What’s the Matter with Georgia?

The latest on the voter registration goat rodeo in Georgia; inside Ben Carson’s plot to stop HUD from fighting housing segregation; the toll toxic media coverage on Kavanaugh is taking on survivors one year after the launch of #MeToo, plus the news of the week ICYMI.

This week on Off-Kilter, “How Dismantling the Voting Rights Act Helped Georgia Discriminate Again.” Rebecca talks with CityLab’s Brentin Mock about Secretary of State (and Republican gubernatorial candidate) Brian Kemp’s long history of trying to purge voters of color from the rolls under the guise of an “exact match” system — and how he was thwarted until now by a key section of the Voting Rights Act that has since been removed, leaving voters of color unprotected.

Next, Ben Carson, Trump’s Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, strikes again. His latest brainchild? He wants HUD to stop fighting housing segregation. Rebecca talks with Rejane Frederick and Heidi Schultheis, two of CAP’s low-income housing experts, about Carson’s scheme to roll back an Obama-era fair housing policy known as “Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing.”

[Trigger warning: sexual violence.] And finally, as we mark one year since the launch of the #MeToo movement, Rebecca talks with Madeline Peltz, a Media Matters for America researcher who’s been monitoring right-wing media coverage of #MeToo and Kavanaugh, to discuss the toll it’s taking on survivors — including herself. She joins Off-Kilter to share her own story for the first time. (Note to listeners: Madeline is also the person to thank for Off-Kilter’s transcripts each week, so we’re especially excited for her on-air debut!)

But first: GOP tax cuts are responsible for more than 100% of the deficit, Mitch McConnell tells us (again) how he wants to pay for it (spoiler: it’s still by slashing Medicare, Social Security, and Medicaid), Trump’s new pick to head up Medicaid is the fox guarding the henhouse, a new report finds poor folks are taxed at higher rates than the richest 1% in 45 states, and more as Jeremy Slevin returns with the news of the week ICYMI.

This week’s guests:

• Brentin Mock, staff writer at CityLab.com
• Rejane Frederick, associate director, Poverty to Prosperity, Center for American Progress
• Heidi Schultheis, policy analyst, Poverty to Prosperity, Center for American Progress
• Madeline Peltz, researcher, Media Matters for America

For more on this week’s topics:

• Get caught on up the Georgia voting crisis by reading Brentin Mock’s article “How Dismantling the Voting Rights Act Helped Georgia Discriminate Again” and this great explainer from the Brennan Center — and here are some helpful tips if you get turned away at the polls
• Learn more about Ben Carson’s effort to stop HUD from fighting housing segregation in Rejane and Heidi’s explainer for TalkPoverty
• Read more from Madeline Peltz on the toll toxic media coverage is having on survivors: “Right Wing Media’s Message to Survivors: It’s Better If You Keep Quiet”

For more on this week’s ICYMI topics:

• Dig into the full Senate Budget report, “If Not For Republican Policies, the Federal Government Would Be Running a Surplus” — and bear witness to more of Mitch McConnell’s latest rendition of the deficit 2-step in this article by The Nation’s John Nichols
• Nerd out with ITEP’s “Who Pays” report finding that in 45 states, poor folks are taxed at higher rates than the richest 1%
• Learn more about Mary Mayhew, the longtime Medicaid foe Trump just picked to oversee the program, in this piece by Katelyn Burns for Rewire and this Vox article by Sarah Kliff
• Read the GAO Medicaid report finding that people in non-expansion states are twice as likely to forego needed medical care as folks in expansion states — and track the mounting toll of Arkansans losing health insurance under the state’s new Medicaid work reporting requirements
• And here’s your good news for a change: the Florida Supreme Court just stopped Rick Scott from packing the court after his term ends

This week’s transcript:

REBECCA VALLAS (HOST): Welcome to Off Kilter, the show about poverty, inequality and everything they intersect with, powered by the Center for American Progress Action Fund. I’m Rebecca Vallas. This week on Off Kilter, “How Dismantling the Voting Rights Act Helped Georgia Discriminate Again.” I talk with CityLab’s Brentin Mock about how Republican gubernatorial candidadte Brian Kemp’s long history of trying to purse voters of color from the Georgia rolls and how he was thwarted until now by a key section of the Voting Rights Act that has since been removed, leaving voters of color unprotected in Georgia and many other states. Next, Ben Carson, Trump’s Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, strikes again. His latest brainchild? He wants HUD to stop fighting housing segregation. Womp, womp. I talk with Rejane Frederick and Heidi Schultheis, two of CAP’s low-income housing experts, about Carson’s scheme to roll back an Obama-era fair housing policy known as “Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing.” And finally as we mark one year since the launch of the #MeToo movement, I talk with Madeline Peltz, a researcher at Media Matters for America who’s been monitoring right-wing media coverage of #MeToo and the Kavanaugh confirmation process. We talk about the toll it’s been taking on survivors including herself. She joins Off Kilter to share her own story for the first time.

But first, it’s Jeremy Slevin, Slevs,how ya doing?

JEREMY SLEVIN: Doing grand.

VALLAS: I have to say you kind of made my day today when you told me that you liked my sweater.

SLEVIN: Did I say that? I think I said oh, it’s the missing cast member of the Muppetts.

[LAUGHTER]

VALLAS: Yeah, you actually did say that too, I chose not to hear that part, I chose to hear that part where you said that you liked —

SLEVIN: Before that I said I liked it.

VALLAS: — my sweater.

SLEVIN: That was a tee-up to make my line about it.

VALLAS: Well basically this is me getting dressed in the morning trying to even compete with you considering your sweater game, which we call it on this show all the time.

SLEVIN: Thank you, thank you.

VALLAS: I feel like we should take a picture of my sweater this week just to even the scales a little bit.

SLEVIN: I’m happy to, I’ll do it now.

VALLAS: Yeah, OK good. So the shoe being on the other foot, please feel free to document this sweater and while you’re doing that. I’m going to make you start talking about some of the news of the week, we’re going to test your multitasking skills.

SLEVIN: Photo has been taken.

VALLAS: Posing! So a lot going on this week that doesn’t have to do with sweaters.

SLEVIN: Yes.

VALLAS: And some of it has to do with taxes.

SLEVIN: Yes, well everyone’s favorite topic, taxes, an activity.

VALLAS: Well yeah, how could it not be? It’s also the permanent topic we have to talk about as long as Republicans are in control, that’s what I feel like we learned.

SLEVIN: Well it’s the only thing they’ve actually been able to accomplish legislatively, so, I mean other than trying to take away healthcare.

VALLAS: That’s exactly right and a new report came out this week from the budget committee that told us a lot about taxes and in particular the Republican jammed through tax scam is doing to our economy. The title of the report which actually gives a lot of it away is “If not for Republican policies, the federal government would be running a surplus.” Jeremy, what did we learn from this report?

