Episode 352 – Nothing to Hide with Heidi Boghosian

Steve Grumbine:
00:00:42

All right, folks, this is Steve with Macro N Cheese. Another banger this week.

I’m excited, very excited, because, you know, as we always talk about economics, and I know that gets some of you guys excited when we talk econ, because that’s how we started and that’s the main thrust.

We talk about the things that are connected to it because there’s nothing worse than trying to present ledgers to somebody who is getting pepper sprayed by a ICE agent out in the streets or somebody who is food insecure, trying to figure out how to get taken care of.

And we’re busy saying, “Well, actually the ledger says,” right? So we sometimes stray, and we’re going to stray today because unfortunately, we are living in a new world.

We are living in a Peter Thiel world full of boogeymen and bad guys and people that are ne’er do goods and are part of the Antichrist and all the other things that come with being Peter Thiel. But we’re also talking beyond AI.

We’re going to talk about internet responsibility and being a good cyber citizen, and we’re going to be talking about that in the framework of the current scenarios that we’re watching play out before our very eyes. And folks, there is something morbidly grotesque about the individual that says, “What are you worried about? I have nothing to hide?”

And the absolute ridiculous nature of that belief system. We’re going to bring it out and we’re going to air it out and we’re going to get to the bottom of why that’s a foolish belief system.

We’re also going to talk a little bit about being a good, you know, cyber guy, understanding how to interpret the news and understanding how to pay attention to what’s happening around you via the internet. And my guest is going to bring it all to us. My guest is Heidi Boghosian. And Heidi Boghosian is a New York based attorney and activist.

She’s the author of Spying on Democracy: Government Surveillance, Corporate Power and Public Resistance, published in 2013, I Have Nothing to Hide: And 20 Other Myths About Surveillance and Privacy. Fancy that. 2021. And the book is not, by the way, called Fancy That. It’s called I Have Nothing to Hide and it was published in 2021, and Cyber Citizens: Saving Democracy with Digital Literacy, June of 2025. Now, folks, as you well know, I don’t believe we have much of a democracy, so this will be fun to talk about.

Anyway, with that, let me bring on my guest, Heidi Boghosian. Thank you so much for joining me today.

Heidi Boghosian:
00:02:59

It’s so great to be with you. Thank you.

Steve Grumbine:
00:03:02

Absolutely. I am so happy our friend [Project Censored staffer] Mischa Geracoulis put us together. And this comes at a very timely moment.

Looking at the kinds of work that you’ve done, it has really made me think hard, you know, because we are an organization that is-we’re not even biased. We are left leaning. We are, we’re so left, we’re falling off the side of the earth. You know, we are left.

So we don’t pull any punches there. The subject matter we talk about is directly in that space and with the current administration as it is, I hate to say this,
but even looking at your books, you can tell this stuff didn’t just start with Donald Trump. This stuff has been going on in a bipartisan way, in a way that our government has a goal.

And that goal, it’s not regular people’s goals, it’s somebody else’s goals. And it’s being pushed upon us. You know, even if we don’t need it, even if we don’t want it, they’re bringing it to us.

And one of the things that greatly concerns me, obviously, as an activist, as a person that’s trying to get the word out about things that just ain’t so that we’re told are so through cultural hegemony. I am very concerned about the lies that are being pushed out on the internet by the official sources, unofficial sources.

Their sidekicks that push this stuff out, that make us believe things that just ain’t so, and we act as if they are so. And we live part of this lie out in the public space.

We facilitate it. We promote it. We pass it on, and all the while we’re helping facilitate manufactured consent for lies that keep us trapped and quite frankly have really in many ways destroyed whatever mirage of a democracy we had by being very fascist in nature. Your thoughts?

Because this is clearly a subject that you have spent an incredible amount of time researching, writing about, and in your own radio program, talking about. Would you mind kicking us off with that?

Heidi Boghosian:
00:05:06

Of course.

I would like to talk about what you mentioned in terms of this has been a long time coming because conservatives in this country have really been smart about laying a long-term plan. Go back several decades to the formation of the Federalist Society, for example.

Now the Federalist Society is responsible for installing the very conservative members not only of our Supreme Court, but in judicial positions around the country. And they’ve done that by creating a big tent where they don’t quibble about relatively minor political differences among themselves.

They have the goal of really taking over the legal landscape, the political landscape of this country. So it started in terms of legal areas back with the beginning of the Federalist Society.

