended up voting for Trump and don't realize that they're aligning themselves with the racist. You probably could get those people, maybe not specifically for San Diego, but the NPRs around in the middle America, you could grab those people if NPR just had the guts to say, "We're going to use that word labor because that word labor is an offensive word to the one percenters and they're the ones that are essentially controlling a huge part of this population." So I think that if there was someone like Nate in those cities in middle America, we could make the change that some of us do think that could happen.

1:22:37 Joanne Faryon And what I would say to you locally, if they're not responding, then you say, "I want to meet with the news director or I want to meet with the head of this show and I want to talk about… This is what we're doing, this is the kind of work we're doing." Because they actually do, I think even that face-to-face meeting, they're paying attention. Same with to your point about marketplace, not that I'm here to… I mean, I don't work for them anymore, but I'm just saying that I know that when I was there, and that was only a year ago, that definitely face-to-face meetings make a difference too. If you're not hearing…

1:23:05 Justin Pearson Sure. But even for me, looking at something more specifically, I have a better chance of contacting the Reader, which is also a little messed up too. Or CityBeat. CityBeat's pretty cool, I guess. And they will definitely touch upon stuff that's a little bit more radical or progressive. And that's cool to see that, especially with their… I'm sure they're concerned about their advertising revenue, so that is… Go ahead. Can I take this?

1:23:33 Masada Disenhouse Yeah. I just want to say, I think there's two issues. I think one is that this goes back to how actively people are participating in their own democracy or as citizens is if people don't take the time to read or if they're looking for something that's more entertainment than investigative journalism, that's what they're going to get basically, right? Because they're putting their money there. I think one thing people can do is look for more investigative journalism and support it, whatever that looks like for them. I do think that there has been… I totally agree with what other people have said. I do think that there has been more coverage of protests and people in the street since the election locally. The UT, for example, we actually, when we held the People's Climate March a couple of years ago that had 1500 people at it, they didn't cover it.

1:24:27 And the only thing we got from them was an apology. They actually printed a little apology for not covering it. But now they're actually out there covering the protests at the airports, they're covering climate protests, they're covering other stuff. And I feel like they're starting to see the importance. I've actually had that argument with the environmental reporter at the UT and the previous one also about protesting is a newsworthy story. They're like, "Well, where's the news?" I'm like, "That is the news. The news is that people are engaged and they're trying to make this change." And I also really agree with the people who were talking about, I think that the news is not everything. And sometimes there are stories that move through social media much faster than they go through traditional media outlets. And for me, that was really obvious during the Dakota Access Pipeline stuff where you could see Facebook live streams from people talking about what was happening well before it actually hit the news and was analyzed.

1:25:27 And I think there's a value in being able to see that actual just raw footage and make your own decisions if you know the context because of course everything, you don't know what's outside the lens.

1:25:42 I think media's in an interesting place, and so I think it is starting to respond more that way. I hope that NPR and KPBS will move in that direction also to record what's happening on the ground more.

1:25:59 Joanne Faryon We have about 12 minutes left, so I kind of want to move ahead and skip to kind of the ending questions. I'm going to throw it out to our panelists, but also invite the audience to weigh in on this. I know that you've touched on this already in terms of it being an awakening, but I'm going to combine the last two questions, which is 20 years from now, what do we tell our children or grandchildren? Because this does feel like one of those moments in history, right? And in terms of this, the positive in this, is this the awakening that we actually needed as a society? And maybe I'll start off with you, Nate, and we'll go through the panel and then we'll see if anybody in the audience wants to kind of say something as well.

1:26:41 Nate Fairman Naomi Klein wrote a book called Shock Doctrine, and it talks about disasters and emergencies and organizing around them and how global corporations have been extremely successful at that. There's a hurricane, Hurricane Katrina, or a Gulf Oil spill. They'll send people in there and they'll start redeveloping land right away and they'll start putting in bids on property to build a new hotel because all of these houses have completely washed away. That's where we're at right now for a lot of our social justice movements. We're at a crossroads, we're at a disaster and we have to organize around it. So 20 years from now, hopefully we can say that we've lived through the hard times and we fought and we organized and we're all better because of it. So I think we need to organize around this disaster. I think we need to educate our members. And like I said, that graph of union density started at about 1900.

1:27:37 It was at six or 7%, then it went up 30, 40% in the 1930s and 40s, and then it went back down. But we're right back there and we are apt to have that needle turn around and start growing back in the other direction. I think with the amount of involvement we're seeing, that's absolutely possible. One man, one presidency, global corporations, they're not worrying about that. They're taking advantage of it, but they're playing the long game and we have to play the long game. I think that everybody in this room and the organizations I represent up here, we have the ability to play the long game. We just can't get burnt out and we can't give up. We have to fight. I'd say 20 years from now, the world's going to be a better place because of movements that we're going to create today. I hope that's absolutely true.