SLEVIN: Well, we learned exactly that. But the key is the —

VALLAS: Are you saying I stole your thunder? Is that what you’re saying?

SLEVIN: You stole all of my thunder. No so two tax cuts, meaning the Bush tax cuts and then the Trump tax cuts, together account for more than 100% of the deficit meaning as you said we would be running a $156 billion surplus as opposed to an almost $800 billion deficit if not for those tax cuts. Now obviously there are a lot of other policies that go into it but the conservative claim that x is fueling the deficit, often Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid is put to shame by the fact that these tax cuts in addition to unfunded wars, defense budgets that have been increasing since the Clinton era, account for a large proportion of the federal deficit.

VALLAS: And in fact more than all of it.

SLEVIN: Right, more than all of it, yes, we would have a surplus without it.

VALLAS: That’s literally what we would have. And so particularly timely that this report came out because right after and as folks were starting to cover it, Mitch McConnell actually ending up in the spotlight talking about the programs that are not driving the deficit as you just said, Medicare Medicaid and Social Security and we actually have a clip of some of what he said so let’s take a listen to that.

[START CLIP]

INTERVIEWER: What’s going on with the debt?

SENATE MAJORITY LEADER MITCH MCCONNELL: It’s very disturbing and it’s ruined by the three big entitlement programs that are very popular, Medicare, Social Security, and Medicaid. And at some point here we’ll get serious about this, we haven’t been yet.

[END CLIP]

VALLAS: So we’ve talked a lot before Jeremy, I’m just taking this in, so are you. We’ve talked a lot before about that two step game that we know Republicans have long been playing, jack up the deficit by giving tax cuts to the wealthy and corporations and then turn around and say oh my God, we just can’t afford Social Security and Medicare and Medicaid! Here he is living that with neon lights around it.

SLEVIN: The most amazing thing about this, and this has been the problem for years is that the reporter’s natural response to that answer isn’t what about your giant multi-trillion dollar tax cuts? Nowhere is anyone saying well obviously the deficit is being caused by these tax cuts. You didn’t need this report to know that it was everywhere that the bill cost $1.5 trillion and the other thing that McConnell says is that it’s a quote, “bipartisan problem.” Where there’s some truth to that in the past. Let’s be clear; their health care law would have slashed Medicaid by almost $800 billion. And their budgets continue to propose it. So it’s not like the only way we’re going to fix this is a bipartisan grand bargain. They are actively trying to cut these programs everyday.

VALLAS: And look for excuses to do it. Now what’s notable is that hearing that Mitch McConnell clip it is so completely the opposite of what we’re hearing from Republicans who are at home, in their districts, running for their lives, less than a month out from election day because they’re worried they’re going to get pink slips handed to them for their massively unpopular agenda that included trying to take health care away from tens of millions of Americans. Now they’re all lying to their constituents saying no, no, we’ve been protectors of pre-existing conditions and more.

SLEVIN: Right Ted Cruz just Tuesday at a Senate debate said that Beto O’Rouke is trying to cut Medicare. Ted Cruz, the architect of holding the government hostage unless they repealed Obamacare which would have slashed Medicaid and a long time advocate for slashing social Security and Medicare is now trying to run as the champion of these programs and he’s now running ads in multiple districts saying Democrats’ plans to expand Medicare, Medicare For All namely would amount to losing your Medicare and would amount to a cut. The length they will go to do one thing and talk out of the other side of their mouth is absurd.

VALLAS: And so it’s hard to imagine mouths that are big enough to have two sides that could be farther apart than these are.

SLEVIN: Yes, unless you’re Mitch McConnell.

VALLAS: Or maybe the Muppet that you called me earlier but that’s cool, didn’t leave a scar or anything.

SLEVIN: I wasn’t going to insult, imply that you had a big mouth. I was just talking about your sweater.

VALLAS: I’m moving on for the sake of your job and your status on this show. [LAUGHTER] So another report that came out this week also shown some light on the false equivalency that often gets given to both sides in the tax conversation. It’s not that long in our rear view mirror that Mitt Romney popularized the makers and takers 47% frame but a new report from ITEP out this week tells us who the real makers and takers are because they don’t just look at federal income tax which is hwat folks like Mitt Romney and others want to look at when they say oh my God there’s these people who aren’t paying any federal income tax, they look at other forms of taxation like state and local taxes. And what do they tell us?

SLEVIN: Yeah so actually low-income people, this is a really extensive study and I t hink they’ve been doing this for years but it’s always fascinating, low-income residents actually taxed at a higher rate in 45 states, so 45 out of 50 states than the top 1% and that’s the poorest 20%. So the poorest 20% on average actually pay 50% higher tax rate in state and local taxes than the richest 1%. So this outweighs almost all progressivity in the tax code at the federal level because we’re talking about sales taxes and consumption taxes at the local level. Low income people end up paying more because they’re spending more as a percentage of their income, they don’t have all this capital investment.

VALLAS: But nothing that you’ll hear from Republicans that are so focused on federal income taxes because that paints a slightly different picture.

SLEVIN: Right and that actually goes back to a earlier point is they refuse to acknowledge any responsibility to get in more revenue by raising, asking people who have a little bit more money to contribute more and instead have to blame programs that help low-income and middle class people.

VALLAS: Now meanwhile moving on from taxes because we could talk about taxes until we turn blue in the face and you actually are looking a little blue, Jeremy.

SLEVIN: it only takes me five minutes to turn blue in the face.

VALLAS: Now that I’m looking more closely —

SLEVIN: I think it’s the background.

VALLAS: I’m a little worried, oh no, we’re at the Center for American Progress it must just be all the blue around us. But a new study out on Medicaid, so continuing this conversation about tax cuts and the programs that Republicans are questing to try to cut and looking for excuses to cut. New study out on Medicaid from the GAO tells us a lot about what’s going on in expansion states versus non-expansion states.

SLEVIN: Yeah, so people in non-expansion states are more than twice as likely to forgo needed medical care because of cost. So what that says is that, the first takeaway is Medicaid expansion works, which will not be a shocker to many of our listeners. But it put real numbers —

VALLAS: So Medicaid expansion, good, right, check, what else did we learn?

SLEVIN: It put real numbers, so it’s about 19.5, almost 20% of people forgo medical care in states that haven’t expanded Medicaid versus about 9% in other states. And this of course, Utah, Nebraska and Idaho are all voting in November as to whether they’re going to expand Medicaid so it’s, it was actually by the Government Accountability Office ahead of these elections.

