Today I am joined by Abdul El-Sayed. He is a physician and a former public health official running for US Senate in Michigan. He has spent his career eliminating medical debt and taking on corporate polluters. And now he's running a campaign focused on ending corporate influence, which is music to my ears, and politics and standing up for the working people. How are you? Well, all things considered, it has been a terrible weekend for the world. I got to spend a little bit more time this weekend with my little girls. So I'm sitting in the ambivalence of knowing that life is a lot worse for a lot of folks. And you see the devastation of a girls' school that was destroyed at the edge of our tax dollars. And at some points, you sort of think, how lucky am I to be able to spend time with my little girls? So that's sort of where I'm living right now. Jennifer, how are you? I mean, you know, it's the same thing. It's the split screen life that we're dealing with as Americans. You have all of these horrible things that the Trump regime is doing. And then you have the split screen with your normal life, with your children, with your pets, with your family. And there's always this moment. My son was in town visiting me from New York this past weekend where it's like, you know, all of these horrible things are happening, whether it be in Milwaukee or whether it be in Iran. And these egregious human rights violations at our taxpayer dollars, and then sometimes you're just insulated from it. And it's very hard to manage and stay engaged. I want to talk to you, obviously, let's talk about the pattern that seems to emerge all of the time with American foreign policy. and we get a Republican in power and they drive up, obviously rich people get tax breaks immediately, immediately. And then they start these wars. And I saw a tweet by Thomas Massey, for me to quote a Republican is a pretty big deal. We spent $8 trillion in these wars in the Middle East. And when you start diving into this Iran thing, it seems like to me, based on my reading, reading independent media, that this has been Benjamin Netanyahu's wish for 40 years and Donald Trump made it come true for him. There's no doubt about that. And the sad thing to me is that Donald Trump cannot take on the problems that everyday Americans need solved for them. He ran on America first. He said he was going to end the era of these forever wars. And instead, what happened is he's just, I don't know, three foreign entanglements in the last two months alone. And all of this sort of goes back to the fact that he can't actually solve the problems for you. He's not going to make your grocery prices go down any lower. He's not going to help you afford a home. He's not going to improve your health care and certainly has been raising prices on you. He's not going to make it easier for you to be able to live in a community safely. none of this is about you. It's all about distraction. But this is a distraction we've seen before. And you're absolutely right. And this is the thing that bothers me the most. So I ran for governor back in 2018. I said something at the time folks weren't quite ready to hear, which is that Trump is not the disease of our politics. He's just the worst symptom. And the disease is the system that allows corporations and special interests to buy and sell politicians to rig a system against us. Thomas Massey is the one you chose to quote. But how many Democrats we have here running around talking about the fact that, you know, Iran has now been liberated. I don't know when we forgot that we were supposed to be the party that stood against war. But again, that's part of the pattern. They cut taxes, then they take us to war, it raises the national debt, they pointed us and say we're profligate, because we're trying to fight for your health care, and your home affordability and improve your schools. And then a bunch of Democrats were supposed to be about those things, then come and cheerlead the war on the back end. And I'm just saying like that whole system has to end, how many Democrats are out here not saying the thing that Thomas Massey is saying that all of us as Democrats who should be the party that's against war ought to be saying in the first place. Completely agree. When there's not an opposition, it creates a lane for Tucker Carlson, for Thomas Massey, for Marjorie Taylor Greene, because the opposition party is so lackluster. The way I see it is it pertains to Iran You have a video of Chuck Schumer the Senate minority leader about two weekends ago saying that his main job as a United States Senator was to make sure that Israel continued to get the blank check. So then when you combine that with Lindsey Graham's statements and Ted Cruz's statements, here's where my brain goes. Okay, we have a Democrat. We have a couple of nutty Republicans, right? They're all Benjamin Netanyahu first. And then I think to myself, how on earth does this policy help people in rural Texas, people in upstate New York, people in the suburban South Carolina, how on earth does this policy help them with accessing medical care? They have a root canal and they need to have, you know, it's a couple of grand to have a root canal. Common, happens all the time. You have the money for it, tough titties. We're not going to help you. But Israel is going to continue to get this check, and they're going to get it bipartisan support, and it's going to continue to destabilize the region, and we're going to continue to print money for it. It is a bipartisan policy of insanity that helps no Americans whatsoever. Look, we're about to pay our taxes next month, And I don't think any of us pay our taxes so that another government gets tanks and bombs, especially a government that has perpetuated a genocide in our name. And I would rather our money be spent here at home, like you said, to expand healthcare subsidies, build federally qualified health centers, rebuild our schools, build our roads and bridges that are crumbling all over this country, than sending