Ken Scott Baron Podcast

The economy has been voters’ top issue in four of the six midterm elections this century — and 2026 appears all but certain to make it five of seven. Beyond the cost of living, the war in Iran and tariffs, America faces a series of daunting longer-term economic challenges, from mounting federal debt to the effects of artificial intelligence.

Yet Nov. 3 could be a defining test for the rule of law in this country, and both our democracy and our prosperity are on the line.

There is a chance — some would argue a likelihood — that the midterms will proceed smoothly and honestly, with the winners seated in a straightforward manner.

There is also the possibility that the election will be, like so much else over the past two years, chaotic at best and lawless at worst.

There are widespread fears that there could be interference at polling locations, that could prevent ratification when the new Congress convenes on Jan. 3.

The economic impact could be felt immediately, and it could last long after Mr. Trump’s presidency ends.

With the exception of the booming A.I. sector, corporate investment is already weak. The National Federation of Independent Business’s measurement of small-business uncertainty is 32 percent above its historical average. This seems like a bad time to inject substantially more instability into the mix.

The short-term risks from election interference look even more concerning when we consider the possibility that a fight over the outcomes will not necessarily remain contained to the courtroom.

Sustained post-election chaos coupled with aggressive federal interference could create disruptions on a nationwide scale.

Any effort to undermine the election will eventually resolve itself, whether through political compromise, contentious rulings from courts, the use of force or all three.

But the economic impact will outlast any immediate political crisis. The rule of law, undergirded by a tradition of free elections and the peaceful transfer of power, supports business decisions and attracts foreign companies to invest.

It underlies the position of the dollar as the world’s reserve currency. It bolsters investors’ confidence in the full faith and credit of the US and lowers interest rates on our debt. The integrity of our elections, in other words, has been one of the keys to American prosperity.

The United States has not yet seen its economy suffer from a lack of confidence in its legal system. Other countries have.

Americans have long been bolstered by the knowledge that their country is the best place on earth to start or invest in a business. A contested or overturned election could call that into question. Please vote on or before Nov. 3rd and resist any attempts for you to do so!

Have you recently hunted for a customer service number to get an explanation and all you could find was an offer for a “live chat” blinking in the bottom-right corner of your screen?

Then you realize you have been communicating with a chatbot all along.

Then you explain your predicament, supplying information it already seemed to have, answering prompts that had little to do with the question you were asking.

This is the future of customer service, a chatbot not designed to solve problems. It seems to be designed to test how much friction customers would tolerate — how much information we would provide to train future models — before giving up.

Automated customer service systems tasked with handling our data and money are driving us crazy. Whether you’re trying to return a purchase, cancel a subscription or recover a hacked account, getting actual help requires a huge quest.

It’s easy to dismiss these exhausting mazes of chatbots, robocalls, irrelevant pop-ups and consent forms as the routine irritations of life lived on screens.

This can cause delayed medical care, denied insurance coverage, predatory subscription practices and scams that cost Americans an estimated $119 billion a year.

Companies are increasingly deploying A.I. chatbots as the mandatory gateway between consumers and the help they need.

That includes tenants, borrowers, insurance policyholders and fraud victims seeking assistance with services that can be enormously consequential in their lives.

In a recent global study, nearly one in five consumers reported that A.I. customer support failed to provide any benefit at all. Just artificiality, no intelligence. Little wonder then that states such as California, Maine, New Jersey and Utah are moving to require companies to disclose chatbot use.

Companies should still be able to use A.I. and other automated tools, but they need to tell consumers when they are communicating with a chatbot — and make it much easier to reach a human being.

These days, racism, when directed at Black people, is rarely openly expressed by white Southern politicians, who maybe consider it to be immoral, bad politics, bad manners — or all of the above.

But has anti-Black racism eased, or has discrimination against African Americans simply become more subtle, disguised as a web of rules embedded in regular partisan politics?

The Supreme Court weakened the Voting Rights Act, the law that allowed many Black Southerners to finally participate in American democracy after decades of systemic oppression and exclusion.

At issue was the way in which the courts should determine whether a legislative map is racially discriminatory.

Writing for the six-judge conservative majority, Justice Alito stated that from now on, anyone who wished to challenge a map on such grounds must show proof that the map makers had “intentionally” drawn legislative districts to disadvantage a given racial group.

But, Justice Elena Kagan, writing for the liberal minority, argued that under the ruling, a plaintiff would have to show “that the legislators were ‘motivated by a discriminatory purpose,’” which was contrary to the “clear text and design” of the Voting Rights Act.