They mentored young law students. They got them positions in government. They frame themselves as engaging in debate with people whose viewpoints differ from theirs. But really they’re a well-organized, extremely well-funded entity that has been working on their plan for decades.

At the same time, we’ve seen think tanks originally formed near the beginning of the 20th century to provide information to leadership, government and otherwise on different policies and practices, to give them the information they needed to set policy. But they morphed, as your listeners I’m sure know, into now very carefully constructed political, almost lobbyists.

And I write about that in my current book, how these mega think tanks, and I liken them to sort of mega churches, which we’ve also seen on the increase with ministries of thousands across the nation. They work online, as many of the forces that I think are contributing to our demise of democracy do.

And they’re really exercising out undue influence that works along with lobbyists in various fields, including Big Tech, which is a big problem for us now as we’ve rapidly entered the digital age and laws have not kept up with our use of electronic devices and internet connected devices and misinformation and disinformation.

So I think that we’ve seen under the radar plans, we are now seeing them surface and we’re seeing how successful Republicans largely have been and really moving us toward a more polarized society, one where anyone who looks different or speaks differently, has different views, is called the enemy.

And I also think that what happened was after the attacks of 9/11, plans for a massive surveillance state which was already underway, the government was able to use the specter of fear of another terrorist attack to try to convince people in a big public relations campaign kind of way, the so called “war on terror,” that we needed, for example, more surveillance to keep us safe, that we can turn fellow citizens essentially into spies. We see neighborhood apps, ring cameras, looking out for so called “suspicious activities,” making even our neighbors sometimes prospective enemies.

So I think that taking advantage of certain moments like 9/11 and even in mass shootings on school campuses has opened up a whole new industry, for example, and monitoring students, telling parents that we’re watching their emails. We’re even having them show us cameras of their rooms when they take remote exams.

We’ve normalized over the last couple of decades, a vast industry of surveillance apparatus. And by normalizing this, I think that it lays the groundwork for even more insidious infractions. For example, on our Bill of Rights.

Steve Grumbine:
00:09:47

You know, when you say the Bill of Rights, a lot of these documents, and I consider the US Constitution part of this, are written by white slaveholding landowners and not the people out of doors, which it references. It has always been something I think most of us just took for granted.

We went to elementary school, grade school, middle school, high school, whatever, college, hearing about these things, and have held on to them for dear life like they are our support blanket. But the more you dig in and the more you realize that these things were written by and for elites and for wealthy white landowners.

Now, there’s been a lot of struggles over time that have been fought, but you can see clearly, at least I think so anyway. Going back to even, like you said, the Mont Pelerin Society and the Federalist, the John Birch Society, you name it.

Going back to the 60s, Milton Friedman era, this libertarian kind of strain of, I don’t know, proto-fascism has been going on for quite a while, and they are rewriting the world in their image. And to your point earlier, it is the long game. How do you think these documents hold up under current environment that we live in?

I mean, I think that we maybe thought really high and as long as we believed they were okay.

But when push comes to shove, there’s laws for us, the people, and then there is laws that aren’t really holding the elites and they’re meant for the little people. It’s kind of like, I don’t know, a bifurcated society.

Heidi Boghosian:
00:11:31

Well, we’ve had decades fighting for civil rights, you know, grassroots movements that have dramatically changed, I would now say temporarily, the arc of how citizens are realizing that those documents were not written for them. The sort of ordinary people, the non-elite.

And now what we’re seeing, and I think many people would agree that with the election of Barack Obama into the highest office of the land, it became fertile territory for hate groups, white supremacist and other extremist groups.

There was a reaction, and I think with the installation of Donald Trump as president, we’ve really seen how he is abrogating the laws of the nation, even refusing in certain instances to abide by the few Supreme Court decisions that rule against his executive orders and other really regressive policies.

So public confidence in the Supreme Court is at an all-time low, and rightfully so, because it’s now a political arm of government and not, as it should be, an independent part of our democratic system.

I think that anger, white nationalist, really, hatred of an integrated and racially just society is now paving the way for so quickly a series, and a continuing series of actions by Trump militarizing our society, taking over cities in unlawful ways by bringing in the National Guard and ICE officers, who really have also normalized the use of violence against citizens.

You know, back in around 1999 when we had the so-called Battle of Seattle, we witnessed the use of so-called “less lethal munitions” against protesters.