1:28:25 I believe it's true.

1:28:30 Audience member Key to that is going to have to be schools. We have to talk with our local education districts regarding helping young people think critically. If we were an intellectual nation that thought critically, Trump wouldn't have even gotten past wherever he had to go first to say he wanted to run. Somebody would say, "What? Get out of here." Most Americans have graduated from high school. Many of them have graduated from college, and we don't seem to have the thinking ability of third graders, third graders who can think.

1:29:16 Masada Disenhouse Yeah. I guess in 20 years, I hope that we're not in a place where we end up having to say, "Sorry, we destroyed your planet." And to me, that's a very real… On different days, I feel more or less optimistic about where we're going to land there, but I think there's a good chance we will not end up in a good place. So I hope we're not there. I do hope that this does become a serious movement moment in the US and that it does cause people to, on a long-term basis, take more responsibility for what happens and take action. To ensure that what they want to see happens, happens. So yeah, I'm hopeful that will happen, but I think we have a lot of work to do. And I think now more than ever, because a lot of people are coming into the movements, these different movements, but they're largely inexperienced.

1:30:23 And I think that if we want to win against the corporations that arguably put Trump in power and put the Republicans in power, that we need to be very strategic and very organized and do things thoughtfully and effectively. And I think that's a lot of work. I foresee a lot of work and I like what Nate said about trying to not burn out, always a plus. So I mean, I would like to be able to say I worked really hard to get us past that point and worked with a lot of other amazing people who also were on the same page.

1:31:08 Joanne Faryon Justin?

1:31:09 Justin Pearson It was 20 years, right?

1:31:11 Joanne Faryon Yeah, 20 years

1:31:12 Justin Pearson From now. I think we're going to just bail. We're going to go to another planet. We have SpaceX, so we're just going to peace out. Unfortunately, they're talking about getting regular civilians out to the moon by next year, right? I think it's 2018. So there's that thing to consider. The thing that is weird though, because I look back 20 years and I'm like, damn, I still feel like the same person I do now, except now we have heightened elements that create that, this turmoil and this sort of anxiety. So I can only imagine how much more jacked up it's going to be in 20 years if we keep going that path. Because I remember, I'm 41, so I remember being 16 years old and protesting the first Gulf War downtown and getting my ass handed to me by Marines for disrespecting the American flag. And I didn't even get a chance to discuss what my stance was.

1:32:12 It was the fact that I was some shitty punk kid disrespecting the American flag. That still happens now, right now. And I'm 41. I'm still going to get my ass handed to me by some jackass. So I'm not sure that I have the optimism that I would like to have, but at the same time, I think that everything is becoming more polarized and people from the progressive side and the conservative side are getting more intense. And I think that that might be good, it might be bad. I think that it's creating some sort of movement instead of the stagnantation, which is I think what would have happened if Hillary was elected. It would have just kind of been like this and we would have still been in war. We still would have been doing all this crap to the environment, to the planet, to human beings.

1:32:57 So it needs to be addressed and changed systematically. We need to realize that there shouldn't even be an argument. Should we go destroy this planet or should we use drones? Or why are people doing this? It's a huge thing. It's beyond you or me or any of us or the young kid that left. It's a gigantic thing that we'll never be able to really obtain. Humans are, I think, inevitably going to just destroy ourselves and we just have to work as hard as we can at some point. I mean, for me, I'll look at my dog and be like, "That guy has got it figured out. He's not going to go be a dick to other dogs unless there's a reason." I don't know, man. It's weird. I wish I had the answers. I feel like the most…

1:33:50 I have no credibility to be up here. I graduated street college and here I am going like, "I fucking hate cops." Cool. I mean, that makes sense to a lot of people. A lot of people do identify with that. There is relevance in it, but at the same time, I wish I had something to offer up. I wish I could go to NPR and be like, "Get your shit together and have labor unions on there or stop playing classical music that is essentially for the bourgeois. Let's hear some cumbia bands on there. Let's hear some local hardcore bands." You want to really take even the progressive left has got their head up their ass and it sucks. So I have no idea where we're going to be in 20 years. I'm going to hope for the best and I'm going to start swinging as hard as I can.

1:34:37 So there it is.

1:34:38 Joanne Faryon Great. Maria?

