The Racket by Jonathan M. Katz

Audio editing by Evan Roberts

For the Biden administration, the arrival of thousands of Haitian immigrants on the southern border has been a telling moment. Instead of rushing relief to and expediting the admission of asylum seekers, the White House focused on the domestic political fallout: trying to appease the nativist right through a massive deportation wave, while defusing criticism from the left by weakly addressing the most visceral actions by border agents caught on camera. Inevitably, no one is happy.

An even more dire response was hinted at last week by NBC News. The story by Jacob Soboroff and Ken Dilanian revealed a posted ad by the Department of Homeland Security for a “new contract to operate a migrant detention facility at the U.S. naval base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, with a requirement that some of the guards speak Spanish and Haitian Creole.” The revelation horrified many Americans, who associate Guantánamo with the worst abuses of the Forever Wars. To Haitians, it brought back an even older memory: of the original Gitmo detention camps, built in the early 1990s to house an earlier group of Haitian refugees.

To dig deeper, I called Jocelyn McCalla, one of the foremost defenders of Haitian migrants’ rights, who devoted years of his life to freeing the original Guantánamo detainees. We talked about the situation on the border, how Guantánamo got to be Guantánamo, and what should be done for the migrants now. MaCalla casts doubt on the insistence of White House spokesman Jennifer Psaki that the ad was “routine.” I also reveal a few details from my upcoming book, Gangsters of Capitalism, for which I traveled to Guantánamo Bay. (The book is available for pre-order now, hint hint.)

Hope you enjoy. Paid subscribers can share their thoughts in the comments at katz.substack.com. Na pale pita.

Transcript (may contain errors)

Jonathan M. Katz:

[music 00:00:04]. Hello, and welcome to The Long Version. I am Jonathan M. Katz. This is a podcast associated with my newsletter, The Long Version, which you can find at katz.substack.com.

Jonathan M. Katz:

I'm sure a lot of you have seen the images that came recently from the US-Mexico border of Haitian migrants crossing the Rio Grande over a dam only to be threatened, trampled, and forced back across it by US border agents in cowboy hats and tactical armor on horseback. Adding insult to injury, about a week ago NBC News reported that the Biden administration had put out an advertisement looking for a contractor to set up a migrant detention facility at Guantánamo Bay.

Jonathan M. Katz:

Now, this prompted an enormous hue and cry, especially when it was revealed by NBC that they had made sure to put in the ad that the new detention center guards at Guantánamo should speak Haitian Creole. For those of us who've been paying attention to Haiti for a long time, and those of us who've been paying attention to Guantánamo for a long time, we know that this actually goes back a ways in the history of Guantánamo. That before Guantánamo became associated with the war on terror, with Muslim detainees who were taken off the battlefields in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and then all over the world in the war on terror, the detention center was actually first built in the 1990s, way before 911, to house Haitians and Cubans who were captured at sea trying to reach the United States.

Jonathan M. Katz:

Now, as some of you know, I have a book coming out in January called Gangsters of Capitalism: Smedley Butler, The Marines, and The Making and Breaking of America's Empire. It's on sale for preorder right now. You can go to Amazon, or better yet your local independent bookstore and preorder it. Please do.

Jonathan M. Katz:

While I was researching and reporting that book, I went to Guantánamo because it's the place where Smedley Butler, who is essentially the main character of my book, it's a nonfiction book but I think we can call him a character, he certainly was a character. Guantánamo is the place where he started his career, and it's also the place where in 1898 the United States overseas empire really began. But it is, of course, the place that today in 2021, and really for the last 20 years has represented the grosses excesses of American empire.

Jonathan M. Katz:

Again, that's a story that really began in the 1990s. I wanted to bring on somebody who knows about that firsthand. Jocelyn McCalla is the Executive Director of the National Coalition for Haitian Rights. He is himself Haitian-American and he has been fighting fiercely for the rights of Haitian immigrants. Haitians trying to escape poverty and repression in Haiti to come to the United States since the 1980s, since they were trying to escape the clutches of the dictator, Jean Claude "Baby Doc" Duvalier.

Jonathan M. Katz:

Jocelyn was thus one of the first people to be advocating for people trapped at Guantánamo in that original detention camp back in the 1990s. He remembers very well the thousands of Haitians who were trapped there, including many who were trapped for supposed medical reasons; they had HIV. Americans were as afraid of Aids as they were of Haitians and they connected the two in theirs minds in very unfortunate ways.

Jonathan M. Katz:

I talked to Jocelyn last week, I wanted to sort of understand the connections between the period that he was very involved with Haitian migrant rights at Guantánamo in 1990, how that connects to today and this latest threat of dumping Haitians in Guantánamo. It was a fascinating conversation; among other things, I learned that back in the 1990s, McCalla and his group realized that a slot machine had more rights than Haitians, at least as far as Guantánamo Bay was concerned. So, without any further ado, here is my conversation with Jocelyn McCalla.

Jonathan M. Katz:

What was your reaction to seeing the photos from Del Rio, from the Southern Border?

Jocelyn McCalla:

Well, I mean, my reaction is that "same-old-same-old". To a certain extent, the Haitian refugee saga is littered with similar pictures from the time they landed in Florida in 1972 up to now, they usually land in south Florida by boat and the Coast Guard and the Border Patrol obviously very actively tried to catch the Haitians before they disappeared in South Florida. So they were all over the beach. Seeing the Haitians still running from the Border Patrol back then is essentially a reminder of what happened just this past week.