And for many of us, that was a shocking public display of armed force against Americans and others lawfully engaging in the right to protest and ask the government for redress of wrongs.

We’ve become a society so recently that has turned to violence, and I think a recent poll from a year or two ago even said that a majority of Americans feel it is okay to use violence as a last resort when you cannot resolve disputes. So we’re seeing this with freedom of the press and other fundamental rights enshrined in the Bill of Rights that we took for granted.

Often knowing, of course, that over the years laws were applied unfairly to non-white groups in this country and that those who could pay for a vigorous high profile legal defense would prevail in court.

So unfortunately, we made some very wonderful gains in civil rights and other areas of rights for individuals, the right for gay and LGBTQ+ persons to marry.

But now we’re seeing that all quickly taken away, I think in a desperate attempt to bring us back to what the so-called founding fathers may have written. Although I’m not saying everything they wrote was necessarily unfair to everyone in the country.

I think there were good aspirations and some sensible provisions. But I think that the backlash is coming harder than we’ve seen before to taking back the rights we’ve given the ordinary people.

Steve Grumbine:
00:15:31

I agree in large part. One of the things that jumps to mind is we saw a moment where we thought, “Hey, maybe we’re going to have universal health care.
Hey, maybe we’re going to have a Green New Deal. Maybe we’re going to have student debt elimination, maybe…” you know, on and on and on.

“Maybe we’ll have a federal job guarantee so people are never left out in the cold during these ebbs and flows of a recession” or whatever, in these manufactured austerity moments create conditions. They create conditions that create outcomes. And those conditions tend to be wherever austerity is, you have increased immiseration. You have increased poverty. You have increased crime. Because what do people do when they’re desperate and hungry? They do whatever they have to do to survive.

And so when you create the conditions to ratchet up that kind of fascistic tendencies, those kind of, you know, “tough on crime,” and “We’re going after the bad guys,” and you know, on paper it sounds good.

It’s like, of course you don’t want a rapist living down the street or, you know, you don’t want to let your kids get kidnapped and sent to some prison camp somewhere. You don’t want the horrible things that they paint out there. I mean, it makes sense, we want the guy selling the poison fentanyl to the children taken off the streets. But what they don’t do is they don’t explain how they create the conditions that allow those things to happen.

It’s almost like a setup for harsh penalties and set up for mass surveillance and set up for tough on crime. And “Hey, we’re just doing this for your good. This is not us doing it because we’re mean. We’re doing this because we’re here to protect you.

We’re the government and we’re here to make it work for you.” And you know, I’m a big G kind of guy. I believe in big government.

I believe in we the people kind of approaches to things, but they don’t tell the story, they don’t tell the full story.

So all these kind of, you know, “We’re going to round up the immigrants and we’re going to kick them out of the country because they’ve been raping our women.

They’ve been doing this, that and the other” and all these litany of things that if you just read it on its face, you’re like, “Oh my God, it’s horrible. Of course you’ve got to take action.”

And then reality is that it’s not real or it’s blown out of proportion or it is strategic for the purposes of some other thing that you don’t see something you don’t see coming, like a surveillance state, like jackbooted military thugs that are yanking people out of their apartment complex at 3 o’clock in the morning, their children, et cetera, all in the name of “getting those illegals out of the country.” These things build on each other.

That long game that you were talking about, can you talk to me a little bit about the bait-and-switch of what they propose that they’re fighting and the conditions by which they set it up so that those conditions become, you know, yeah, of course they’re happening.

Of course, poor people in given area that have been starved out and welfare taken from them or support structures taken from them are now floundering. What did you expect? You expect it to go great and swimmingly? I don’t know. What are your thoughts on that?

Heidi Boghosian:
00:18:44

So many thoughts as you were speaking, because I recall during the Nixon administration, the campaign, as you were alluding to, about having safer streets and that ads that were on television, the public service ads, would show a dark night in Chicago, for example, and a woman, a white woman holding her bag closely to her chest, walking down the street with an African American man half a block away. The ominous messages of, you know, it’s sort of like, “Do you know where your children were?” campaign.

Really ratcheting up the fear, especially in large urban centers and portraying, and this is, I think, critical to this whole propaganda formula. You have to have an enemy. So at that time, inner-city Black Americans were the enemy.