VALLAS: So breaking news, when people don’t have health insurance they forgo needed medical care, something that makes a lot of sense to a lot of folks listening I’m sure but every time there’s new evidence to help tell that story really important to get that out there so people see those connections. Now also on the Medicaid front, people who listen to this show are well aware that the most immediate threat to Medicaid itself is the administration’s backdoor attack on Medicaid in the form a policy Trump rolled out about a year ago at this point telling states that they now have permission to take away health insurance from people who can’t find work or get enough hours at their job. Of course Trump calls it work requirements, we know it’s really just cuts by another name and we’ve new numbers out of Arkansas, the first state to actually adopt this policy telling us what’s happening when you require people to report their work.

SLEVIN: So Arkansas basically has a ticker going, how many people are losing Medicaid each month because they can’t meet these draconian so-called work requirements but essentially these bureaucratic hoops these people have to go through to prove that they can get healthcare to survive. So it’s now up to 8,000. So it was 4,000 the first month, now it’s another 4,000 and then these people are locked out until the first of the year and we’re expecting to get new numbers again at the end of the month. It’s expected to again be 4,000. So the staggering gall to continue with a policy that they know has the effect of taking away healthcare from 4,000 people every single month, so another 4,000 people from Medicaid.

VALLAS: And of course, right, we say this all the time but remiss if we don’t say it, this is a feature not a bug of these proposals. They are very much designed to strip health insurance from people who get stuck in those hoops that they can’t jump through and that is exactly why this policy is the top priority of the Trump administration when it comes to Medicaid. It’s also why we’re seeing Trump put in his administration now a new head of Medicaid, Mary Mayhew, who we should also talk about here who is a long —

SLEVIN: Yes, Mary Mayhew. [LAUGHTER] I’ve been waiting for you Mary!

VALLAS: You’re doing the Mr. Burns thing, right, where you’re drumming your face so people can actually get the visual of that. Mary Mayhew who is now Trump’s pick, we learned this week to oversee the Medicaid program. She is no stranger to Medicaid, she’s actually one of the program’s most ardent foes going back to her time in the LePage administration in Maine where she was front and center in LePage’s, he’s a Republican governor who hopefully is, or I should say is on his way out and not a moment too soon. But she was front and center in that administration’s attacks on Medicaid including their refusal to actually move forward with Medicaid expansion, which for anyone who has not see that this is still what’s going on in Maine, LePage still refuses to expand Medicaid despite a ballot measure that passed overwhelmingly. This person, Mary Mayhew, who absolutely has spent her career trying to destroy Medicaid, now the person Trump has decided should be the fox guarding the hen house.

SLEVIN: Can I just harp on Mary Mayhew because she’s awful. So under her tenure, she not only opposed a publicly passed ballot initiative which we all know is not something this show takes kindly to. She completely reorganized the department to deliberately make it difficult for people with disabilities and low-income people to get health care through Medicaid. So during her time in office, by the way she’s a former hospital industry lobbyist turned regulator, so during her time in office Maine’s infant mortality grew substantially. Its’ national healthcare ranking plummeted from 8th in the country to 23rd. They blocked thousands of vulnerable people from receiving Medicaid and they slashed the number of low-income Mainers who were able to qualify for Medicaid by over 10,000.

VALLAS: And Mary Mayhew, not content to oppose Medicaid expansion and just people having health coverage in Maine. She actually went so far as to testify in front of multiple other state legislatures including Florida and Utah urging them not to expand their Medicaid programs and as I mentioned she is an ardent proponent of the Trump administration’s current attack on Medicaid through these work reporting requirements. So I don’t think it’s overstating it to say that Trump went looking and maybe did a national search from the person who hates Medicaid the most.

SLEVIN: Or his people did, Alex Azar or Seema Verma.

VALLAS: And if that’s what they were going for they hit it out of the park she is winner, winner chicken dinner on that front. So Jeremy tell me you came with some good news, I think you came with some good news to round us out.

SLEVIN: Actually I googled it before the show. So here’s the good news.

VALLAS: “Good news this week”?

SLEVIN: Good news in the sense that we prevented a sliding into autocracy. So Rick Scott the governor of Florida and villian in the seven Harry Potter books had a proposal, sorry, not a proposal, he said —

VALLAS: I’m sorry I just need to stay with that for a second, because the internet loves to make fun of Rick Scott and in particular to compare him to Voldemort.

WILL URQUHART (PRODUCER): Yeah, I’ll cut in here to –

VALLAS: Please Will, please.

[LAUGHTER]

URQUHART: I used to track Rick Scott so I have a history with him and my favorite one was just a meme, a picture of him that says, “Rick Scott is so evil trying to kill Harry Potter isn’t the worst thing he’s done.”

[LAUGHTER]

VALLAS: That priceless! I actually hadn’t seen that one before. Ok so now that we know what we’re talking about.

SLEVIN: So yeah, so he actually has been seeking the elder wand for decades now it turns out.

[LAUGHTER]

VALLAS: Oh you’re not done.

SLEVIN: Oh, wrong news clip. [LAUGHTER] So Rick Scott, his term ends in January and that same day three of the court’s seven Supreme Court justices, their terms expire. So naturally that’s the day the new governor gets inaugurated, they get to appoint the next Supreme Court justices. Rick Scott said no I’m going to appoint them anyway even though my term will have ended. Would remake of course the state’s Supreme Court in a radically conservative direction, it was a huge deal in Florida because it was actively subverting democracy and potentially creating a constitutional crisis.

VALLAS: It’s almost like he’s been paying attention to Republicans in congress and their playbook for packing the courts.

SLEVIN: He’s been getting some tips.

VALLAS: Yes.

SLEVIN: Fortunately that very Supreme Court still has power to say whether they can be appointed by Rick Scott or the next governor and they said the next governor is the one who gets to appoint because it falls on their inauguration day, they will be the governor. So good news, Rick Scott unable to thwart democracy in Florida, we’ll see about the fate of the wizarding world.

VALLAS: So democracy 1, Voldemort, 0 and we leave it there. Jeremy Slevin always has the news of the week in case you missed it, usually has better sweaters than me but this week I win, Slevs, we’ll see you next week. Oh, what’s that, you don’t concede?

SLEVIN: I’ll bring a better sweater next week.

VALLAS: OK I see, game on.

Don’t go away more Off Kilter after the break, I’m Rebecca.

[MUSIC]

You’re listening to Off Kilter, I’m Rebecca Vallas. As November’s midterm elections creep closer, Republican efforts at voter suppression are back with a vengeance, this time in Georgia where some 51,000 of the state’s residents’ right to vote is in jeopardy less than a month out from election day. This comes courtesy of Brian Kemp, Georgia’s sitting Secretary of State and Republican nominee for governor who has quietly been working to purge Georgia’s voter rolls for years under the guise of a quote, unquote “exact match voter registration system”, with a massively disproportionate impact on voters of color who make up 80% of the 51,000 voters whose registration is currently in pending status. To unpack what’s the matter with Georgia and what’s at stake in this election I’m thrilled to have on Brentin Mock, staff writer at CityLab.com to talk about his recent article titled “How Dismantling the Voting Rights Act Helped Georgia Discriminate Again.” Brentin, thanks so much for joining the show.