Jocelyn McCalla:

Then you had Haitians being detained at Krome North in the hundreds and sometimes the thousands. At Krome North, some of them were in chains; at Krome North, they were also processed and disinfected. I think that you should go on the internet, you'd probably find a picture of Haitian men, naked, being lathered in soap that was published at the time. That comes sometime in 1980 or so and you have at that time Haitians washing ashore in Florida, about 33 of them, and they washed ashore dead because they didn't know how to swim. That picture as well.

Jocelyn McCalla:

But with respect to horses, my experience with horses was in 1985 when I was organizing and had organized a protest of US policy towards Haiti and US policy towards Haitian refugees, and we were protesting on 42nd Street near what used to be the Haitian Consulate. The New York City police was using horses to corral us in, to make sure to get us off the street, and essentially moved us onto the sidewalk; and they were doing this very brutally. At the time, my ex-wife was there, [Borgnine 00:07:16], and she was pregnant with [Layla 00:07:19].

Jonathan M. Katz:

Wow.

Jocelyn McCalla:

She fell down and I had to basically rush her into a store where she could be protected. But one of my guys, who was an organizer, was trampled by one of the police horses.

Jonathan M. Katz:

It's like an old intimidation tactic.

Jocelyn McCalla:

Absolutely. The horse is huge compared to a human being, and a horse that is being used aggressively led into a crowd is nothing to sneeze at, so to speak.

Jonathan M. Katz:

My big encounter with police horses, I think, was during Occupy Wall Street, also in Times Square in 2011. And just a phalanx of police horses just charged into part of the crowd. It's terrifying. And trying to imagine what it's like for somebody who just waded across the Rio Grande and is trying to bring their lunch.

Jocelyn McCalla:

Well, the picture of that person is completely terrible. I mean, you had an entire family that are going back across the Rio Grande to get some food and they were all coming back, and this border patrol guard decided that he was going to split the family and prevent the man, the adult there, from joining the others. So it's a really sick attempt to basically send a very strong message that you're not wanted and we're going to do everything in our power to ensure that you're going to regret coming ashore.

Jonathan M. Katz:

That was the video where the border guard said that, that's why, "You come from a s**t country." Yeah.

Jocelyn McCalla:

Yeah. Right. And that you're using your women to get by.

Jonathan M. Katz:

Yeah. I don't even know what he meant by that. What's that?

Jocelyn McCalla:

You know, well.

Jonathan M. Katz:

I mean, the whole family was trying to claim asylum-

Jocelyn McCalla:

Exactly. Right.

Jonathan M. Katz:

... I don't understand. How do you not travel with your family if you're trying to bring your family to safety? Can you just talk a little bit about your background, how you got involved with migrants rights?

Jocelyn McCalla:

Back when I had an opportunity to go to Haiti after living here for about seven years-

Jonathan M. Katz:

What year is this about?

Jocelyn McCalla:

1975, 1976.

Jonathan M. Katz:

So this under Jean-Claude Duvalier.

Jocelyn McCalla:

Yes. Jean-Claude Duvalier was President for [inaudible 00:10:02]. You know, I had no other intention but to have a good time back then but I found myself in the situation where I was profoundly shocked by what I saw, which was the opposite of my memories of Haiti. I was also profoundly shocked by the fact that there was so much inequality in the country. I decided upon my return that I was going to try to figure it out. I kept hearing from Haitians that nothing is ever going to work in Haiti, the country cannot be fixed, because even though we say together we're strong and that unity makes us all strong, there's never going to be any unity.

Jocelyn McCalla:

So I decided that I was going to try to demonstrate and prove to Haitians that, yes, you can achieve unity and you can do the impossible. From that point on, I started to really get deep down into Haitian history, Haitian custom, Haitian politics and so on. I became very active in student affairs and tried to organize Haitian students on campus; put together the City University of New York. From that point on, I basically went on to become associated with and founded the Association of Haitian Workers in New York, being associated with [inaudible 00:11:40], which was, I mean, not [inaudible 00:11:45], and launched a couple of other student and-

Jonathan M. Katz:

The newspaper.

Jocelyn McCalla:

Yeah. The newspaper; the weekly newspaper.

Jocelyn McCalla:

Then, throughout this period, there were a number of refugees that were being dispersed. You had Haitian refugees being detained at what is called the Brooklyn Navy Yard; a little less than 100 Haitians were being detained there. Then you had Haitians being detained in Upstate New York, which was about two to three hours away from New York City in the town called Otisville in New York. Then New York City had another area, an old military base near the Canadian border, where several hundred Haitians were being held there too.

Jocelyn McCalla:

Part of what I did was to organize, and at that time it was possible to do so, organize visits to the Haitians in the Brooklyn Navy Yard. We had worked out agreements with the authorities there to provide English as a second language, classes for these guys to orient them while they were in detention. And with respect to the Haitians in Otisville, I worked primarily with a good friend of mine, Michael Hooper, who was at the time leading the National Coalition for Haitian refugees.

Jocelyn McCalla:

Michael and I worked together trying to provide legal assistance to the Haitians in Otisville. That sealed my, well, first of all, my bond with them, but also made it possible for me to, in 1985, to join the National Coalition for Haitian refugees as a Deputy Director. By that time-

Jonathan M. Katz:

A lot of America is the land of short memories. Haitians, up to 1986 were fleeing the Duvalier dictatorship, and then there was another big wave following the 1991 coup against Jean-Bertrand Aristide, right?

Jocelyn McCalla:

Correct. There were a couple of things in respect to the relationship of Haitians to the United States and the measures taken by the United States to prevent Haitians from reaching its shores, or to claim asylum. You have to take into account two things; one, the major influx of Haitians came in 1980 along with the [inaudible 00:14:33]. There were maybe about 15 to 18,000 Haitians who made it while the [inaudible 00:14:41] were being accompanied, so to speak, by the-

Jonathan M. Katz:

And those were people fleeing Cuba?