Congress has long known, she wrote, that trying to find smoking-gun evidence of racist motives is “well-nigh impossible.”

The old measures of racism — some stomach-turning tally of crosses burned, of people lynched — does not seem to apply so much anymore. What we’re dealing with now is less overt racism.

The Supreme Court’s requirement that there must be some proof of an intent to discriminate has taken form in other areas of the law.

For example, in a closely watched capital punishment case in 1987, the court rejected the appeal of Warren McCleskey, a Black man who had been sentenced to death in Georgia for killing a white person.

His lawyers presented the court with a study of the state’s justice system showing that a defendant who had been accused of killing a white person in Georgia was four times as likely to receive a death sentence as someone who had killed a Black person.

But the court ruled that this was not enough to help Mr. McCleskey. To win his case, the court said, he needed to show that he had been personally subject to discrimination.

The problem of “proving” racial discrimination has also bedeviled the South when it comes to racially lopsided juries. In a 1986 case, Batson v. Kentucky, the Supreme Court established that a judge must find “purposeful discrimination” to determine that racial discrimination had been present in the jury selection process.

This is one reason that all-white juries remain common in many parts of the South — “even in places with very substantial African-American populations.”

The Supreme Court nullified a majority-Black congressional district in Louisiana, one of two in the state.

The district had been created by state lawmakers who felt pressured by the courts to draw a map that carved out two districts with a majority of Black voters, in order to meet the requirements of the Voting Rights Act.

Justice Alito, writing the decision, made the case that the South had come a long way since 1965, particularly on Black voter participation, an assertion that is highly contested.

Justice Alito said “Black voters now participate in elections at similar rates as the rest of the electorate, even turning out at higher rates than white voters in two of the five most recent presidential elections nationwide and in Louisiana,”

This ruling is of a piece with the Supreme Court’s decisions to move to what some justices have called a “colorblind Constitution.”

In 2023, the court effectively ended affirmative action in college admissions, with Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. writing, “eliminating racial discrimination means eliminating all of it.”

The second Trump administration, meanwhile, has used its executive power to try to eliminate diversity, equity and inclusion programs in the public and private sectors.

In today’s redistricting efforts, it has been a struggle, at times, to tease out whether a redrawn electoral map is a result of partisanship or old-fashioned racism. Complicating matters is the fact that the Supreme Court, in 2019, ruled that federal judges have no power to hear challenges to gerrymanders carried out purely for partisan advantage.

Mr. Alito also warned that litigants should not be able to get around the rules “by dressing their political-gerrymandering claims in racial garb.”

Quin Hillyer, a white conservative opinion writer who lives in Alabama, believes that these days, Republican map makers would welcome any Black voters into a district if it would bolster their party’s strength.

“If there were an enclave, or a neighborhood, that was 100 percent Black, but that voted 80 percent Republican,” he said, “I think that the white Republicans would gladly take those people.”

My last video outlined the flawed Jury system in the USA. Now comes a historical reminder that this has been the same over many years.

According to the New York Times, Curtis Flowers, a Black man whose six trials in the same Mississippi murder case became a national symbol of racial bias in jury selection, leading the Supreme Court to reverse his capital conviction in 2019 (FLOWERS v. MISSISSIPPI)/ He died this week in Winona, Miss. He was 56.

Mr. Flowers was transferred off death row in a prison in Mississippi and released in December 2019, after nearly 23 years behind bars. His release followed the Supreme Court’s ruling that Black people had been unconstitutionally excluded from the jury in his sixth trial.

In the 7-2 majority opinion, Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh wrote that the state of Mississippi had pursued a “relentless, determined effort to rid the jury of Black individuals.”

Mr. Flowers was convicted in that trial of killing four people in 1996 at a furniture store where he had once worked in Winona Mississippi.

The white district attorney, who tried all of Mr. Flowers’s six cases, spent two decades employing the same tactic: ensuring that few or no Black residents in the majority-Black county were seated on Mr. Flowers’s juries.

At the third trial, the State used all of its 15 peremptory strikes against black prospective jurors, and the jury convicted Flowers and sentenced him to death.

Across the half-dozen trials, 61 of the 72 jurors were white. Two of the prosecutions ended in mistrials, and four in convictions that were overturned on appeal.

Mr. Flowers’s ordeal gained broader attention through a 2018 podcast, “In the Dark,” which identified holes in the prosecution’s case. One witness who had testified at four of Mr. Flowers’s trials, and who had said that Mr. Flowers had confessed to the crime in jail, recanted to the podcast reporters.

Along with other high-profile examples, among them the 2020 killing of George Floyd by police in Minneapolis, Mr. Flowers’s wrongful convictions contributed to a national assessment of bias in the criminal justice system.