our money abroad to destroy other people's children and their schools and their hospitals and their roads and bridges. Now, ask yourself why we don't do that. Ask yourself why there are so many Democrats that are justifying this illegal and unjustifiable war. Well, it kind of goes back to the fact that you got a special interest in the form of AIPAC that is funding candidates on both sides and then writing their talking points for them. And this is, in large part, the problem. When you have a system that is so porous to the interests of special interests and corporations, it almost always does their bidding against you. So now a bunch of folks who can't afford their root canal, a bunch of folks who can't afford to take their kid to a doctor, a bunch of folks who are driving down broken roads are now subsidizing this war that does not benefit them, but only benefits the interests of a particular set of leaders in a particular foreign country. And at the end of the day, I think all of us should agree that we should not be in the business of blank check, foreign military aid. And I'll start with Egypt, where my folks immigrated from, right? All I've ever seen, given that I spent childhood summers in Egypt, is that that money did not make the Egyptian people any freer or any richer. All it did is cement the grasp of a military dictatorship on those people. We need to think differently about how we invest in ourselves in this country. And right now we are watching as a few very rich, very powerful people are dictating a foreign policy that stands against peace, that stands against prosperity, that works against international law, and that robs us of the things that we need and deserve. So this notion, I think, is really important and at the heart of the midterms, is we all expect MAGA or anybody that votes Republican, we know what they're going to do. We know they're going to do immoral things, break laws, give rich people all the perks and scapegoat black and brown people and poor people. We know that. Rinse and repeat. We have decades of data that shows us that's what they're going to do. Since the fall of Citizen United, we have a Democratic Party that has wandered off from the working class and has wandered over to corporate interests. And now there are people like you and me who are standing saying we have to be the political party that goes back to the worker. And then you have a Democratic establishment that is really freaked out by us doing this that won't endorse Azoran Mamdani, that you have a whole group right now that is trying to muddy up any chance AOC could have at throwing her name in the ring for president or Senate, these centrist Democrats. And I saw this video the other day, and I not going to be able to credit the woman but she was a thought leader And she said And oftentimes when capitalism or crony capitalism is at risk fascists and liberals become good allies And that was a really stunning thing And we see that going on right now. We see the Democratic Party offer us a few things of harm reduction, But a lot of times we see Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer and other corporate Dems really on this MAGA light trajectory. And for people like you and I, when we speak out, they're like, oh, wait, don't say that. People are not going to vote for Democrats that way. And I think that that kind of patronizing thought towards a Democratic electorate is also a huge part of the problem, assuming that the voter group is stupid. it. Yeah. Look, I've been to 80 cities now, 270 public events. And you know what nobody asked me? Nobody asked me, what are we doing about Iran? Everybody asked me, what are you doing about my healthcare? Donald Trump had one formulation and he was able to tell this narrative that created the circumstance in which we live right now. If you're out of a job, it's because an immigrant took your job. If you're out of homes, it's because an immigrant took your home. If you're out of healthcare, immigrant took your healthcare. We have a better, truer formulation. If you're out of a job, it's because a corporation figured out how to automate an offshore your job. If you're out of healthcare, we know what they're doing your healthcare. If you're out of a home, they're probably speculating on the home you should have been able to afford. And the reason that too many Democrats don't say that thing is because they're taking money from the same corporations who are causing the problem. So we end up with this milquetoast approach to our politics that does not inspire anything. But here's the thing I want everybody out there to understand. The Democratic Party is not a function of its leaders. The Democratic Party is a function of its voters. And as I travel the state, people are asking the questions that you and I keep asking. They want leaders who want to spend our money here to provide healthcare here rather than drop bombs over there. They want leaders who are willing to stand up and think through this challenge of immigration. You can keep the southern border safe, but you can't enforce immigration policy, which by the way is not about criminal law, it's about civil law. At the end of an AR-15 with your face covered, killing two people in the streets and detaining US citizens and detaining children. They want someone who is going to think credibly around the challenges without being bought by either a special interest like AIPAC or by corporations. And so I want all of us to understand that at the end of the day, money doesn't buy votes. People vote. And we've got to take our issues to the people. They are beatable. So don't back down. Don't stop telling the truth. Step up and stand up on business. And I think there is an opportunity to retake the party for the ideals that the party was meant to be for in the first place. I have felt like there, and this is just anecdotal, but there has been a great awakening in the American public to the corporate interests that occupy both parties. And I've seen it just in my personal friend