Jocelyn McCalla:

Yes. Those were the people fleeing Cuba; about 125,000 of them. So, [crosstalk 00:14:51]-

Jonathan M. Katz:

As depicted in the movie, Scarface.

Jocelyn McCalla:

I don't know if I've ever seen that movie.

Jonathan M. Katz:

Oh, it's a great movie, you should see it.

Jocelyn McCalla:

So the Haitians are being treated differently from the Cubans, and the Cubans had the benefit of the Cuban Adjustment Act of 1966, which essentially treated them as refugee

Trump has described COVID-19 as a problem that “came out of nowhere.” “Nobody would have ever thought a thing like this could have happened,” he said on March 26, as he steered his country to the worst nightmare of the pandemic so far.

That’s a lie. In this audio edition of The Long Version, I talked with Dr. Jonna Mazet, the former global director of the U.S. government project to identify and prevent viruses from jumping into human populations. Trump shuttered that project in September 2019, three months before the virus was first detected in Wuhan, China—by scientists Mazet had been working with until the funding ran out.

You can keep independent journalism alive in this time of crisis by signing up for this newsletter/podcast at katz.substack.com or using the box below. You can also support it with a paid subscription, or check out my Patreon for more options.

Transcript (automatically generated, may contain errors)

Theme Music

Jonathan Myerson Katz:

Hello, and welcome to The Long Version. A newsletter by me, Jonathan Myerson Katz, which you can find online at Katz dot Substack dot com. That's K A T Z dot substack dot com. I hope everybody is doing well, away from other people to the greatest extent possible. These are frightening times. It is currently April 10th, 2020 and the coronavirus pandemic is raging in the United States of America. The new coronavirus is now the leading cause of death on a daily basis in the United States. The epidemic is worse here than anywhere else in the world. In just the city of New York alone, there have been more deaths than in any other country. And even if you don't buy those numbers, if you think that as is very possible, that China underreported the number of deaths in Wuhan city and Hubei Province you can't deny the fact that in New York there are unclaimed bodies being buried on Hart Island in the Bronx.

Jonathan Myerson Katz:

It's a nightmare. Donald Trump, the president of the United States in case you've somehow forgotten has said a number of times that this came out of nowhere, right? He said that on March 6th, a couple days later on March 19th, he said that this pandemic is something that just surprise the whole world, quote, "If people would've known about it, it could have stopped being in place. Nobody knew there would be a pandemic or an epidemic of this proportion." March 26, just a couple of days ago, he said nobody would have ever thought a thing like this could happen. He's obviously saying that to excuse his action, lack of action that has cost so many lives. But I think it's a statement that a lot of people can probably relate to, right? You know, for most of us, this does seem to have come out of nowhere. [That] it was hard to predict.

Jonathan Myerson Katz:

But he's wrong. There were people who were out there predicting this. There were a lot of people who had devoted their lives to trying to predict the next pandemic and more importantly, stop it or at least stop it from killing as many people as it otherwise could. And a lot of those people worked for the United States government. So I've written in the long version about the decision to shutter the National Security Council's pandemic response team for instance. You have also probably read about the fact that the Obama administration literally handed the Trump administration when it was coming into office in late 2016, early 2017 a playbook that had the word playbook stamped on the front about how to handle, you know, a potential viral pandemic. But the details are even worse than that. This one may blow your mind. It blew my mind. There was a program at USAID, the US Agency for International Development to identify potential viruses that could spread from animal populations into human populations with the explicit goal of preventing a global pandemic.

Jonathan Myerson Katz:

That project worked in about 30 countries around the world, including China and one of its partners where the virologists at the viral lab in Wuhan, the city where the COVID-19 pandemic would eventually start. That project was effectively shuttered by president Donald J Trump's administration in September, 2019. And of course the pandemic erupted in central China in Wuhan three months later. Now, a brief caveat, the PREDICT program was working with the scientists in Wuhan, but they were focusing in Yunan province in Southern China. It was somewhat limited because of a lack of funding under President Obama, but really under the Republican Congress that was in charge of funding it for the last several years. With more funding, it could have done even more than it already did. But of course it was completely unable to do anything once its fieldwork was shuttered in September, 2019.

Jonathan Myerson Katz:

So to get at the bottom of what happened, what might have been, what possibly still could be, I'm pleased and honored to have on the podcast today, dr Jonah Mozet for 10 years, dr Mazet was the global director of the predict project. And she is the executive director of the one health Institute of the university of California Davis. And if you stay tuned until the end of this podcast, I will have a comment from USA ID. Dr [inaudible], welcome to the long version. Thanks for having me. Thanks for being here. I wanted to, there's a lot I would like to talk to you about actually, but I want to start off by asking what was the predict project and what happened to it?

Dr. Jonna Mazet:

Well, the PREDICT project is a 10 year effort funded by us agency for international development where we built a consortium of people from the U S Canada and 35 low and middle income countries around the world to look for identify viruses just like this, SARS-CoV-2 in advance of their spilling over, understand the characteristics that might put us at risk, like what hosts and transmission interfaces. And at the same time we were sort of building what I like to think of as kind of a global immune system by training people in all of these countries to be ready anticipating this event and be able to jump into action.

Jonathan Myerson Katz:

You use the term spillover. What do you mean by that?