The evidence for racial disparities in the criminal justice system is well-documented. The disproportionate racial impact of certain laws and policies, as well as biased decision-making by justice system actors, leads to higher rates of arrest and incarceration in low-income communities of color.

However, there is no evidence that these widely disproportionate rates of criminal justice contact and incarceration are making us safer.

There is a hugely disproportionate impact of mass incarceration on millions of Black people, their families, and their communities.

Latest on Death Row and Executions

Race has always played a powerful role in the American death penalty system. From the earliest uses of capital punishment today, racial bias has continued to create critical gaps in fairness and justice.

Black people make up about 13% of the U.S. population, yet they account for roughly 40% to 42% of individuals on state death rows.

Racial bias shapes the U.S. capital punishment system at nearly every stage, from charging and jury selection to sentencing and execution. Also, minority defendants and cases involving white victims face a substantially higher likelihood of receiving a death sentence.

Also, In murder cases, bias and discrimination has led to death sentences for queer defendants. Many have been executed and some remain on death row. Other defendants have used the “Gay or Trans Panic” defense to avoid the death penalty in cases with queer victims, a defense that is grounded in validating hatred or fear of gay people, though states have begun to ban its use.

Opinions on the use of executions vary widely. The United Nations firmly opposes capital punishment, viewing it as a violation of the right to life and the absolute prohibition of cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment.

Roughly 66% of U.S. adults support capital punishment for murder cases, while about 32% are opposed. According to Gallup data, roughly 52% to 68% of Americans view the death penalty as morally justified or acceptable, though moral approval has trended downward from past decades. Most Americans (59%) do not believe the death penalty acts as a deterrent to violent crime, and a large majority (73% to 78%) express concern over the risk of executing an innocent person.

The method of execution has recently come under scrutiny. Fifty-year-old Christa Pike was discharged from a Nashville hospital and transferred back to the Deborah K. Johnson Rehabilitation Center after surviving two doses of pentobarbital during her scheduled execution.

Former Army Major Hasan—convicted of the 2009 mass shooting at Fort Hood—will be executed by a military firing squad. There are plans to publicly livestream the event, which would mark the U.S. military’s first execution since World War II and the first televised live streamed execution in modern U.S. history.

Clearly, there are difficult decisions to be made about the fate perpetrators of horrific crimes. Each of us must make our own opinions with care and consideration of each case based on the above information.

The NABWMT believes voting is a fundamental pillar of democracy. Every eligible voter should have the opportunity to have their vote count. What’s on the ballot can impact your live.

The NABWMT efforts are nonpartisan. None of our communications or activities support or oppose any candidate or political party. But we can inform our members and allies of our values.

Voting is something we can’t take for granted. Voters need guidance with some of the following:

• Finding their polling location

• A number to call for assistance

• Learning about their voting options (early, by mail, in person, etc.)

• Understanding what’s on the ballot

• The impact of the election on the issues they care about

https://www.vote411.org/

See What’s On Your Ballot

Check Your Voter Registration

Find Your Polling Place

Discover Upcoming Debates In Your Area

And Much More!

Vote your Values, the NABWMT provides guidance for you

In the 2026 US midterm elections voters feel concerned about the economy. But the campaign is also being pulled in several other directions, But the campaign is also being pulled in several other directions, from immigration to the Iran war, transgender rights and the growing political fight over data centers.

The Economy

People of Color continue to experience persistent economic disparities in wealth, employment, and income compared to white households, driven by structural inequities and recent labor market. The NABWMT’s mission supports legislation to address these inequities.

Health Care

Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) face persistent health care disparities driven by systemic racism, economic inequality, and implicit bias in medical settings. Recent changes in the Affordable Care Act (ACA) and Medicaid have hurt communities of color.A combination of legislative subsidy expirations and active federal crackdowns has reversed enrollment trends, heavily impacting minority populations. The NABWMT supports the World Health Organization definition of health as a fundamental human right.

Transgender Issues

Trans people face severe discrimination, stigma and systemic inequality. The NABWMT supports comprehensive federal non-discrimination law that includes gender identity.

Immigration

Immigration remains another issue, The NABWMT believes all migrants are entitled to basic human rights regardless of their legal status. Although States possess the sovereign right to control their national borders, universal treaties apply to every person within a state’s effective control or jurisdiction, meaning all migrants are entitled to basic human rights regardless of their legal status.

Voter Rights

Black voters face sophisticated A.I.-driven disinformation campaigns designed to suppress turnout ahead of the November midterms. The NAACP has released “propaganda playbooks” to help communities identify fake polling information, AI-generated deepfakes, and voter suppression efforts. The NABWMT has, for decades fight for the vote.

