We Decide: America at the Crossroads with Jenna Flanagan
The broad daylight murder by federal immigration officers of Minnesota civilians Renee Good and Alex Pretti last month continued to roil our national politics inside the D.C. Beltway. Congressional Democrats balked at signing off on a federal funding bill, risking a prolonged partial government shutdown, without significant reforms to the Trump junta's violent immigration enforcement operations including the unmasking of ICE agents.
Under the final deal approved by the Senate, the Department of Homeland Security is only funded through Feb. 13, setting up a deadline for Congress to try to find consensus on new restrictions on ICE operations.
With the battle lines being drawn between municipal governments and the federal government over immigration, we take a closer look at rural America. It's been such a key component to the success of Trump's MAGA movement and given the GOP such an edge in the U.S. Senate, where rural states get the same pair of Senators as the most populous states.
Eighty percent, 2,500 of American counties have fewer than 100,000 people with 48 percent fewer than 25,000 people. It's this massive land mass that IS America that Democrats have ceded to Republicans and the MAGA movement.
Like the rest of America, rural America has felt the loss of a local newspaper, “leaving 50 million Americans with limited or no access to a source of reliable local news,” according to Northwestern University , a void quickly filled by unauthenticated social media memes and MAGA slanted Fox News and One America News.
This dearth of local news reporting comes as Ballotpedia reports a spike in uncontested elections throughout the United States with 53,485 (70 percent) of contests being uncontested, most of them local contests, with just 23,417 offering voters a choice.
In smalltown America, democracy has been on the ropes for awhile as local authenticated journalism collapsed. Is it any wonder we've lost the ability to achieve a national consensus on facts like who won the 2020 election or whether or not COVID was a mass death event?
Our guests in the D block hope to change that.
In the A Block, we look at the Trump regime's FBI raid in Fulton County Georgia, to seize ballots from the 2020 election led by Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, with our political panel, David Levinthal, Washington DC correspondent and Senior Editor at NOTUS, Laura Jedeed, a writer at FirewalledMedia.com and an Army veteran of two tours in the War in Afghanistan, and Egberto Willes, host of KPFT's Politics Done Right.
In the B Block, we looked at what Thursday’s arrest of former CNN anchor Don Lemon by federal agents for covering an anti-ICE protest at the Cities Church in St Paul last month says about the state of first amendment protections in America with civil rights attorney and professor of Constitutional Law at John Jay College of Criminal Justice Gloria J. Browne-Marshall . Her latest book A Protest History of the United States looks at 500 years of resistance movements in the US.
In the C Block, we turn to the economy as we look at the consequences of a tax code that offers major breaks for oligarchs like Elon Musk and his company Tesla , while tens of millions of Americans struggle to pay for basic needs with Amy Hanauer, executive director of the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy and Nathan Gusdorf, Executive Director of the Fiscal Policy Institute .
Meanwhile, in a Texas district that went for Donald Trump by 17 points, voters elected Taylor Rehmet, a Democrat newcomer to the state senate. Rehmet, an Air Force veteran and union machinist was outspent 14 to one. The district hasn't elected a Democrat since the 1970s.
In the D Block, we visit with We Decide Rural Affairs editor Teresa Purcell who introduces us to a pair of Democrats mounting campaigns in places that went for President Trump.
Callie Barr is a Northern Michigan attorney mounting her second campaign for Congress in Michigan’s rural First District, and Julian Beaudion , a former State Trooper running for the US Senate in South Dakota where Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem was Governor.
Barr describes how GOP cuts to healthcare are decimating rural hospitals while Beaudion discusses how the Trump mass deportation strategy was crippling his state's once robust dairy industry.