group. I've seen people really opening up their eyes and really craving a independent politician, an independent Democratic Party. Through your travels around Michigan, the places you've gone, have you experienced this kind of great awakening that the electorate is educating themselves off of corporate media onto independent media and that everybody's eyes are kind of widely opening. I'm getting this vibe across the United States and I feel like the base has moved and the establishment is sitting there stubborn. Tell me what your experience is with the electorate. I think my experience has been entirely the same as yours. I mean, the crazy thing about it is in this moment, there's so much information coming at you all the time and you can sort of see past or beyond the curtain that has so often covered the fact that too often the parties, they maintain a bipartisan consensus. Look, when the people disagree on an issue, but politicians agree on an issue, the difference is usually somebody's money. And so folks can see that clearly. And I'll just share an anecdote from here in Michigan. Our local utility is called DTE. They spend more on Michigan politics than any other corporation in the state. They have given to 93% of the elected legislators in the state legislature. Now in January they sent everybody a letter saying that for the privilege of being able to pay for your inflated utility costs with a credit card that you have to pay an extra a month If that not like a frank junk fee money grab, I don't know what is. Now, why are they able to get away with that? Why were they able to just pass a $242 million increase in rate hike that all of us are going to pay? Why are they asking for another one when they're about to get sweetheart deals from data center operators? All of that goes back to the fact that they bought off both sides of our politics. And I think Democrats now understand that if you do not want to continue to watch your pocket get picked by a big corporation, you've got to stand up to the way that the corporation is rigging the system. The same is true for pharma. The same is true for health insurance. The same is true for like Raytheon and General Dynamics. Who do you think benefits when we're out there dropping bombs? Who do you think is going to pay for the three F-15s that just got dropped by friendly fire in Kuwait? You and I. And I think we need to decide that they're not going to be able to rig the rules against us. And the only way that we get to afford a dignified life in America is when we're willing to stand up to the ways that they're trying to rewrite the rules to pick our back pockets. I mean, when you say all of that like that, it really always still kind of takes my breath away that we are a country that produces so much wealth. I mean, just incredible wealth. We have this incredible, massive military that we wouldn't blink about spending money on, wouldn't hesitate in the least bit because national security. But when it comes to helping working class people, you get politicians that go through all of this bizarre mental gymnastics. And I believe that we have to reclaim the Democratic Party back to the days of FDR and deliver a generational promise. And I think that the establishment Democrats are really the new Democrats. And those of us that are claiming and those of us that are desiring to go back to helping workers, to helping people, not throwing anybody under the bus, stop playing culture war politics and say, hey, our policies apply to everybody. You might not like this gay person, tough titties, they get the same rights you get. And I feel like the branding that the Democrats like you and me that we're doing right now is just so important to reclaim the party. And tell me who are you primarying, first of all, and then tell my listeners how they can find you. Yeah. So I really appreciate that point. And just a few things. Look, I'm a doctor by training. I rebuilt Detroit's health department. Every single time you have a program to put glasses on kids or eliminate medical debt, everyone looks at you and says, doctor, how are you going to pay for that? I'm wondering how many people asked the generals who just architected this whole set of strikes, this war, in general, how are you going to pay for that? We've got a choice to make. Now, look, I'm in a three-way primary. I'm locked in a primary with an AIPAC-funded candidate who's a U.S. Congresswoman named Haley Stevens and a state senator named Mallory McMorrow. I'm the only one of us who stands for abolishing ICE, passing Medicare for all, and who's never taken corporate PAC money. You can get involved at abdulforsenate.com. I hope folks will. I don't take corporate money. I never have and never will. So if you can chip us off five bucks, 10 bucks, it goes a long way. And if you're in Michigan, actually anywhere, sign up to volunteer. We are a movement campaign and we need that movement. So I hope folks will get involved. We got an opportunity to think differently about what our politics is supposed to be about rather than worrying about whether or not our government is going to continue to raid our streets or drop bombs on other people's children. Maybe it could start doing things like providing us healthcare, rebuilding our schools, and taking on the power of corporations so we can have one good job that pays the things we need to be able to afford our life. And I really appreciate you having me to get the opportunity to share a conversation with you, Jennifer. I really enjoyed it. Thank you so much. And thank you for running. We need people like you running for political office. It provides me a lot of hope that there are still such decent people that want to dive into the political spectrum because we need you so desperately. Thank you so much. And listener, please go support Abdul. We will link all of his campaign information right below in the show notes. All right. Good luck. Thank you so much. I appreciate you. Thanks for fighting the good fight for us. Of course. Bye-bye.