The Iran War

Martin Luther King asked how could a nation spend so much money on a war, when it could not feed or protect its own people? The NABWMT does not support wars that disproportionately affects People of Color.

The authorities in Turkey have arrested dozens of people since early Sunday as part of a broad crackdown on L.G.B.T.Q. activists and associations, according to officials, rights groups and lawyers for the detained.

The government has called the campaign an effort to protect Turkish families, but rights organizations have accused the authorities of criminalizing L.G.B.T.Q. people and lifestyles they don’t like, and of seeking to stomp out rights activism.

Some critics of the campaign say the government is also targeting L.G.B.T.Q. people because members of that community are an active part of the political opposition to President Erdogan.

The government is conflating gay rights advocacy with prostitution, drug use and obscenity in a way that “smears L.G.B.T. people.” Their very identity is really being criminalized.

Homosexuality is not illegal in Turkey, but Mr. Erdogan’s government has frequently demonized L.G.B.T.Q. people and sought to push them out of public life.

The authorities have banned Pride parades in Turkish cities, and Mr. Erdogan has referred to L.G.B.T.Q. people as “deviants” who were “spreading like the plague.”

Mr. Erdogan has also promoted a conservative view of the family in which marriage is between a man and a woman, men are the breadwinners and women are encouraged to have at least three children.

This year begins what Mr. Erdogan has called the “Decade of Family and Population,” during which the government hopes to push up Turkey’s sagging birthrate with cash incentives and other child-friendly policies.

Security forces in Istanbul, Ankara and other Turkish cities detained more than 60 people in their homes, and raided gay bars and the offices of gay rights organizations.

The government also blocked numerous social media accounts belonging to gay rights groups, as well as the accounts of a sexual health organization, a legal monitor, reporters who wrote about the arrests and the Turkey office of Amnesty International.

Justice Minister Akin Gurlek said that the operation was called “My Family is Safe.” He said the efforts had targeted 162 people, nine associations and 13 businesses suspected of involvement in prostitution and the production and dissemination of “obscene content,” including to minors.

He noted that searches by the security forces had turned up digital materials, drugs and indications of foreign funding for groups that were encouraging homosexual activity and “indecency.”

“We are steadfastly continuing our efforts to protect our children, the institution of the family and the social order,” he added.

Mehmet Sinan Birdal, a political scientist at the Free University of Berlin, said the Turkish government was going after L.G.B.T.Q. people because of the community’s political opposition to Mr. Erdogan.

“Obscenity is a very vague term,” he said. “I see this as a step to further pressure civil opposition.”

Those detained in the operation included a women’s rights activist, a journalist who had written an article about gay rights in the Republic of Georgia and two founders of a health association that supports people with H.I.V.

Yildiz Tar, editor of an online newsmagazine, denounced the government’s crackdown, saying, “They call the existence of L.G.B.T.Q. obscene” and noting, “This is discrimination.”

The arrests followed other cases in which the government tried to use obscenity laws to criminalize certain types of behavior.

Twice this year, Mabel Matiz, a singer, has faced obscenity charges over his music. A judge acquitted him in the first case, focused on some of his lyrics. A second case, focused on a video clip that shows a groom at a wedding party dancing with another man, is ongoing.

Thank you for tuning in! Ken and Paul talk about the NABWMT Conventions and Political Action

Johnathon Clauss, said “There has yet to be an openly gay male player in the French top-flight.” Clauss attributed that to a perceived lack of empathy, causing players to “hide”. As long as it doesn’t concern them, they don’t put themselves in other people’s shoes.

Clauss also said: “I didn’t really like it when others were treated badly because of things they can’t do anything about,” Clauss said. “ I have always been on the side of those who were not very popular in the playground.”

While openly gay players in women’s football are far more common, there are currently only two examples in major top-flight football around the world — Jakub Jankto of Italian side Cagliari and Josh Cavallo of Adelaide in Australia.

Despite the growing representation of gay, male footballers, Clauss said challenges still lie with the heteronormative climate of the men’s game.

Claus, who has won 14 caps for France since his debut in 2022, urged education around homophobia to begin “among young people, starting at school”.

He added. “Raising awareness among a professional group is almost already too late.”

Clauss said he hopes for there to be “no impact” when future players come out as gay but felt he is unlikely to see it in his environment before he retires.

Players of Ligue 1 teams are set to wear armbands in the campaign against homophobia this weekend, the final match of the French top-flight’s regular league campaign.