BRENTIN MOCK: Thanks so much for having me on.

VALLAS: So we’re less than a month out from election day, tell us, what’s the latest in Georgia and how did we get here to the point where there’s 51,000 some voters who are wondering whether their ballots are even going to count?

MOCK: Yeah well under the Secretary of State Brian Kemp who also happens to be the Republican contender for governor in Georgia, he’s employed an election administration scheme wherein people’s voter registration forms can be frozen or held pending until some information can be confirmed or verified. And the way that they do that is when a person fills out a voter registration form and hands that into the county, county election officials then submit those forms or they release information about those form to a couple databases run by the state to see if all of the information matches up; any name spellings, social security numbers, things like that. And it’s basically two databases that they use. One is a social security number database and the other is a drivers license database and so what they’re trying to do is they want to make sure that all the information, the name, the address, all the numbers on a person’s voter registration form matches exactly the same with information the state already has on file in the social security and drivers license databases. And as you can probably imagine, this causes a lot of problems, people shorten their names when they fill out certain forms so on your drivers license you name might be Thomas but on your voter registration form you might write the first name as Tom. Women who have married who may have taken on two different last names so they may have a hyphen in their last name, that hyphen might be already on your drivers license but you might leave the hyphen out on your voter registration form. Trivial things like that can cause the state to flag your voter registration form essentially freeze it, which encumbers or at least burdens your ability to vote come election day. And right now there’s somewhere between 51,000 and 53,000 voter registration forms across the state are in that frozen mode and the grand bulk of those are African-American, some 70% of those African-American. So a lot of people who closely monitor and track voting rights legislation see this is a possible voter suppression tactic to make it more difficult for Black people to vote which is something is a high-stakes election for African-Americans right now because Stacey Abrams the Democratic contender could possibly be the first African-American woman to be a governor of Georgia. So they’re anticipating hopefully a lot of Black people to come out to vote and what’s interesting about this controversial voter registration scheme is it’s not the first time that Secretary of State Brian Kemp tried to put a version of this through. And in many of those cases, this exactly scheme was either stopped in its tracks or it had to be modified because of lawsuits or because of intervention from the federal government.

VALLAS: So that’s exactly where I want to dig in next because one of the elements of this controversy in Georgia that’s getting way too little attention and which your article in CityLab really focuses on is that this isn’t Kemp’s first attempts at these kinds of voter suppression tactics, he’s tried to do this before and importantly he was stopped by the Voting Rights Act and now that’s happening this time around and that’s exactly what your piece looks at is how the Supreme Court’s recent undermining of the Voting Rights Act, really taking the teeth out, has actually weakened it in a way that where it was helpful before and protected voting rights in the very same state where we’re watching this play out now, in Georgia, it’s not there to protect in the exact same situation now that it’s cropping up again. Help us understand, what is it that happened to the Voting Rights Act and how is it implicated in now this particular scenario that we’re seeing playing out in Georgia?

MOCK: Right so up until about five years ago the Voting Rights Act had a provision in it called Section 5. And in Section 5 basically these were the rules for how the federal government should intervene in the election administration for several states that had proven histories of basically racism at the polls. So all the your former confederate, former Jim Crow states are included on this list, which obviously includes Georgia. And under Section 5 basically if a change in the election administration was proposed either by a state election official or even a county or city election official or even a school board, it doesn’t matter how small is the jurisdiction. If anybody wanted to make any kind of change to the election system in a state like Georgia it first had to be submitted to the US Department of Justice who would review to make sure that basically the impact, the outcome of this change would not be if Black people were to be encumbered or prevented from voting, or people of color being prevented from voting. And again this applies specifically because of the history of racial discrimination against Black people, especially during the Civil Rights Era and before. And so Georgia was subjected to what’s called pre-clearance. Pre-clearance is when the federal government actually reviewed the proposal for an election change that Georgia would submit and they would do research on it and they would basically say, they would either say no, we don’t think that we can let you do this because it would lead to too many Black voters being left out at the polls or discriminated against. Or they’d say we think that this is going to be OK so go ahead and make the change.

In 2008, Georgia’s Secretary of State Brian Kemp, the exact same person we’re talking about proposed this controversial, what’s being called exact match voter registration system and this is the one that I described earlier. Where the information on your voter registration form had to match with information in the state’s database for social security and drivers licenses. But since Georgia was subject to Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act in 2008 they had to submit that to the Department of Justice to get approval and the Department of Justice did not approve it. They ran the numbers and they looked at it and they said basically no this would lead to too many Black, Latino and Asian voters who would be encumbered by the system. So it was sent back to the drawing board, Kemp had to make a bunch of modifications, which he did, and then he resubmitted and the Department of Justice allowed it to go through in 2010.

Fast forward to 3 years later, basically to 2013 the Voting Rights Act, specifically Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act was under review, it had been challenged by a party out of a county in Alabama and the Supreme Court basically stated that Section 5 had to be rewritten, that the way it was currently written where it only singled out certain states, even if those states were again, former Jim Crow states, the Supreme Court basically said you can’t single this out, you either have to apply Section 5 to everyone or you apply it to no one. And the Supreme Court being who they are they said we’ll just apply it to no one, which means — uh huh?

VALLAS: And a lot of Voting Rights Act activist and advocates at the time said whoa you taking the teeth out of the Voting Rights Act if you do this and then that is what the Supreme Court moved forward and did.

MOCK: Right, this was the most potential clause of the Voting Rights Act, Section 5 was because this was the one that really targeted in on the states that have been the most racist towards African-Americans. It was basically the Black Lives Matter clause of the Voting Rights Act, right, because the rest of the Voting Rights Act applies to basically everywhere else in America but for Section 5, this was the one that looked specifically at the states where Black lives and Black votes have been threatened for the longest. So with that out of the way Georgia and all of the former Jim Crow states, they were basically able to pass as many election changes as they wanted without any intervention or review or pre-clearance from the federal government and this is exactly what they did. And during this process Brian Kemp saying, Brian Kemp’s controversial voter registration program, it was discovered that it was actually leading to a lot of Black and Latino and Asian voter registration being frozen or being suspended, just as civil rights organizations said would happen. And so civil rights organizations had to sue Brian Kemp and the state of Georgia to bring this to their attention and get them to stop this system from going forward. They didn’t get him to stop it but they did get Brian Kemp to put it on pause. But what ended up happening was Georgia’s general assembly, the lawmakers, they created a law basically enshrining this program into the state’s law books in 2017 and that law that allowed that program to go through, that’s basically the one that’s in question right now.