And we’ve come to see the war on drugs, the war on so-called crime have led to the US having the largest penal system in the world, which, you know, years ago was supposed to rehabilitate, now is purely punitive and really segmenting large parts of our communities to being behind bars or under supervision. I mean, all these campaigns have failed. The war on drugs is an abysmal failure, but ruined so many lives and continues to do so.

That alone shows a thinking person how the government isn’t genuine.

I mean, they may take a certain moral panic and notice how they always enforce certain laws after a high profile killing, often of a young white child or a kidnapping. [Yeah] But we don’t see those hidden consequences of how it’s devastating large parts of our fellow community members, people we know.

And I think now the beauty of the Trump administration is that he gets how the use of humor and how sort of social media can be used to tap into some of those basic fears that Americans have, be it economic or otherwise, how things are going to affect their pocketbooks saying, you know, allowing this government shutdown to go on and pretending that it’s vilifying Democrats. And what I’m concerned about is during 9/11, we saw so many communities of colors being vilified as potential terrorists.

Now we’re seeing it on an even larger level: Democrats, liberals.  I mean, I run a small foundation that gives grants to activist organizations that are doing things that according to the current government’s logic might fit into their rubric of anti-American activity, you know, supporting Palestinian rights, environmental rights, all of the things that are now being labeled as a threat to democracy. So he’s done a brilliant job in terms of public relations and really normalizing fantasy as some kind of new reality in his book.

Steve Grumbine:
00:22:10

Yeah, I look back, I know it’s easy to break out the old 1984 tropes, but they sometimes fit and I try to go light on them. But this is one of those ones where you can see the kids standing over the parents as they’re sleeping, going up. Thought crime.

And I’m watching this with how, “Hey, you laughed at Charlie Kirk.” Thought crime. “Hey, you raised up George Floyd. He’s a criminal.” Thought crime. On and on and on. But while you were talking, and this is gonna…

I’m dating myself, so forgive me, I’m an old Dude, I’m 56. I look back and I say to myself, I remember when Paul Tsongas [actually Michael Dukakis] was running against [former POTUS} George H.W. Bush and the old Willie Horton thing came out.

And you talk about a real… like I was a young man, you know, we were dealing with all kinds of stuff.

And that was the first time I had actually as a, I don’t know, 18, 19, 20, 21 year-old, whatever I was at the time, man didn’t have the tools to weed through the propaganda, didn’t have the tools to understand or the class awareness or the, the systemic racism awareness or any of the things that they’re trying to put the kibosh on us talking about because ‘It’s woke.” Right? But you look back and you think about nothing has been more identitarian than that kind of conservative logic.

And I don’t want to just paint it out at Republicans, I really don’t. Because Bill Clinton went to a mentally handicapped man’s execution to prove he was tough on crime. So we’re not going to cut anybody any breaks here.

They’ve been complicit across the board. I think it’s been kind of a universal oligarch, trait-driven thing that we’re going to use this as a means of ratcheting up control. Ratcheting up.

There’s a crisis of hegemony going on.

“We need to make it more and more and more constrictive on the regular person so that they don’t get uppity and think that they’re free and, you know, but we’ll sell it as we’re protecting freedom while simultaneously ripping away freedom.” I don’t know if you remember the Willie Horton stuff, that left an impact on me at the time, but I was completely lacking in analysis.

I didn’t have any kind of worldview other than, “Yeah, what are they doing? Soft on crime, liberals, screw them, blah, blah, blah.” You know, do you remember the Willie Horton moment?

Heidi Boghosian:
00:24:38

Of course I do. And I must agree. You know, Bill Clinton enacted some very restrictive laws, especially regarding prisoners’ rights to appeal after a certain point.

But when you were saying 1984, you made me think of one of my favorite examples of a television ad. And this was Apple’s Super Bowl ad. It only ran once. It won many awards.

They were competing against IBM and they wanted to sort of position Apple as the “non-corporate entity.” So they had sort of a Big Brother figure speaking on a large screen and then a woman with a sledgehammer coming to smash that screen.

And “Apple’s different we’re for, you know, independent thinkers.”

And then you look at what’s happened now in terms of Apple, Macintosh, the other Big Tech companies who now monetize our personal data, exercise monopolies, squash small competition, and really, in addition to commodifying our private information and profiting enormously from it invading our privacy, totally taking over, really, some of our virtual identities, you look back and you wonder, wow, was that ad naive? Was it something we should have? You know, it appealed to people and it got so many lifelong Apple users.