Dr. Jonna Mazet:

So spillover is, is what we think of when a a micro organism. We work mostly on viruses. Actually makes the jump from one host to another. And often in the host where it evolved, it won't have caused disease, but when it gets into a naive host, it may be able to cause disease. And so that's the spillover event is what we're after preventing. But even if we can't prevent all of those spillover events, we want systems to be ready and strong to be able to detect them early and control them at their source.

Jonathan Myerson Katz:

So basically in September 20, 19 fieldwork stopped like what, what, what, what exactly happened?

Dr. Jonna Mazet:

Correct. So we, we finish up with the field teams in the countries in September, 2019. So they were no longer you know, out in the field collecting samples from wild animals, people, domestic animals and they were no longer testing in the laboratory.

Jonathan Myerson Katz:

One of the countries that you were working in was China,

Dr. Jonna Mazet:

Correct. And we were working with the Wuhan Institute of Virology. They've been very instrumental in identifying this virus, the SARS-CoV-2. We had been working specifically on coronaviruses and worrying about coronaviruses all over the world. The PREDICT project discovered 160 new coronaviruses during its performance period. We were not working up in Hubei or near Wuhan. We were, we were kind of slated to work in Southeast Asia. So we were working in China, but on the just in Yunan province. So we didn't detect this particular one, but the project in China did detect more than 50 novel coronaviruses. And so, so they were ready at least to detect this one. I think what we've seen around the world is that the, the, the forward thinking side of looking for these viruses and being ready and being able to detect and diagnose them much quicker than, for example, what you saw with SARS, the original SARS proves that this can help. So it was days rather than weeks or months to get to the stage where we could actually do specific diagnostics. But we need to go so much farther because the rest of the systems as far as the healthcare systems policy, everything in most is not where it needed to be.

Jonathan Myerson Katz:

So the, okay, so, so fieldwork stops in September of 2019. At what, what, at what, what's the earliest date that we can say that the novel coronavirus that ended up becoming, you know, SARS-CoV-2 was detected?

Dr. Jonna Mazet:

So certainly right at the end of December, we know it was detected and the information was shared. The the virus itself was probably circulating quite some time for the course of the illness for those that, that were sick, that were identified as early cases for some time before that. But we don't have a definitive date.

Jonathan Myerson Katz:

So I mean, if you had been in place what might have gone differently, do you think it would've been possible that we would have, that you would have found the, the virus in October or November?

Dr. Jonna Mazet:

Well anythings possible, but we weren't working in that region of China.

Jonathan Myerson Katz:

Got it.

Dr. Jonna Mazet:

So unless we had expanded scope and had been working in that region of China, I'm not sure that the predict project itself would have helped with that. But what I'm super proud of is that the predict project, even though the teams weren't funded anymore, did help. Right. Then at the beginning of this whole then epidemic now pandemic did help in I think raising the flag in China, but then also in all of the countries surrounding China and in Africa. Frankly, the, our labs were the initial ones to be ruling out introduced cases before they're even first cases in places like Tanzania.

Jonathan Myerson Katz:

You guys were focused mostly in Yunan province, which borders Vietnam. Correct. and so why, why that province in particular?

Dr. Jonna Mazet:

Hm. So before at the beginning of the project, we used all the best scientific information we could find to target hotspots around the world where the most likely spillover events as we've talked about already could occur. Now they can occur anywhere, but we wanted to, you know, sort of target the resources to the highest likelihood locations. And we had to work with the portfolio of where USA ID wanted to and could make their investments. So when you overlay the scientific map with the geopolitical structure you come up with the portfolio, the best portfolio you can invest in as far as doing this work. And that took us to places with very specific characteristics where there's a lot of fever of unknown origin, where human populations are growing or changing the way they behave and interact with well the earth, but especially wildlife species. And then where there's high biodiversity. So there's a lot sources of viruses that we may not have seen in our evolutionary history.

Jonathan Myerson Katz:

The working theory, I mean, you obviously know much more about this so you can tell me about it. Is that the new coronavirus came from a bat, is that the idea?

Dr. Jonna Mazet:

Correct. Correct. So all of our work we, we certainly discovered coronaviruses in multiple species. And the reason coronavirus was we're sort of on our high risk list in our concerned list is that they seem to be able to be identified often in different species so that that gives us a hint that they're a jumper and this is known for other coronaviruses that were already known as well. So when we started the project, only a handful of coronaviruses primarily human pathogens and pet pathogens were known, but we dramatically expanded that and started to identify the ones that looked like they had multiple hosts that they could infect. So that's one of our high risk factors.

Jonathan Myerson Katz:

Do you wait for the virus to appear in a human or are you just picking, you're just picking up animals randomly and seeing if they're carrying viruses.

Dr. Jonna Mazet:

So just like I mentioned, what kind of, how you pick the countries where you're going to go. That's when we get into the countries. We work with, the ministry of health, ministry of agriculture, ministry of environment. Sometimes there's communication ministry and we get them all together and then we start working on the maps within the country to say where do those same factors I mentioned occur. And then we pick those sites where people are interacting in a either intimate or different way than they've interacted with in the past. So an example is certainly the wildlife farming all the way to wildlife, hunting to market, to restaurants some even live animal restaurants. So that was a certainly a very intimate, if you eat something that's about as much as you can get, right. So especially for the bat. Yeah, unfortunately. But but it's not just those, it's it's other interfaces that you might not think of. People farm, bat guano for example. So they're, they're attracting bats to their property in order to get their poop directly near their crops and put them straight onto the crops that go straight to market. So other things like going into caves that maybe humans have never been in to explore for minerals to make our phones better, faster, smaller. All of these things are high risk interfaces that we've been exploring and working with the communities.