VALLAS: And a lot of attention has rightly been paid to the overwhelming majority of these folks being people of color, a lot of people have paid attention to the fact that a lot of these people are Black voters particularly because of the potential for Stacey Abrams to become the first Black governor of Georgia. But something that your reporting points out is that while a lot of attention has been placed on the high level of African-American voters who were caught in this exact match program, that another population is new citizens, immigrants who often have hard to spell for election officials anyway last names or other reasons that they might be kicked out of the system as well.

MOCK: Right, so there’s basically two ways that your voter registration can be frozen or put on hold, one is through not having, having certain information on your voter registration not comporting with whatever’s in the state’s databases, that’s one. The second one is if the state flags you because they suspect you might not be a citizen and that could happen for a number of reasons. But it’s a completely separate category and this matters because if you are otherwise Black or Latino or white and your voter registration was frozen because of a misspelled name or something like that, you actually can still show up on election day and vote and so long as you have some kind of photo ID on you, you might not have a hard time voting. If you have been flagged for possibly not being a citizen, you do not have that option. You cannot just show up with a photo ID and expect in any regards to vote. Instead what you have to do is you have to find a deputy registrar and these are people who are not normally at polling locations, they’re usually at the county election office which is usually in the seat of the county, some city where you may not live. And you have to find a deputy registrar and you have to give him or her your proof of citizenship in order to be allowed to vote.

Now the way that you even know that you’ve been flagged for possibly not, for having your voter registration frozen is that the counties send out these notification letters telling you hey, we noticed that there’s a discrepancy, we need you to come down and correct this. And every single county in Georgia except for one, those letters go out only in English, meaning if you are a new citizen and let’s say you’re an English as a second language or you don’t know English, that letter will come to you in English and you may not even be able to read it to know what you’re supposed to do, which again just adds further encumbrances to your basically, your person exercising the right to vote.

VALLAS: And really important to underscore, you said it but I want to say it again, people who have been marked pending or are unsure about their status in Georgia absolutely should still vote and as you said many of these folks if they show photo ID will be able to vote without issue. A lot of other folks should still vote even they feel like their vote is somehow in question and whether it’s going to be counted. You mentioned that a lawsuit has been filed, the DC based lawyers committee for civil rights under law is one of the groups behind that lawsuit. In the last couple of minutes that I have with you, tell us a little bit about what we should be watching in the weeks ahead between now and election day and what the chances of seeing these 51,000 or possibly more Georgians regain their ballots counting?

MOCK: Yeah so last Friday several civil rights organizations, both local to Georgia and also national filed a legal complaint against Brian Kemp basically saying what they’ve been saying over the last ten years which is that look this voter registration scheme is supremely flawed and it’s leading to too many people of color having their voter registrations frozen and we need you to stop it. The complaint basically asks for the program to be stopped and for the people who are on the list to immediately be given the right to vote without worrying about the status of their voter registration. And I’m not close enough to the court system to know the chances one way or the other about how the judges will rule on this but we can say this which is that Brian Kemp and the state of Georgia, they’re well aware of the fact that this program has had disproportionate numbers and percentages of people of color caught up in this system. In fact, some of these same civil rights organizations wrote Kemp and the state a letter in July basically outlining all of the information that they found saying look, your system is leading disproportionately people of color having their voter registrations frozen. We have a major election coming up and this violates a number of constitutional voting rights protections. But between that letter that was written this past summer and even you can say the initial analysis that we done by the Department of Justice on this kind of program ten years ago, the state knows that it’s leading to this kind of discrimination, it just chooses not to do anything about and the complaint even says as much.

VALLAS: And as the clock continues to tick between now and November 6th, the election in Georgia really is close enough that some 50,000 pending voter registrations could make a difference in the gubernatorial election. I’ve been speaking with Brentin Mock, he’s a staff writer at CityLab, Brentin thanks so much for your reporting on this and for taking the time to join the show.

MOCK: Great, thanks.

Don’t go away more Off Kilter after the break, I’m Rebecca.

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You’re listening to Off Kilter, I’m Rebecca Vallas. Rarely does a week pass, it feels without the Trump administration seeking to burn down an Obama era policy that has made a difference in the lives of vulnerable communities. The latest attack comes to us courtesy of Ben Carson, Trump’s Secretary of Housing and Urban Development and his new big idea is, drumroll please to stop HUD from fighting housing segregation. To unpack the Trump administration’s scheme to roll back a fair housing policy known as Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing, and de-wonk-ify it, I promise, I talk with Rejane Frederick and Heidi Schultheis, two of CAP’s resident housing experts here on the Poverty to Prosperity program. Rejane and Heidi, thank you so much for taking the time to join the show.

REJANE FREDERICK: Thank you for having us.

HEIDI SCHULTHEIS: Yeah, we’re happy to be here.

VALLAS: So ebfore we get into all the wonky details of the Affirmatively Further Fair Housing Rule, it’s DC, we’ve got to do acronyms, the AFFH, before we get into that and de-wonk-ify some of that and also what Ben Carson is trying to do I want to spend a little bit of time laying out the problem that this Obama era policy at risk of rollback is trying to solve. And your piece at Talk Poverty does a great job of really putting a human face on this and so I want to read a little bit from that piece and then hear your thoughts about how this is playing out on the ground. You write, “Today, a child born to a low-income family and raised in the Tremé neighborhood of New Orleans will have beaten the odds if they live past age 67. They can also expect to make just $20,000 a year by the time they reach their thirties. Just a 20-minute drive away,” you continue, “in the Uptown/Carrollton neighborhoods near Tulane and Loyola Universities, that same child could expect to live 20 years longer and take home roughly $53,000 more in annual salary.”

So here you are, putting some numbers to the it really matters where you live story of place and how that intersects with not just life expectancy but also with income and poverty and opportunity. Rejane, help us understand before we get into all the wonky stuff with the rule, how can we see these kinds of gaps between communities that are just six miles apart?

FREDERICK: Yeah, that was really, thank you for teeing up with that question, I think that’s exactly the question that Heidi and I wanted our readers to take away from just that frame itself is the reality that there is really nothing, and I want to emphasize this, there is nothing natural about people who live just six miles apart and yet they have a 2o difference in how long they can expect to live. But why is that? And sadly this is not a uncommon story all across the United States. I come from the public health field and unfortunately researchers all across the country have been doing similar studies that find that communities that are just minutes apart yet it’s a world of difference in terms of the kind of life they can expect to have. So the thing that we really want readers to take away from that is that this gap is not explained by one’s family history. It’s not explained by genetic makeup or culture. It’s really the result of our society creating environments that were designed to either thrive or fail largely based on the racial makeup of that community. And so really the central point is that we have built environments in this nation that really determine, either they increase or cut off access to the type of jobs that allow you to support yourself and raise a family, they either guarantee or prevent your children from having a well resourced neighborhood school that provides a quality education, it decides if your family has to travel more than a mile from home just to get fresh groceries and whether there are even green spaces and playgrounds available and safe enough for your child to play or is it going to be blighted and vacant concrete lots? These are among this list that I just outlined or are just some of the many vital supports that really help individuals and families achieve a health full life and to put it bluntly, America has not rectified the long-standing and man-made racial gap in wealth, health, education, or housing that’s really existed since the founding of this nation.