And now we have Google in the classroom, technology really taking over some of the essential functions of our lives.

And I’m not knocking technology because it’s been incredibly opening and great at sort of democratizing certain kinds of communication, but we’re seeing the downsides of that right now as AI escalates so quickly. And one of the things people may not be aware of is that how Congress and our lawmakers have no… we don’t even have a national privacy law.

And now with everything done digitally, we don’t have sensible and adequate laws to keep up with the fast rush of technology. So I think in that respect, the government and its partner, big business, Big Tech, have us exactly where they want. We’re malleable.

We’re still uninformed about how data aggregators work. Some people are paying attention, but it has to happen on a mass level.

Steve Grumbine:
00:27:20

Well, it’s funny you say that. I have been doing a lot of study on things like [Italian communist Antonio] Gramsci‘s cultural hegemony lately. It’s really become super important to me.

But you also see the algorithmic use. I mean, how do you manufacture consent?

By ensuring that the algorithms are rigged, by ensuring that people can’t see one another, that people that you want to follow you don’t see, and people you don’t want to follow, all you do is see, the well-placed ads. This is going to sound insane, but I was on a call, personal call, over my lunch break at work.

And when I came back to work, I was talking about router bits for woodworking. And when I came back from lunch, I guess I was sitting near my computer.

All of a sudden on my computer screen was an ad for router bits on my work computer. I was like, “What in the world is it listening to me? Did it hear me?”

And I mean, I don’t want to be a conspiracy theorist here, but they’re listening. They’re checking your clicks.  They’re checking where you go, who you talk to, you know. You got people like Larry Ellison flat out saying, “You citizens will behave because we will be watching you.”

And the guy just bought TikTok and owns Oracle. And then of course you’ve got lunatic fringe with Peter Thiel who is ready to fight the Antichrist.

And you know, God forbid any of us look like that sweaty wax figure. Anybody that doesn’t look, sound, act like him is in the crosshairs.

I mean, we’re talking about a guy who sells AI technology to allow drone strikes on children in Gaza, for God’s sake.

We’re not talking about good people here, but these are the people that are controlling the technical apparatus that is observing us and watching us and controlling us and socially enforcing cultural hegemony through these electronic means. What are your thoughts on that?

Heidi Boghosian:
00:29:15

Well, so many thoughts.

First of all, lobbyists for companies promoting artificial intelligence are spending millions and millions of dollars to really leave their imprint and fight against, for example, the Algorithmic Accountability Act, which was introduced in 2019 and has been repeatedly reintroduced. Keep stalling.

Each cycle, OpenAI in this year increased its lobbying by nearly 50% over the same period last year, spending 1.2 million in those six months.

I think that when you have the interest of the ultra-wealthy few, really dictating how we craft safeguards, as we mentioned earlier, it’s very clear who’s running the country and who’s essentially, in subtle and not so subtle ways, really dictating our choices, be they political or mundane.

Intermission:
00:30:23

You are listening to Macro N Cheese, a podcast by Real Progressives. We are a 501c3 nonprofit organization. All donations are tax deductible. Please consider becoming a monthly donor on Patreon, Substack, or our website, realprogressives.org. Now back to the podcast.

Heidi Boghosian:
00:30:46

And yeah, every time I have a conversation with someone, in a few hours I get a pop-up ad, as you said.

And I also almost got duped by an AI clone. I had a, an email from someone claiming to be a Yale law student who wanted part -time work.

So we hopped on a zoom and I thought something was off, but his face and mannerisms looked real. And then I realized after when he started hitting me up for money that I was duped and, boy did I feel stupid.

But every day friends email or text me and like, do you think this is a fake?

And I’m like, yeah, it has all the hallmarks, and I try to bullet point a few things to look for, but we are definitely and you referenced I have nothing to hide argument. If I could just mention briefly why that is so flawed. Because it wrongly equates privacy with concealing wrongdoing.

Steve Grumbine:
00:31:43

Amen.

Heidi Boghosian:
00:31:44

So ignores privacy’s true purpose as a right that we have to control our personal information and totally disregards how data can be used in ways that are not only illegal, but harmful. Because privacy isn’t just about hiding bad things.

It’s about keeping our autonomy and protecting sensitive or personal information like our medical records or our political beliefs, if we don’t want to share those.