Jonathan Myerson Katz:

In a lot of ways a US foreign policy was built on chasing guano around the world in the 19th century. So you're--you're in a long batshit tradition of U S government investment.

Dr. Jonna Mazet:

Yeah. [Laughs] Anytime to learn to do once it spills over. Now I think that's what we really need to strengthen. We need to keep going with this. We need to identify all the threats, but we also need to have a resilient systems that are ready for these detections hopefully before they sp

With Trump again threatening war with Iran, last week’s best-known scandal—the president doctoring a hurricane map with a marker—might already seem quaint. But #Sharpiegate was revealing. It showed the depths to which the federal bureaucracy, including Trump’s deeply corrupt Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross, were willing cover for the president’s insanity and crimes. And it showed the ways in which the noise from the White House can be used to cover up the damage it causes in the world.

Gabriel Synder, the Columbia Journalism Review’s resident New York Times public editor, joined me for a discussion about Sharpiegate, the Stupid Show, and how not to cover the presidency. We talked hurricanes, mushroom clouds, and Maggie Haberman.

You can keep independent journalism going by signing up for this newsletter/podcast at katz.substack.com or using the box below. Thanks for listening.

Transcript (automatically generated, may contain errors):

Audio clips:                  00:00               [Nicole Wallace, MSNBC: It appears the White House attempted to retroactively correct a tweet that the president issued over the weekend in which he warned ... Alabama would in fact be impacted. The graphic appears to have been altered with a Sharpie ... [CNN Host: ... a forecast map altered by a black marker to prove his point ...] [24horas.cl: ... un marcador por encima de la linea blanca ] [Stephen Colbert: He used a Sharpie to extend the path into Alabama [laughter]] [Clip: This is what's become Sharpiegate] [Liz Wheeler, OANN: ... so obsessed with Sharpiegate …] [Brian Williams, MSNBC: Does anybody remember Sharpiegate?]

Jonathan M Katz:          00:26               ... To the point that you know, I, and you are on this podcast where I have complete editorial control. We could talk about anything I want and we're talking about it!

Intro Music:                  00:41               [Music]

Jonathan M Katz:          00:44               It's getting stupid out there. Hi. Welcome back to The Long Version. This is the audio edition of the newsletter that you can find at katz.substack.com. That’s k-a-t-z dot s-u-b-s-t-a-c-k dot c-o-m. I am the eponymous Jonathan M Katz and it is currently September 16th, 2019. That's a Monday for those of you who've lost track. I know I have. It's very hard to keep track of what's going on in the world right now. Remember Sharpiegate? Feels like it happened about a billion years ago when the president of the United States used a marker to draw on a weather map so that he wouldn't have to admit that he was wrong? Anyway, that was about last week. So today, while the world is consumed with trying to figure out if he is going to declare war on Iran to defend Saudi Arabia's oil fields in a war in Yemen, that Trump refuses to get out of. I wanted to go back a little bit to a conversation that I had a couple of days ago with a special guest, Gabriel Snyder.

Jonathan M Katz:          01:53               Gabriel is a journalist. He was the editor in chief of the New Republic. We worked together way back in the neolithic era when I was covering the Paris climate talks back in 2015. Remember those? He is now at the Columbia journalism review where he occupies the very cool role of the public editor for the New York times. Not employed by the New York times, which I think is possibly the best way to do that. He is, is serving a role that used to be filled in the times newsroom of, of looking at the journalism there, responding to, to critiques and concerns that readers have. He does an excellent job. You should definitely check out his stuff. We had a conversation about a piece that I had written a couple of days before that called turn off the stupid show in which I was talking actually primarily in that piece about what was going on in the United Kingdom with Boris Johnson, the "Tesco Value Trump" prime minister they have over there.

Jonathan M Katz:          02:50               That was my attempt at British humor in the piece. Something spoke to him in the piece and I think we sort of both agreed that there's a bunch of real stuff that is going in the world. A lot of it, the fault of the president of the United States, but it is very hard to pay close attention to what is going on precisely because there's just so much noise coming out of the white house and it can be very hard to figure out what is important and what isn't. And so we sort of had a conversation about that and I think that it I think it was really interesting. I think it was really enlightening and even though it was about the president drawing on a map with a marker like a child we both saw the ways in which that spoke to, to a much bigger, a much more serious issues.

Jonathan M Katz:          03:36               And I think now that once again, as they have so many times in his presidency, war clouds are gathering. It's important to understand the way that the reality show that this reality show president is overseeing serves to confuse people and make it very difficult for us to make a important decisions as a country and to observe the, the, the crimes and the dangers that are coming out of Washington. Anyway, I think it's a really interesting conversation. You're going to totally dig it. Here is my conversation with Gabriel Snyder. Gabriel, welcome to The Long Version.

Gabriel Snyder:            04:09               Thanks for having me.

Jonathan M Katz:          04:12               Thank you for being here. I know you've been talking about how for the last couple of days, all of your feeds and this was true for me as well were filled with a Sharpiegate. You said while you were appalled by Trump's disregard for truth or reality, you have no desire to engage in the infinite loop of debunking and fulminating what's the point? So yeah, tell, tell me a little bit what you were thinking there and and we'll go from there.

Gabriel Snyder:            04:38               In the past, you know, I guess it's going on three years now. I've watched my media consumption change just profoundly, I think after the election where, you know, everything kind of kind of changed over the, the, the next thing that I was noting was just this monoculture. Like there was an incapacity for at least the circle of people that are in my Twitter universe to think about more than one story at a time. And since 2016, that story has pretty much been all Trump all the time. But it's also just kind of made me think about sort of, you know, how the attention economy works with a, when you have a president who is a product of, you know, media culture, what point does continuing to watch actually make him stronger and give him more sway over the culture?