1:34:40 Maria Nieto Senour Well, I have very opposite reactions at the same time. I am afraid we're already past the point of no return on our planet. I am very afraid that's a fact. And I think we can slow it down, but I think in a few generations there's not going to be any humans. Earth is going to shrug us off and go on without us. That's what I'm afraid of. And I hope I'm wrong. I really hope I'm wrong, but I think if I can believe folks in your movement and the people that talk about it, they're saying we're almost done. So that doesn't give me much hope. I still recycle. I still turn off the lights. I still save water and take very quick showers. I still do all the things I'm supposed to do, but I don't have hope about that. And that's the biggest issue.

1:35:36 On the other issues though, I'm very hopeful. And the reason I'm very hopeful is because young people are much more progressive than our generation. People my age are the people that voted for Trump, and younger people did as well, but old people voted for Trump. Old people are more Republican and old people vote, but they always vote against schools and et cetera because they don't whatever. When we're gone, young people are much more embracing of diversity. Young people are much more aware that sexuality might be fluid and they're not embarrassed about talking about maybe they're bisexual or whatever. It doesn't throw them in the same way. And so the attitude of the young people that I know, the 13 and 14 and 18 and 20 year olds and 25 year olds, they inspire me. They inspire me because they're much more embracing of everybody.

1:36:48 Joanne Faryon Great. Does anybody in the audience want to sort of add to this?

1:36:59 Audience member, IBEW Local 465 registrar So as far from me, I worked with Nate actually. I just became the registrar for this union. Luckily Nate picked me. I was involved with the Bernie Sanders campaign pretty heavily. I became disenfranchised, unfortunately, when Hillary got the nomination and like two other people up there, I went ahead and went for Jill Stein, but I don't know what you guys did, but third party anyways. I'm pretty optimistic about 20 years from now because this little union hall right here got eight people to show up and some panelists and that's better than nothing. So what this gentleman was saying about going to Texas and confronting Trump's voters, no one really talked about that. Trump still had voters. That's how he got there. And just us showing up here means that there's somebody that's willing to do something. And the most important thing we can do is engage these voters.

1:37:46 As me, I engaged a Jehovah's Witness a week ago for two and a half hours attempting to convince him to register to vote because whether you think we're going to have an afterlife or you don't, we're all here right now and making this better is the most important thing we can possibly do. We do that because we are right on the issues. Our side is the right side. It's proven. Most of the United States agrees with us. They just get duped and tricked and feared into voting against their own best interests. At least there's eight people in here that are willing to show up at this little union hall and come and listen to you people speak and figure out something to do. Marching, that's fantastic. I've never really done a march, but I will engage Jehovah's Witness for two and a half hours. I will go and talk to my union brothers that consistently vote against their own best interests all day long, if that's what it takes, until I can come to them as a friend, as a neighbor, as an American citizen and convince them, "Hey, you're not this, you're not that.

1:38:52 You're a human being and I'm a human being too, and we need to look out for all human beings. We need to look out for all of our brothers and sisters. We need to make the labor unions come back or we need to make everyone have a place." And even someone that voted for Trump that maybe is scared, they feel that they were marginalized. I also try to confront, not confront, but I try to talk with people of faith through the Bernie Sanders campaign. I myself as an atheist. I used to be a militant atheist. It was my way or no way. And if you don't agree with me, I'll prove you stupid. I will use all of my philosophy and all my mathematics and I will prove you're an idiot. Guess what? That got me nothing. It got me absolutely nothing except labeled constantly as an asshole when I was.

1:39:38 But because of the Sanders campaign, one day I'm standing there with these other people and they're Christian and I go, "What are you doing here? How does this happen?" They say, "We're just like you. We want to make this place better." All of a sudden it was, "Wow, maybe people of faith, they're right, just as equally as right as I am. And all we have to do is come together and make them realize we're all on this together." So if we can do that, then the next 20 years are going to be amazing because the corporations, like people have alluded to, they've done a fantastic job at convincing certain types of people that they're not with us. They're not human beings anymore or we're not human to them and that lets them vote a certain way or go along a certain path. By the time they realize they actually are with us, it might be too late.

1:40:22 So if we can come together on that, we can stop demonizing other people. And there's eight people in this room that obviously came all the way here to talk about this stuff and these eight people can go out and talk to those people too and we keep doing what we're doing. We're right on the issues. The next 20 years could be fantastic. They don't have to be bad and I'm not going to concede to the fact they are. In my engagement for two and a half hours with my good friend at the gym, the Jehovah's Witness, he told me, "What's the point of politics? What's the point? I don't need to register. This is all going to end. It's preordained." I said, "What's the point of that?" If you're not willing to try every day when you get up, if you're not willing to believe the next day it's going to be better, what is the point?