Steve Grumbine:
00:32:14

It’s really powerful, I mean, people want to remain anonymous in this world and go through life and do their thing. And all laws that are on the books that we believe defend us, like the Fourth Amendment, you know, people, “Ah, my First Amendment rights.”

Your First Amendment is not from the private sector, it’s from the government.

And so by the government allowing the private sector to do a lot of its policing for them and then making those records available to law enforcement, they can do a whole host of damage to you just for having a contrary opinion. I think it’s important to kind of look at how we can protect ourselves, if at all.

I think to myself, you know, what do we do if we’re at a protest and a camera picks up our identity there and we haven’t done anything? Maybe we’re just standing there, maybe we’re cheering and using our First Amendment rights, whatever.

But ultimately you’re caught on a camera, a crime occurred at the event, and now all of a sudden you’re in the crosshairs and can be detained due to the Insurrection Act or the, these, some of these anti-, you know, spying acts or anti, I mean they’ve got a million of these things. Each time an event occurs, they create a new law to make it harder on us.

And then of course, it’s wielded in the way that the people that crafted it the time appear to not want. But I not so sure that they’re that stupid. I think that they know it will be exploited later by whoever or however.

But that said, I mean, how do we protect ourselves in this? What does some citizen hygiene look like in terms of protecting ourselves from AI, protecting ourself from a surveilling government?

I mean, do we have any protections? I’ll be honest with you, I don’t know what they are. I don’t think we’re voting our way out of this. And I’m very, very concerned.

Heidi Boghosian:
00:34:07

Wow, what a question. I think the first answer would be that people say, do we have any privacy anymore?

And citing everything you just said, many are inclined to say, “It’s too late.  It’s out of our hands”. Now that’s exactly what our government and corporations want us to think.

And so this is an area that I refuse to be defeatist about because they say regarding First Amendment rights, if you don’t use them, you lose them.

And obviously it’s getting more frightening to exercise our rights because we’ve seen in very visible, you know, news clips and firsthand videos the violence that the state inflicts on people just wanting to take to the streets peacefully to practice those rights.

And I’d look back when we had a lot of those protests starting around 1999 and continuing through the Republican and Democratic National Conventions, because I attended a lot of big protests at national special security events. We saw the panoply of lethal weapons being used.

But then in 2007, we got the iPhone and that changed everything because people were then carrying personal surveillance devices in our pockets, as you alluded to more recently. In terms of how they’re tracking everything we do and listening and using geolocation data. I think that the first advice is do not give up hope.

And you can take baby steps. Look, everyone can do something.

Everyone should know by now because you can go on any website and find out tips about practicing good hygiene, which those are the everyday digital safety practices that reduce our vulnerability to cyber threats like hacking, phishing, surveillance. Use strong passwords for each account. Don’t use the same one over multiple platforms. Use multifactor authentication.

That’s easy to do. And also easy to do is update all your devices and apps.

And I always say don’t use too many apps unless you definitely get them from trusted sources like the company itself. But update with latest security patches. Install strong protective ransomware search software. Regularly backup important data and Signal is easy and great to use for sensitive communications. But use your privacy settings on social media and browsers to limit your data tracking.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has a wonderful platform called Privacy Badger. I have it installed on my laptop and when I look at it, it shows the number of times someone had wanted to track me, but they blocked it.

Which is fun. I mean, a lot of these basic habits can be fun. Partner up with a friend and share what you’re doing. Read up about things.

And I’m sure that everyone listening has had their personally identifiable information hacked in one of the companies that they have interacted with, including Equifax or the other data entities that collect everything about us. And when that’s hacked. And you can also go to a site online, Have I Been Pwnd? P-W-N-D, which is great. You can put in a password.

It tells you how many times it’s appeared on the dark web. So I would make the first steps fun. Just enact a couple of new things and then read up about the most current phishing attempts.

Because every state is getting hit, individuals are hit every day. Just start to be savvy, but do it in a way that isn’t overly burdensome or daunting for you.

Steve Grumbine:
00:38:07

I appreciate that.

You know, in my day job, we have a lot of phishing education that we have to go through and tailgating for physical security and other types of spoofing, and you name it. I mean, there’s a number of spearing attacks, text messages, you name it.