Jonathan M Katz:          05:35               Yeah. But to a certain extent, it's kind of, I don't know, maybe I'm making sort of a, maybe both of us are kind of making kind of a, a facile complaint, right? It's, people always complain about this in journalism. Journalism is always about why are you painting? Why are you paying attention to this instead of that? So I mean, do you think that this is different from that or are we just like sort of being like,

Gabriel Snyder:            05:55               Well, I hope I'm being different than that. I mean, I, I, I have to say, I, I've always been very resistant to the, you know, the complaint of why is the media covering X when, you know, why is so much more important? You know, I've, I've recently been doing this Columbia journalism project. I'm acting as the public editor for the New York times. And so people send me these complaints, a lot of these complaints that come in through Twitter and they're like, Oh my gosh, how dare, you know, the New York times tweet out a joke about something in the style section when X, Y,Z is terrible. That's happening in the world. And,uand it's, it's always kind of, I've always been resistant to that as an editor because, you know,unewspapers are big, staffs are big. They, they do lots of things.

Gabriel Snyder:            06:39               You know, it doesn't mean, you know, the existence of a sports department doesn't mean that the foreign desk is any less important. But I think the, the reason why all of this came up with Sharpiegate, which, which actually, you know, twist, I, I've, I've kinda changed my opinion on a little bit since I sent off that email to you, but is that there, there has been just this glee of, you know, this meme of vacation of Sharpiegate that that happened that really didn't seem rooted in doing anything. It seemed, it seemed rooted in entertaining people and there is sort of a, you know, a very natural, you know, yearning to, you know, have laughed instead of have a cry during the, during the Trump years for people who are terrified of them. The, you know, what the other, the other massive change that I've had in my media consumption is I can't watch any of the political satire shows.

Gabriel Snyder:            07:36               I mean, and I say that as someone who thought Jon Stewart was the smartest best thing on TV was I modeled myself, I modeled, modeled by the publications I edited after John Stewart and I just have had to completely turn it off. You know, cause I, I, there's this, there's nothing funny about the news right now. Is I guess I guess is, is, is my feeling. And, and so, you know, while I, I, I think, you know, John Oliver does great and Sam B is fantastic and Trevor Noah and all the rest, I, I just don't feel like they have, I, there was just a profound shift in what they had to offer, offer me an [inaudible]. And I've been getting that a lot of thought, you know, what is that? I think, I think the big change, and I think it's related to everything, you know, Brexit and the world falling apart is social media.

Jonathan M Katz:          08:27               Yeah, exactly. And there's also nothing to puncture. Like, you know, during the Bush administration part of the joke, or really the joke was that, you know, George W. Bush still sort of carried himself with a certain dignity in office people. People at least, you know, ascribed to him a certain dignity of office. You know, there was the idea, you know, the Iraq war was sold as something that was in the country's best interest. It, you know, it was, it was built on lies. It was all about revenge. But the way that, the way that it was sold to the public was there's a clear and present danger facing the United States. In a situation like that, you can have somebody like John Stewart who can be like, you know, Mesopotamia and, and everyone's like, Oh ha ha ha, like, and of course, you know, and the emperor has no clothes because like George W. Bush is an idiot.

Jonathan M Katz:          09:22               And like, he, he can't talk. And he like, he clearly can't think very well and [inaudible] why does it, nobody noticed this? Whereas with Donald Trump, everybody knows it and it's, you can't, you can't out clown a clown. And I, you know, I, I think the, I mean let's, I, I started to kind of do want to drill into Sharpiegate a little bit because it is a really interesting moment cause of course what it is like fundamentally what it's, what it's a story about is that the president of the United States fabricated in a childish clownish way, a government document broadcast it to the world for no reason other than to avoid admitting that he had made a mistake. And it was, you know, during, it was in the middle of an actual national crisis. And instead of dealing with those things the president of the United States was forging documents in like in, in the stupidest way anybody possibly could. And so it's like at one level that is really dumb. And like almost, it doesn't deserve the time of day. On the other hand, it was a federal crime. And and I actually kind of important, what do you make of it now? You said you had changed your mind about is the problem that the mono culture that we were just, we were all paying attention to this one thing? Or should we have not have been talking about that at all?

Gabriel Snyder:            10:52               Well, what I think changed was the story that was reported out on Friday and I believe it was in New York times, although it was Washington post. I apologize that reported on what the Wilbur Ross did to get the statement out of NOAA. Yes. The secretary of commerce and you know, calling up the acting head, the appointee, it wasn't just a civil servant, but calling up the Trump appointee to say, you know, you've got to put out a statement saying that your, your, your staff is wrong and the president's right. Yeah. It turned a story about, you know, what did, what's the latest dumb thing that Trump did into here is how power works in our country today. And, and I think that that story is so important because in all of the, sort of my thinking about like what has changed, why has everything in the media changed?

Gabriel Snyder:            11:51               Why is w what is, why does that, why does the world seem like it's going to help? The one idea I keep coming back to is that the stories we tell ourselves about how power works, every culture has them, right? And they have stopped making sense in our culture right now. And, and so we are, we're, we're in this point of, of kind of relearning how power works and, and what, what I mean by that is like, you know, think about all of the run up to the Mueller report, right? I mean, all of that was largely kind of defined by Washington insider, conventional wisdom of how power is exercised in D C when it comes to, you know, crimes that the president has committed. You almost kind of think of it as more of like a chain of dominoes that, well, if this thing happens and it's gonna cause all these other dominoes that eventually could lead to impeachment. Right, right. And, and, and, and it's, you know, so clear that that set of dominoes just doesn't, it doesn't look the same anymore. And, and I think, I think this, this, you know, the, the, the, the satire, you know element, which, you know, where w which is where S Gates started was kind of this, it was kind of rooted in this old, this, this outmoded notion of, of, of chain of chain events, right. And, and, and so

Jonathan M Katz:          13:07               And one of the other things that happened was that the president was caught in an obvious lie and then he got people to cover

Happy Friday. Hope everyone had a good — and dry — Independence Day. This week I was on the U.S.-Mexico border, getting as close as I could to America’s concentration camps.