VALLAS: Now Heidi, Rejane mentioned that there’s been a whole bunch of research on this topic looking at how place matters and there was actually some nationwide data released just a few weeks ago from Chetty and some other well known researchers who have really led in this space those new data really underscore what we’ve already known but which we only have now more data to help us see the connection here which is that the zip code you grow up basically determines your life outcomes. Help us understand what that new research is telling us and how it connects with what Rejane’s just been describing.

SCHULTHEIS: So this was really timely. Actually came out the day before we got that Talk Poverty piece up on the website and so I think Rejane is maybe more expert in this data than I am but the data included virtually all Americans now in their late 30s showed how difference the prospect of Black boys are from those of white boys. They have this really incredible visual for little dots that represent individuals falling over this cliff. Even when Black and white boys grow up near each other in households with similar incomes Black boys fair worse than white boys in 99% of America. It’s really striking visually and it underscores what Rejane was talking about and how the piece opens with communities just miles apart, just a 20 minute drive apart having dramatically different outcomes across health, wealth, education, housing for their inhabitants.

VALLAS: So what we end up hearing out of all of that and again this is just more research piling onto an already existing literature telling us that this but that more than ever where you grow up has more to do with how you’re going to do in life than almost anything else including how much income your parents have and other kinds of predictors that people have well understood for a long time have a lot to do with children’s life outcomes. So Heidi, staying with you for a second, that’s what’s behind the Obama era policy that’s at risk here, Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing and a better way to understand that might be that this was an Obama era policy targeting housing segregation and the kinds of inequities you guys have been talking about. I feel like we need rebranding of Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing, which no one knows what that is. So help us understand how is this rule that’s now at risk working to fight the set of problems you guys have been describing?

SCHULTHEIS: So one really important way that it does that is by requiring that communities that receive HUD funding comply with a type of assessment that basically takes stock of the costs, the availability, the quality of housing as well as who lives in different communities that receive that funding and it requires communities to identify problem areas and just as importantly, formulate really meaningful goals to remedy those problems. So it’s not only a forward looking policy, it’s also looking back on the harm that these policies have done and looking to remedy some of that as much as possible. I think it’s kind of useful to compare a little bit pre and post-AFFH in terms of just a little bit of process for what communities are going through. So prior to the AFFH rule, communities receiving HUD funding had to submit what was called an analysis of impediments and you can tell just by the name it was very problem focused. The purpose of it was really to identify barriers to fair housing and to housing choice in both the public and private sector. And these analyses tend to really lack measurable objectives and goals, because that wasn’t required. And thanks to the AHHF rule communities now are supposed to submit what are called assessments of fair housing that identify problems but also strongly emphasize concrete timelines and goals based on measurable objectives. So there are lots of examples of strategic goals in these new assessments.

VALLAS: And I’d love to hear a few of those because I feel like at the concept level of this starts to sound like OK maybe they’re trying to do something good but how does this work? You’ve got some specific localities that you call out in your piece for Talk Poverty as putting a face on how this plays out on the ground.

SCHULTHEIS: Yeah so with a huge nod to Justin Steele his research on this topic really unveiled a lot of different communities that were doing a lot of good with this rule in just a short amount of time. Some of the goals touch on things from affordability to accessibility for people with disabilities, housing choice, even employment programs and how employment relates to housing. So just a few examples, some of these were in the Talk Poverty piece, some are additional. In Wilmington, North Carolina that community committed to making 10% of affordable housing produced with HUD funds targeted to people with disabilities over the course of five years. In New Orleans they plan to increase the number of landlords that accept vouchers, giving voucher holders more choice in where they live and not confining them to low opportunity, high poverty neighborhoods. Seattle proposed expanding its housing affordability requirements into new areas of the city and Chester Country, Pennsylvania committed to building 200 affordable housing units in neighborhoods with good jobs, quality education programs and health services. Just a handful of really thoughtful measurable goals that communities came up with as they were completing their assessments of fair housing.

VALLAS: Now Ben Carson is explaining what he’s trying to do here, right, because a press release saying I don’t want HUD to fight housing segregation anymore, that probably wouldn’t have worked as the lead talking point so instead what we’re hearing out of his Department of Housing and Urban Development around why they want to halt this rule is that somehow what these communities are doing under the Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing rule isn’t working, that it’s ineffective. Before we get into exactly what Carson’s rollback would do and what’s at stake and how that’s going to work, is there any truth there and what do people need to know if they hear that message coming out of HUD?

SCHULTHEIS: Just to start off I would say that Carson’s HUD has cited some quote, unquote “high failure rate” associated with these assessments of fair housing that replace the old impediments analysis and that’s completely ungrounded. There’s about 1,200 communities that receive HUD funds and they need to comply with this new rule, only 49 of them have been required to submit and have submitted these new assessments and nearly all of those 49 were accepted, approved by HUD so there’s no grounds to say that there’s been some kind of high failure rate. There’s also only been three years for communities to get a handle on this and to start making strides toward complying. And we’ve seen that they’ve actually done a great job of that. So I would those are some things that Carson said so far that we don’t find any grounds for.

VALLAS: So Rejane, what exactly, now that we’ve been dancing around it, what exactly is Ben Carson trying to do, it takes the form of rolling back this rule but help us break that done. What does that mean and what’s at stake here?

FREDERICK: Effectively the name of the game is delay to kill. Everything that Trump’s HUD or Carson’s HUD has done really belies what they have said. Actions speak loud than words and so effectively what we have seen since really January of this year is that HUD has done everything within its power to undermine and sabotage this rule despite the positive outcomes that we were starting to see and I think it’s important to remind listeners that the Affirmative Furthering Fair Housing and it’s easier to say that that AFFH, is not something new. This was a key provision of the 1968 Fair Housing Act. It’s been in existence exactly for 50 years and so what the 2015 rule did really was as Heidi beautifully outlined was really put front and center the priority that communities should not only be remedying the past harm of segregation but it should really be in a space of envisioning what do healthy communities look like and how do we get there? And so what the Carson HUD is doing is really just trying to delay to slow it down to effectively eliminate that and there’s nothing that they are replacing it with.

VALLAS: So public comments were being accepted until this Monday October 15, I’m sure a lot of our listeners were among those who submitted comments, I know you guys have been working with the broader housing community to try to push back on the delay or even rolling back altogether of this rule. What can we expect in the weeks and months ahead? Where does this go from here?