They always get you with that urgent request, “Quick do this or quick do that or hey, five minutes from now, if you don’t do this, you’re going to lose your house or whatever” and some unsuspecting person goes ahead and clicks on it and voila, they’re done. And there is no government guardrails because the government is in bed with these tech companies. The tech bros are large and in charge. I mean, they have a seat at the table, whereas Main Street does not.

And even the things they’re trying to do with crypto and stablecoins and all these other things, they come off on one hand as if they’re trying to do us all a favor and while simultaneously locking us in deeper and deeper and deeper.

I am curious, as we’re watching, for example, activists that are protesting in Chicago, or we’re watching activists that show up in New York City in your backyard, there’s lots and lots and lots of protests that go on and how these kinds of things… And I don’t think this is conspiratorial. I mean, it is a conspiracy, but I don’t think it’s like a conspiracy theory.

I think it’s a proven mode of operation where these private firms work hand in glove with the government and they use a backdoor approach to violating all of the constitutional rights you have. Because the only constitutional rights you have are really protection from the government, not protection from a private entity doing private things.

Because that right there is the hat tip to, you know, the wealthy white landowners from the original documents. How do you manage that? I mean, to me, quite frankly, Heidi, it feels like we are assuming good things in entities that are not doing good things.

We’re assuming good intentions from entities that don’t have good intentions, or we believe that they’ve just been captured, when in reality we’re just finally seeing their true essence. And I know that you probably have a much more favorable opinion than I do on this stuff, but I’m interested in hearing your well-researched thoughts.

Heidi Boghosian:
00:40:34

Oh, I’m completely in agreement with you. Look, years before the attacks of 9/11, business was coming up with surveillance and security devices to sell.

I think that 9/11 is when they really took off. But corporations, you know, I used to say, well, they were partnering with government. Well, I really don’t think there’s a line of demarcation there.

They’re operating really as a twin terror in terms of exercising control over everyone through monitoring, through these catchily named slogans, the war on whatever. So I have shifted how I look at things, especially since my most recent, almost falling for a con, in that my default is no longer trust.

My default is suspicion now.

I don’t think that’s defeatist because I do want to sort of emphasize that I think we have to fight with all our might against this hydra of evil forces. We still have neighbors, friends, we have communities. And I think it’s important to act locally.

What you spoke about at the beginning describes when one goes to a protest now, if people still want to, because it’s terrorizing, we’re bombarded with images of violence by police against citizens. First you have to make a decision how you want to get involved. And there are many ways.

If you don’t want to take to the streets to protest, donate money to a favorite group that is doing something to fight this. There are so many wonderful digital rights organizations that are keeping tracks of laws telling us which are good laws, bad laws.

They’ll make it easy by signing onto a form to send to your elected officials. That’s one way to get involved.

Letter writing, writing, op eds, talking to your neighbors, forming little coalitions if you don’t like something you’re seeing.

But I think importantly, if you do go into the streets, you know, make clever signs, have an exit route, be really aware of what’s happening around you.

So often people go to events and they’re focused on marching and they’re not looking at the lineup of cops at the next corner, hiding on the side street, which we see in Manhattan all the time. Personal safety comes first. But this is a time to make our voices heard. Because for years I’ve been saying we’re at a critical point.

I mean, right now things are beyond what we might have imagined years ago. So this really is a time to take action.

Just find the level of action that’s comfortable and safe for you, but always maybe push a little more outside your comfort zone.

Steve Grumbine:
00:43:32

I’m going to say something and I’m going to regret it. I am going to regret it, I’m sure. But I am a voracious reader.  And one of the things that I read recently was Che Guevara’s Guerrilla Warfare book, which is a staple of leftist circles going back a long time. But it’s also a staple for West Point and green berets and everybody else as a counterinsurgency to understanding the way rebels operate.

But when you think about operating, you know, to change the system, the system was built with self-reinforcing guardrails. You’ve got superdelegates within the primary process.

In fact, the Democratic Party fought successfully in federal court in Florida, or it’s just thrown out, that they have no responsibility whatsoever to voters to honor the outcomes of primaries, much less to conduct a primary, much less to direct funds for said candidate to said candidate through their van system and everything else their, their vote blue, check blue, whatever it’s called anymore.

And these were some of my first awakenings in this getting away from being what I call a normie to being a bit of an aware human being, surviving in this world and trying to make heads or tails of it. But that I found was rather frightening. The fact that because they are a private corporation, they have no responsibility whatsoever.