I was following a congressional delegation led by Rep. Joaquin Castro of Texas. It featured most prominently Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the freshman Democrat from New York who has done as much as anyone in the country to bring attention back to this issue.

After the tour, I sat down for a one-on-one interview with Ocasio-Cortez — much of which I published as a transcript in Mother Jones.

I had other thoughts and reporting to share as well. I’ve done that here in the first-ever Long Version podcast edition, which you can listen to using the player above. It includes exclusive audio from that interview and the scene along the border.

Please enjoy and share.

And, if you haven’t yet, sign up for The Long Version! You’ll get the backstory others missed, the details they didn’t bother to look for, and analysis you won’t get anywhere else:

Transcript (automatically generated, may contain errors)

Jonathan Myerson Katz:

Hi, this is Jonathan Katz and you're listening to a special audio edition--in fact, the first ever audio edition--of The Long Version. That's my new newsletter. I'm just back from El Paso and the US-Mexico border where I was following around a congressional delegation that was visiting Donald Trump's concentration camps. And I thought that this would be a good medium to share some of my thoughts. Some of the things that I saw when I was down there.

Jonathan Myerson Katz:

I want to start off, first of all by thanking everybody who's already subscribing to The Long Version. Hello. If you have not yet I invite you to check it out. You can find it by Googling my name and the long version. Or you can go directly to katz.substack.com to sign up. That's K A T Z dot SUBSTACK dot com. And you can read some back issues there and see if you like it and sign up to get it in your inbox every week.

Jonathan Myerson Katz:

So on Saturday, I was on my way back from Puerto Rico and I got where I was working on a different story and I got a phone call that a congressional delegation was about to head down to El Paso to visit some of the concentration camps. And this delegation was going to include Alexandria Ocasio Cortez.

Jonathan Myerson Katz:

Congresswoman Ocasio Cortez is of course a freshman, 29 years old representing the Bronx and Queens, who in her, it's almost been exactly a year since she won an upset victory in the democratic primary against a long time, but little known nationally Democrat. And in the time since she's been in office, she has established herself as a significant voice and she used that voice a couple of weeks ago to make a very powerful statement.

Jonathan Myerson Katz:

She said that the migrant detention centers as some people call them that were set up all along the Southern border -- but of course there are others throughout the country -- are concentration camps. Now this was a call that resonated particularly with me. Those of you who have been reading this newsletter for a little while it has been going on know that I wrote a piece in late May called "Concentrate on the Camps" where I made that same argument. I made that into a op-ed that ran in the Los Angeles Times. And sometime later the representative responded to that call and made that statement and I think we were thinking about the same thing, which was that calling them by their name using a powerful term that would resonate with people, would call attention to a crisis that to a large extent had been forgotten.

Jonathan Myerson Katz:

There had been a brief flurry of attention during the so-called zero tolerance or family separation in 2018, but ever since that had been quote unquote resolved essentially by president Trump deciding to throw whole families into his camps together. It hadn't been talked about a whole lot and I thought that was wrong. I think that this is one of the signature policies of an administration that has shown clear, authoritarian and white nationalist tendencies. And I think that the Congresswoman saw the same. So I thought this would be a good opportunity to see things through the eyes of an emerging and very important public figure and get some access that I might not be able to get myself as, as a journalist.

Jonathan Myerson Katz:

Now. I was not allowed inside any of the camps or any of the places that we visited. No reporters were--only the members of Congress were--but by virtue of the fact that I was sort of following them around with a small pack of, of other reporters and of course some staff, I think I was able to get more of a look than I normally would be able to. I mean, even just being able to stand up against one of these fences and look through and you know, record little videos and, and a little bit of audio, some of which I'll play for you on my phone. That's something that I probably wouldn't have been able to do if I had just gone on my own. And of course I was able to talk to the members when they came out. Especially Congresswoman Ocasio Cortez who sat down with me for an interview. And I'll be playing a couple snips of that later.

Jonathan Myerson Katz:

But let me just give you a brief overview of some of the places that we saw and I'll, I'll set the scene a little bit. For those of you who've never been there before. El Paso is a really fascinating town. It's very far from other cities. I was told that if you drive east it's hours before he gets in the next major city, which is probably San Antonio. And it is really a binational city. Really it's, it's still in a lot of ways El Paso del Norte, which is what the area was originally known as. Half of it is El Paso, Texas, and the other half is Ciudad Juarez, Mexico. And you really feel that in a lot of ways. I mean the, the people, you know, families have relatives on both sides of the border.

Jonathan Myerson Katz:

People are crossing back and forth every day. And by virtue of that fact, it's a very interesting place to have these camps which are primarily being used to hold people from Latin America. Now, not so much Mexico because immigration from Mexico is way down and has been way down from, from the much higher numbers that we saw, you know 10, 15 years ago. A lot of the people who are moving through right now are coming from farther South and central America from what's known as the, the Northern triangle. That's Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador and a couple of other places. You also have significant populations of other people in computing interests, including interestingly enough, Cubans who are flying from Cuba often to Ecuador or to Nicaragua or countries that have good relations with Cuba and making a long and very dangerous Trek North to try to get through the border.

