What I’ve seen from Neil Gorsuch is that when liberals want something, regardless of whether there’s precedent in their favor, he’s looking for ways to dismantle those precedents, and when conservatives want something, he’s going out of their way to give them their wish list. And that’s even scarier than someone who just wants to dismantle the court’s role in society.
We juxtapose images of Trump at his rallies during the campaign with, you know, images of civil rights abuses happening in the ‘60s. We juxtapose them against the Bloody Sunday footage out of Selma. That same atmosphere of ignorance and hate and criminalization and oppression is what, you know, he—it’s hard for me to say “president"—but what he espouses. And so, that footage is important to have. It’s something that I want to make sure that we’re watching again, you know, during the inauguration when he raises his hand. And I think it’s going to be a real sobering moment for the country when you see the power of images, the power of him taking the oath. My hope is that that shakes people out of some of the—certainly not your viewers, but many other people—out of this kind of reality show haze that we seem to find ourself in. It is real. It is happening. And we have to remember what he said and continue to hold him accountable.
What Israel was allowed to do during the negotiations process was continue to build and expand its settlements. And we saw that the number of settlers ended up doubling just in the few short years that the negotiations were taking place. Within a seven-year period, the number of settlers went up to 400,000. Even now, we see that the number has more than tripled. So what Israel wants is it wants to have this farce of a bilateral process, but it doesn’t at all want to pay the price of peace. It doesn’t want to end its settlements. It doesn’t want to end the occupation. All that it wants is for the international community to reward it for entering into dialogue and discussion with the Palestinians, all the while continuing to steal more Palestinian land.
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The important thing about all of this, this resolution and so on, is not so much the language about settlements as much as the language about salvaging the two-state solution, the desperation that’s expressed in this text about the two-state solution dying. When you read that and you consider that the incoming administration, the Trump administration… You have an ambassador now to Israel that is incapable of delivering the message that settlements are an obstacle, because he, himself, has helped create those obstacles.
We are, you know, well aware of the fact that we have a month left before Obama leaves office. Chelsea herself is continuing to speak publicly. We are continuing to draw attention to the fact that in our country we have very—our carceral regimes are themselves mechanisms of death, and the longer that she is subjected to the conditions that she is living under, the less likely it is that she will survive. And the reality is that we have a very limited amount of time to take action to save her. And Obama, you know, can do the right thing here, not just for Chelsea, but to send a message into a future in which whistleblowers are going to be more important than ever. Chelsea Manning is a hero to many of us.