1:41:03 Why not just concede it all and just give up? Well, I'm not willing to do that and clearly you people aren't either. So the next 20 years aren't going to be bad. They're going to be amazing because we're going to make it amazing. We're going to engage those people. We're not going to tell them they're stupid or dumb or whatever. We're going to engage them as our neighbors, our friends, our peers, our brothers and sisters and we are right on the issues and it's just a matter of time. Just keep engaging them, keep them coming and eventually they'll come to the right side as well. So for me, the next 20 years are going to be amazing.

1:41:32 Audience member Where's your gym? I got a couple. He probably sit over there.

1:41:42 Audience member, IBEW Local 465 delegate I also work with a young man up there. I also sit on the executive board here at this local union and the labor council. I'm a delegate. I come from the Midwest, born and bred in St. Louis and have lived in the city, lived in the country, have seen many different things. We have to educate our younger generation. We have to educate them on the right things to do and the wrong things to do and how to do things the right way and march and protest. There's nothing wrong with marching and protesting. It's our right, but we can't have them going and disrespecting the political offices or the police or the firefighters or the paramedics that come to help us. So we have to educate them to do things to help our generation.

1:42:58 They're all that we have. If we don't help them, then it's just going to go haywire like everyone says. I just Googled what NPR was because I don't listen to NPR. I'm a Bill Handel fan. I do listen to talk radio, but there's no BS for me. Everything is straightforward and they will tell you, and I don't care who you are, but we have to change the way our younger generation thinks in order for everything to survive. Because if we don't change the way they think now, who's to say that there won't be another younger version of Trump being president down the road? I voted for Bernie Sanders. I wrote his name in. I couldn't stomach voting for either one of those. I'm not that versed in politics. Thank you.

1:44:02 Justin Pearson I want to say one thing. Maybe it's the younger generation that's going to change us. Do you ever think about that? I understand what you're saying and I'm with you, man, trust me, but it could be the younger generation that's going to change us.

1:44:16 Audience member I want to follow up on that exact point and also what Maria said about the attitudes of younger people, which I think is exactly right. I read a report recently that said younger people are more favorable to socialism than they are to communism. There's a reason for that. One is that there's a logic to it when you think about it, what is socialism? Bernie Sanders told us a lot about this, healthcare, decent housing, jobs, attention to the climate, that kind of thing. So income equality, yes. Another reason for that is the end of the Soviet Union because the military industrial complex, which Eisenhower told us about, requires an enemy. So our enemy for so long was communism and that became the cause of many different things, including Vietnam, including the wars in Central America, all kinds of things under the name of communism. Then the Soviet Union ended, so they needed a placeholder, so they chose the war on drugs.

1:45:20 That became the big war that we're having, and then came 9/11, and now it's terrorism with this amorphous thing that you'll never defeat. It could go on forever, but it becomes the mechanism by which these hegemonic powers maintain their economic and political domination.

1:45:47 But younger people don't have this boogeyman of communism, so they look at the realistic issues. What is socialism? So that's a hopeful thing. I also think that we may be beyond the edge in terms of climate, but we don't know. So I have two other books to mention that I read recently. One was Joanna Macy called Active Hope. She's an environmental philosopher and activist. And the other is a more politically oriented book called Hope in the Dark by a woman named Hope Solnit. And that's about incidences where Rebecca Solnit, where change has actually occurred in the past. And both of these authors say hope does not mean that you believe for sure that something's going to work. It may work or it may not work, but we don't know. So let's be active. And change can happen suddenly and dramatically in ways that we don't understand or expect.

1:46:51 So we work with that possibility in mind and we put our best effort forward.

1:46:57 Joanne Faryon Anybody else want to…

1:46:59 Nate Fairman In year 2030, millennials will make up 75% of the global workforce. So that's only 13 years away. 75% of the global workforce will be comprised of millennials. That is an incredible fact. And if the millennial generation is more favorable of socialism, they're absolutely more favorable of labor unions. So like what Matt was saying, the next 20 years could absolutely be incredible.

1:47:24 Joanne Faryon It's funny. I'm Canadian and I didn't know socialism was a bad word when I first got here. I mean, Canada's a socialist country. I mean, it really is a bad word in the United States for some people. It's changing. I wanted to thank our panelists for coming out. You guys have been absolutely amazing. And just give Xavier, who organized this entire event, the last word. Thank you.

1:47:58 Producer Last word is we had about maybe a dozen online listeners, so you can add that to the eight.

1:48:06 Nate Fairman There we go. Real Matt.

1:48:09 Producer But yeah, thanks everybody for coming, especially the panelists, some of whom I know really well and some whom I'm just getting to know really well. Thank you.

1:48:20 Joanne Faryon Thank you. Thank you.