Jonathan Myerson Katz:

And those people are being held in these places and they are places that are meant not to be seen. I think that's one of the major things that really stuck out to me from what I saw there. There, there are places that are meant to blend in with their surroundings and be ignored. So the first one that we went to was called Casa Franklin and it's a building, nondescript office building, kind of a sandy beige color brick, no signs on the outside except for some very small ones that basically tell you the troublemakers are going to be prosecuted. But you could walk right by it, which is what I did. I, it was actually very close to the hotel that, that I was staying in, which was also where some of the members were staying. And I use my Google maps to head over there and I, I walked right past it because I just didn't see that it was there.

Jonathan Myerson Katz:

But if you look really closely, if you stop on the street and notice you can see that there's something strange going on. All of the blinds are really tightly drawn. No daylight is getting in or out. And of course, that means that you can't see anybody who's inside. And the people who are inside are children. Several dozen children. Again I think the majority of them from central America who have been put in there and a lot of them have actually been taken away from their families. Not parents because of the result of, of, of the outrage over the family separation policy back in 2018. But if they travel across the border with an uncle, an aunt, a grandparent, a cousin, even if they have parents who are already in the United States is my understanding. They're taken away from them and some are being put into, into this particular place. And the delegation got there. And they visited there first and Rep. Ocasio-Cortez actually came out and told us in Spanish a little of what she had seen inside

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez:

Aquí por un tour algunos días, pero hay tambien niños aqui que esta, you know, llegando a, como, algunos meses aqui en estas facilidades. Y tambien yo tengo preocupaciones por los niños que solo pueden hablar quiché, o mam, o otros dialectos -- idiomas,idiomas indigenas

Jonathan Myerson Katz:

And what she's saying there is that, first of all, some of the kids who were supposed to be kept there for only a matter of days had been kept there for months on my heard from one member as many as eight months. And also that she's concerned because some of those kids not only don't speak English but don't speak Spanish, they speak indigenous languages such as Mam, Ki'che, and so they're having trouble communicating with anybody from the outside. I also was told by another member of Congress who went in that one of her concerns was that there's a telephone that the children can use to call in and make a report of abuse if there are any abuses going on. But then that phone is being put in a very public area. So like you would have to be making these declarations basically in front of all of the other inmates, the other child, inmates who are being held in this place.

Jonathan Myerson Katz:

Not to mention the guards. So that, that would suggest that if there's malfeasance going on, we may not know very much about what's going on inside. The next place we went was a border patrol station one El Paso. And if you've been following any of the coverage of this trip, including what I wrote in mother Jones this is where a lot of the news that you've been seeing came out of. I'll give you a little bit of background about what was happening right at the moment that we went in that morning. ProPublica had published a story about a Facebook group of border control agents who were posting racist and sexist and just awful, awful memes and jokes. Both about the migrants and sort of retaliation against the members of Congress who were about to come inspect them. Particularly AOC.

Jonathan Myerson Katz:

And this story had come out, you know, just then, and when the members went inside they were already, you know, kind of nervous about what they were going to encounter. Because this Facebook group, I mean, let's, let's be clear here. It contained about 9,500 members. That's almost half of the entire border patrol. I think that's, that's like the, almost the majority of the people who actually worked for this entire agency. And I mean, one of these, one of these photo illustrations that somebody had made showed Representative Ocasio-Cortez literally being raped by Donald Trump. And that's the level of, of what we're talking about here. And so the, the members were understandably concerned. There are also some sort of weird ground rules that were being laid out that the members couldn't take phones inside. They couldn't record what was going on.

Jonathan Myerson Katz:

And I just, I, I really want to underline this, like over and over and over again. Remember, press isn't allowed inside. You know, anybody who's basically below the level of a member of Congress isn't allowed inside. And even the members of Congress, I mean, these are elected officials. Some of your elected officials are being told that they can't record, they can't take any video. They can't take any audio of, of what they're seeing. Border patrol does not want you to know what is happening inside of these places. The Trump administration does not want you to know what is happening inside these places. They want to be able to get away with whatever they want to do. They want to have no oversight whatsoever. And this was understandably concerning. It was understandably concerning to a group of law makers one of whom in particular had been targeted by, by some, some pretty violent and, and sinister stuff online. But, you know, they were willing to go with this because these were the ground rules. I mean, it's, they didn't have a whole lot of choice in the matter. So during the visit well I'll, I'll let, I'll let you hear from Representative Ocasio-Cortez herself. This is from the one on one interview that she and I did just after.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez:

I'm listening to CBP kind of give this tour. And then I see, and I think someone else has seen it first. It was either like Madeline Dean or Rashida to leave or somebody saw the screen with the surveillance that had like all of the video feeds of all of the cells. And so I started walking up to the screen with the surveil--with all of the surveillance feeds and I started, since they made us check our phones at the door. I did have like some paper and some pen and I started jotting things down. I was writing down everything that I had seen around me and so I was counting, I kind of have my pen up and I was counting like all of the little, in one of the, one of the feeds of the cell, there was one cell that just had very large amount of people, like large -- there were so many people crowded in the cell that people could not sleep in there.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez:

So there were some people like sitting, some people crouched and I went in and I started counting all of the people that were in the cell and then I looked down and I kid you not, there was literally a CBP officer with their phone and they started trying to do this to take a selfie of themselves with me in the background.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez:

Right?! It wasn't even in the distance. She was like two feet in front of me and there was this glass perimeter in front of them and she was literally like, and that's when all hell broke loose.</