FREDERICK: Yeah well the great news is that there was over a thousand comments published with the federal government. The vast majority of them in support of maintaining Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing. We and our public comments emphasized the fact that HUD should cease and desist, is it cease and desist? I’m not a lawyer so I’m going to try, cease and desist from their current proposed changes and that instead they need to full throttle implement it as it had been designed and so unfortunately where we stand now is that we’re really in a holding pattern. Legally, HUD has to review the 1,572 comments submitted and they have to take those comments into account. The stage that we’re at currently is the pre-rules, so the proposed rule making I believe from our intel is slated to be released some time next year around this time and so advocates across the country have quite a bit of time to continue to let their voices be heard as HUD continues to pour through the comments that were submitted, we really advise that people just continue to keep the drum beat and as our colleague at PolicyLink says really increase the number of drummers that we have in the field because this is a very important issue. Literally in 2018 we are still talking about housing segregation. In many ways it has gotten worse in this country and here we have a HUD that’s completely out of touch. That essentially is saying we’re not going to do a core part of our mission which is increase fair housing and justice by attacking and remedying really the sins of the past, which the federal government was very much a part of when it creates and promoted housing segregation.

VALLAS: So as with some many of the fights that matter to families struggling to make ends meet, this one is far from over, a lot more to watch and a lot more shoes to drop and I know you guys will be here to keep us updated. I’ve been speaking with Rejane Frederick and Heidi Schultheis, two of CAP’s resident housing experts. You can find their recent article, “Ben Carson wants HUD to stop fighting housing segregation” at Talkpovery.org and of course on our nerdy syllabus page as well. Thanks so much to both of you for joining the show.

FREDERICK: Thank you for having us.

SCHULTHEIS: Thanks very much.

Don’t go away more Off Kilter after the break, I’m Rebecca.

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You’re listening to Off Kilter, I’m Rebecca Vallas. To close out this week’s episode, I wanted to take a moment to mark one year since the launch of #MeToo movement. After a recent episode in which I shared my own story of sexual assault publicly for the first time, one of the messages I received in response came from someone who works behind the scenes on this very show. Her name is Madeline Peltz and in addition to work as a researcher at progressive media watching Media Matters for America, Madeline is the person to thank for Off Kilter’s show transcripts each week. After watching countless hours of Fox News and other right wing outlet’s horrific and deeply triggering coverage of the Kavanaugh hearings, she asked if she could come on Off Kilter to share her own story of sexual assault, how it’s impacted her throughout her life and how right wing media coverage is impacting her and other survivors right now.

Madeline, thank you so much for joining the show.

MADELINE PELTZ: Thank you so much for having me.

VALLAS: And this is your on air debut but I’ll do a shameless plug here, you are the person that we can thank for the transcripts that Off Kilter runs every week making this show accessible to hearing impaired listeners and folks who like to consume their audio content through written transcripts, thank you for doing that and I am so honored to have you on air for the first time.

PELTZ: Well I really appreciate you guys making that a priority because more people should follow your lead.

VALLAS: So before we get into Kavanaugh and media coverage and all of that what is Media Matters for America and tell us our listeners what it is that you do there?

PELTZ: So I’m a researcher at Media Matters, I work at night so I cover Fox News primetime. Media Matters is a progressive research organization and we cover the conservative media and hold them accountable for their lies and misinformation and fearmongering so that we can bring that to an audience who wouldn’t otherwise be privy to consuming Fox News on their own.

VALLAS: Now you mention you work at night, a lot of what you do really is watching Fox News, being glued to that TV set and watching Tucker Carlson and all of those folks spew lies and horrible offensive things, that’s your job.

PELTZ: Yeah so I watch between an hour and three hours a night, and I am very familiar with their strategies, which range from talent to talent throughout primetime, each one of them have their own horrifically racist and sexist shtick or in the case of Sean Hannity he really leans towards this state TV, authoritarian approach to covering the Trump White House, I’ve never heard him criticize the president so, Tucker on the other hand is really the nexis between right wing extremism and mainstream conservative media.

VALLAS: So listeners are I’m sure well aware that right wing media like Fox News didn’t just help given the White House and congressional Republicans cover to push through Kavanaugh’s confirmation, they’ve also been endeavoring to rehabilitate his image. That’s been painting his as a victim of a smear campaign, a big part of this has obviously also been through attempts to discredit Dr. Ford and other survivors as well. Now as I mentioned, you have spent countless hours and bless your heart and thank you for your service, monitoring Fox News and other right wing platforms coverage of the Kavanaugh confirmation process and your takeaway from watching all of this horrible coverage as you’ve written in a recent Media Matters report was that quote, “It’s better to keep quiet and if you come forward our machine will ruin your life”. Now I don’t want to walk through a worst of the worst list of all of the awful stuff that right wing media has said about survivors, about Dr. Ford but before we started taping, you mentioned one particular example that I hadn’t seen before courtesy of Tucker Carlson.

PELTZ: Well Tucker really pivoted from Kavanaugh to this wholesale attack on masculinity and men, that’s what he took from this ongoing for a year parade of women and survivors of all genders to tell their stories. And in the case of Kavanaugh, he like everyone at Fox was very invested in seeing that nomination go through and one of the things he did in the midst of the coverage of survivors coming forward and telling their stories with Justice now Kavanaugh was he said, this is quote, “The victims they say must be believed,” and he teased it by saying, “here’s a selection of the charges” after which he played a clip from the movie “The Crucible” which is based on a play by Arthur Miller and it was clip that portrayed a group of girls and young women standing up and saying, “she’s a witch! She’s a witch” and so to Tucker the allegations were a joke and could be made fun of through this horrific reference and it really is just, when you respond to the stories of survivors like that you’re really just showing your own hand, that there’s something bigger than your afraid of happening if women and people of all genders start to tell their stories of surviving sexual violence.

VALLAS: And that’s real personal for a lot of folks at Fox, I’m sure listeners will remember that Fox News was one of the outlets that saw multiple of its big fish taken down in the earlier stages of the #MeToo, Roger Ailes, Bill O’Reilly, several others, all brought down as people came forward with serious allegations of sexual assault and harassment against those types of folks at Fox.

PELTZ: Yeah the story of exposing the culture of sexual harassment at Fox is an ongoing one and it started with Roger Ailes in the summer of 2016 if I’m not mistaken and their other big story was Bill O’Reilly who of course, multiple women came forward and said that he had sexually harassed them and some women at Fox have described the culture of sexual harassment as reign of terror under Roger Ailes. And importantly, Roger Ailes’ henchman so to speak was forced out of Fox after Ailes and O’Reilly were exposed, his name is Bill Shine, he was an executive at Fox News and he’s since moved to the Trump White House where he’s the deputy director of communications and has signed an ethics waiver so that he is able to communicate to his former colleagues at Fox News and so the pipeline between the West Wing and Fox News’ executive suite is indistinguishable.

