>> President-elect Joe Biden is planning to reverse Donald Trump's efforts to help
build the controversial Keystone XL pipeline. This is actually part of several environmental
actions Biden plans on taking to combat climate change. Which, of course, is incredibly important.
Let me also note that Deb Haaland serving as his incoming Secretary for the Interior
could have had some influence on Biden in regard to indigenous communities and the
need to do something about climate change, to do something bold about climate change.
But this is really an issue that many people
across the ideological spectrum really agreed on. You have ranchers and farmers
joining this coalition, that also includes the indigenous community, in order to oppose and
fight back against the Keystone XL pipeline. And now it appears that they have won.
So the pipeline, promoted by the oil and gas industry since it was first proposed about
15 years ago, has drawn opposition. Because it would carry tar sands from the boreal forests in
northern Alberta, Canada, of course, to refineries in the United States' Gulf Coast. The energy used
in extracting the molasses-like petroleum supplies would contribute heavily to climate change.
So there were legitimate concerns about leaks, about contamination in drinking water.
All legitimate concerns, especially when you look at how the fossil fuel industry,
due to a lack of oversight, has contributed to tainting drinking water in various communities.
This is a very real problem that people across the board understood the gravity of.
And as a result, I think the messaging was effective and aggressive enough to convince
Joe Biden that he needed to immediately undo some of the damage coming from the
Trump administration on this. But Ryan, I wanted to bring you in and talk about
some of the messaging we're getting from Biden in regard to the environment.
He's not on board with the Green New Deal, but he is pushing forward with a more
robust environmental agenda than I had expected. >> Right, and Raphael Warnock and John Ossoff in
Georgia wouldn't say that they supported the Green New Deal either. But if you ticked through every
single plank of the Green New Deal, they would say yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, I'm for all of that.
And Joe Biden has pretty much done the same. He has said he doesn't support the Green New Deal,
but he does think that this country needs a new deal, and it ought to be green.
But there's something about the messaging. And progressives actually should do
some reflecting on that, that why is it that these pragmatic politicians who only care about
winning and messaging, who will say absolutely whatever they think is the best thing to say
to voters to win, why are they so afraid to say those couple of words?
Yet they're okay pissing off the oil industry and the other industries that will be so angry about
supporting all of the different planks of that platform. There's a disconnect there that
people need to sort through, but this is- >> No, it is an interesting aspect of this.
Because, I mean, the way I read it is
you have moderate Democrats who just kinda want to distance themselves from,
I guess the left part of Congress, the AOCs, the Rashida Tlaibs, the Ilhan Omars.
And so what do you make of that? Do you think it has something to do with the way progressive
lawmakers have messaged these issues? Do you think it has more to do with the fact that progressive
lawmakers are, they're hounded non-stop by right wing pundits? So what do you make of it?
>> I think it's actually the latter, the last thing you said,
that there is a multi-billion dollar, 24/7 propaganda operation
that we can't really fully appreciate, because we're not kinda bathed in it. Because we see Fox
News, and we see Newsmax and everything to its right, as it kinda flows into our Twitter feed.
But we're not kinda watching this stuff all of the time. And if you're a politician who runs
statewide or nationally, then you have to understand
what everybody's media diet is like. And so then you do end up having a sense that
there's a huge portion of the country that is being told that these are un-American insurgents.
They're terrorists, they're trying to undo everything that you love about this country.
And the Green New Deal is going to ban cows, gonna ban hamburgers, gonna ban airplanes.
And we see that on Twitter, we laugh at it.
But there are millions of Americans who are fed this as part of their daily media diet.
And so I think part of what you're seeing is success on the part of groups like Sunrise
Movement in pushing forward this climate agenda, and success on the part of the Waterkeepers and
others who have blocked the Keystone pipeline. And so politicians want to be on the side of that
energy, yet they want to not be in the cross-hairs of this multi-billion dollar propaganda operation.
So they start avoiding words like Green New Deal. And they even, like Ossoff and Warnock,
wouldn't say they were for Medicare for all. But they would say that they're for
healthcare for everybody, everybody should have.
And they would say that there should be a public plan that should be available to everybody.
They would inch right up to it, but there's something about the words. And I think it's
what you said, that it's related to this propaganda campaign and the money behind it.
>> And it puts Democrats, particularly progressive Democrats, in a little bit of a pickle. Because
the online pressure to use certain rhetoric isn't gonna go away.
And the purity tests that have been incredibly toxic lately, I don't think are going to subside
in any way. I think they're gonna continue. And so if you have Democratic lawmakers who are
pretty supportive of robust policies that help provide solutions to climate change, that help
provide affordability and availability to people who don't have healthcare,
any progress that they might be pushing for is going to be considered inadequate.
Selling out, not doing enough, these people are frauds, whatever it is.
And so it's difficult to kinda toe that line, where you are trying to avoid the anti-leftist
propaganda out there while simultaneously trying to appeal to a base of voters who wanna see
pretty strong rhetoric and robust policies, solutions that come from a more leftist ideology.
>> Yeah, it's an interesting and a tricky situation that we wound up in,
because the impulse for these litmus tests comes from a very good place. Because you have so many
Democrats, establishment Democrats who will claim to be progressive. But then when they actually
have a chance to do it, when you put something on the floor, they don't end up voting for it.
And they'll give you all sorts of excuses around this. So the solution was, okay, well, we're gonna
come up with these. You have to support a Green New Deal. You have to support Medicare for all.
But as you started to get people into Congress that were able to elevate those issues into the
national conversation, then you had the right wing say, this is something we can smear and distort.
And so then you get this feedback of centrist, establishment Democrats saying, well, we
actually support the elements of this, but we don't support the thing itself. And so
what you have to do at this point is just judge people based on what they actually do,
nothing performative. It doesn't matter in a lot of ways what they say, it's what they actually do.
So if Joe Biden shuts down the Keystone XL pipeline, then you judge him on that,
because that's what actually matters. What words he uses when he shuts it down or if he doesn't
shut it down, don't matter whatsoever. What does he do when it comes to direct aid to people?
What does he do when it comes to expanding healthcare? Obviously, he has said he's
against Medicare for all. But is he going to lower the Medicare age? Is he gonna raise
the eligibility up to, say 25? Is he gonna allow everybody who is unemployed to get into Medicare?
If he does those things, then you judge him on that.
And so because there's propaganda flying in so many different directions, you really have to
pay much closer attention than you used to. And so labels don't quite cut it anymore.