VALLAS: Now in addition to monitoring right-wing media coverage including Fox News on the Kavanaugh hearings and other topics as well, you yourself are a survivor of sexual assault. I am as well, as I’ve disclosed on this show and that was a part of why you actually wanted to come on Off Kilter to talk about this topic. Would you be comfortable sharing your story and how you come to this issue personally?

PELTZ: Yeah, after a year of #MeToo I really feel like I’m ready to share this story and for a long time I wasn’t. And so in a way I feel liberated by taking this story into my own narrative. And so what happened to me was I was 16 and it was the summer before my junior year of high school, and I was working at a summer camp and I was crazy about this guy who was 21. And I never thought that was going to happen because I was young and he was an adult to me and one night I met up with him after Lollapalooza in August which is a music festival in Chicago and we went back to his apartment and you know it’s really hard for me to say exactly what happened but we had sexual contact without consent and I remember thinking that night, I remember thinking I’ll never be the same after this. And we didn’t have intercourse but it was my first sexual experience and I remember telling my friend like bragging about it kind of, because I wasn’t, I saw it as oh, I hooked up with this older guy, it’s so cool but I knew what had happened. And during Kavanaugh, the Kavanaugh coverage, it was like he was living with me, like my head, for three weeks. And I started to listening to music that I was listening to during that period, which always has been a big thing for me, and I was just like, I have to, I can’t keep this to myself because so many women, including yourself and Christine Blasey Ford came forward and the way that she told her story, with such honesty about what she knew and didn’t know and the story about her making sure that there two front doors in her house really just stuck with me. And the second that I was sexually assaulted I was 20 years old, it was my first summer in DC, I was interning on a campaign and I don’t remember, there’s parts of this I don’t remember because I was really drunk and I was on a bus and this guy came up to me and he put his arms around me and followed me back to where I was staying and he raped me. And I think that he, part of what, for so long I have had a really hard time enforcing boundaries and I think of survivors feel the same way. And so that’s, that’s what happened.

VALLAS: Madeline first of all just thank you for coming forward, for sharing that and for wanting to share it here. It’s something we’ve talked about you and I before, but it’s a very big deal to share that publicly so just thank you. This is a set of experiences that I know has impacted you for a long time in the years since.

PELTZ: Yeah, well I’ve always had depression, since I was really little and I have been in therapy my whole life. And what happened, the first response to what happened when I was a teenager was I started abusing substances and that stayed with me for a long time and I quit using drugs when I was, right after I graduated college, like a week after I graduated. But it was a big part of my life for a long time and a big way that I coped. But I have been in an outpatient facility twice, and I have had multiple diagnoses, I have dealt with depression, anxiety, panic disorder, and a mood disorder and I go to therapy three times a week so that I can work and live and be healthy and go to the gym and enjoy my friends and listen to music sober and I couldn’t, I would not be, I don’t know if I would be alive if I didn’t have access to medication and to therapy, which is a privilege in this country and I want to be more honest about that.

VALLAS: How has watching this coverage impacted you as a survivor? Here you are trying to take it in so you can write about it and analyze it for Media Matters and for media accountability purposes but this has been extremely personal as well. How has that been impacting you and how are you taking care of yourself in this moment?

PELTZ: Yeah, well first of all, I’ve always wanted to do opposition research and that’s basically what I’m doing and so there’s this adversarial part of myself that just fits like a glove in this job and I love it. The days when our stories have impact and people are really looking at Fox News for what it is outside of the little media bubble is so rewarding. In terms of like self care, which is a term that I have a mixed relationship with but I try to exercise, and I listen to a lot of music and I have these roommates who I hope will listen to this and they’re so supportive. I really feel like the support I get from my roommates is a college experience that I didn’t get and I love them and we’re all women and femme identifying people and it’s such a supportive environment and I couldn’t do it without them. But there’s something about the #MeToo movement but specifically Kavanaugh that I just feel free. I feel freer in my body, I feel less apologetic about what happened to me and I want to align myself with other women and survivors and gender non-conforming people and men, all of whom suffer because of the patriarchy. Men and masculine identifying people are bound by expectations of physical appearance and expressing emotion that are debilitating and I feel so free in expressing how that has impacted me personally, in a way that I didn’t before.

VALLAS: In the last couple of minutes that I have with you, I want to focus on something that Media Matters has really been a huge leader in, which a lot of folks listening might feel like eh, Fox News is a lost cause, I don’t watch it but a lot of people do watch it so it does matter what gets said on these types of platforms and as we’ve talked about on this show before, it’s not all folks who even just identify as Republicans, there’s a lot of swing voters in that mix getting information through that and other right wing news outlets. And so to that end Media Matters has made significant use of one particular pressure point in trying to hold Fox News and other right wing media outlets accountable when they push lies, when they push misinformation, when they operate like state media and so much more, and that is advertising boycotts. Tell me a little bit about how those work and what kind of impact they’ve had.

PELTZ: So Media Matters is a leader on advertising boycotts and they work. And we have a track record of them working going back to putting pressure on Rush Limbaugh after he insulted the Georgetown law student, he lost advertisers. Glenn Beck, after he said that Obama has a visceral hatred for white people, which is something you hear everyday now on Fox News is this insane white identity politics but that’s another conversation. He eventually lost his show and Bill O’Reilly lost his show, all of whom were people who should not be on the air and one of the only ways to hold them accountable is by putting pressure on their boycotts because if you’re listening to Tucker Carlson or Sean Hannity or Laura Ingraham who is their primetime lineup go into this insane racist rant about immigrants and women and all of the punching down that is at the center of their business model and then it cuts to commercial and it says this is brought to you by major pharmaceutical company or major insurance company, it’s shocking to me that night after night I see, and a lot of programs you don’t see because they have lost advertisers, especially Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham and their advertisting rates, their ad real estate value has gone down significantly and a lot of that has to do with Media Matters but a lot of people do watch Fox News, millions of people. They’re the number one rated cable news show and they lock you in part by saying don’t trust the rest of the media. And so what they say is really important especially in this time period.

VALLAS: I’ve been speaking with Madeline Peltz, she’s a researcher at Media Matters for America, a leading progressive media watchdog and also the person we can thank every week for the transcript of this very show, Madeline thank you so much for coming on air finally and for sharing a very personal, very hard to share story for the first time. I can’t wait to have you back.

PELTZ: Thank you so much, I’m thrilled to have been here.

VALLAS: And that does it for this week’s episode of Off Kilter, powered by the Center for American Progress Action Fund. I’m your host, Rebecca Vallas, the show is produced each week by Will Urquhart. Find us on Facebook and Twitter @offkiltershow and you can find us on the airwaves on the Progressive Voices Network and the WeAct Radio Network or anytime as a podcast on iTunes. See you next week.