Their bylaws are their bylaws. They’re not legally bound by those bylaws and they can change them and choose to ignore them. They can do whatever they want.

But yet that is presented to us as our pathway to change.

And reality is that trying to get a mass movement of people together to stand for anything is a real challenge within this system because we have all been kind of led to believe, you know, get out the vote. We got the “I voted” sticker on our forehead, on and on and on.

But in reality, until you get to the actual national elections or whatever, and even those have been proven by Gillens and Page’s Princeton study that public opinion has approximately 0.0% impact on legislation. Like you feel it in your heart, you’re like, “yeah, it just doesn’t measure up right.”

But now you’ve got empirical evidence, you’ve got evidence that it’s rigged, that it’s not real, that we are living in, I hate to say a simulation, but we are living in a kind of a World Wrestling Federation style society now where we all go along because we’re afraid not to. We’re afraid not to go along, to get along.

Because once you scratch past the veneer of the world they’re trying to cultivate and you start seeing the diseased, toxic underbelly of this, it’s kind of impossible to put the lead back in the pencil. You know, it’s a rough, rough world. So people guard themselves from seeing these things to protect their psyche to, I don’t know, whatever.

Because beliefs, not facts, but beliefs, are a stronger, more compelling system to function in than actually knowing the truth. The truth is scary. It’s like, “Oh my God, what happens if I acknowledge this? If I acknowledge this, what does that do to my belief system?

Am I going to be dealing with more pain and suffering? Am I going to struggle more now that I’ve accepted the truth? What does this mean to me?” How would you advise somebody to think about that?

I mean, the things I’m saying, they may not be pretty, but I’ve done my homework, they’re real. What do you think about that?

People’s ability to process information when in fact their belief system depends on them not believing and not changing to stay where they are because of fear.

Heidi Boghosian:
00:47:17

This is a real problem.

I was thinking when you began addressing this, about a group of students in Rhode Island who felt they were not getting proper or adequate civics education in their school, their high school. So they sued the school district and said they were entitled to learn the basics of civics, rights and responsibilities of citizens.

And they reached a settlement in which the school district agreed to reinstate certain civics classes. They are monitoring this on a regular basis. I think they’re giving out a civics award once a year.

I love examples like that because in addition to everyone that you’re sort of addressing, backed by statistics. There are those who are willing to do something creative, to effect some kind of change, largely on a local level.

So it’s, you know, easier to take on a local deficit by being creative, pairing up with a nonprofit organization or an advocacy group that can help, as they did in this case, bring the lawsuit. I mean, some people have an instinct. They get angry when they see an injustice, and they immediately step into some kind of action.

I’ve got to say, we’re at the point where we need more people to acknowledge the potentially harmful or uncomfortable repercussions of taking a stand and doing something. But there are so many creative ways. We need to start using our minds.

Pair up with other people, brainstorm with ideas of how you can do something, no matter how small.

Steve Grumbine:
00:49:07

Agreed.

Heidi Boghosian:
00:49:08

Fighting a local injustice to take back our rights, whatever they were. But I still think that people respond to other people’s stories, and we need to share those stories, fight for what’s right. And you know what I hate?

All the mom-and-pop shops that were put out of business in my neighborhood by big corporate.

Steve Grumbine:
00:49:31

Walmart.

Heidi Boghosian:
00:49:32

Yeah. Target, all of those.

Steve Grumbine:
00:49:34

Yep.

Heidi Boghosian:
00:49:35

So I support all the local little ones. I try not to use Amazon.

You know, you support your independent businesses, get involved in your schools, other institutions to just get your voice out, however you do that. But people can no longer sit by and be fearful.

And honestly, this whole surveillance apparatus is designed to make us censor our behavior and our speech, to check ourselves so we don’t stand out. And I’m saying it’s time to stand out, people.

Steve Grumbine:
00:50:10

I’m with you.

You know, one of the things that you said that I want to make sure that I’m clear on here is while I may not believe that we can vote our way out of this, I do believe in the people. I do believe that we can use tactics. We don’t have to be one for one.

That’s why I brought up the Guerrilla Warfare book, is that even though I’ve never owned a gun in my life, I would never advocate for violence. You know, I mean, like, that’s not my M.O. at all. But I want to be crystal clear.

There are tactics, there are lessons to be learned from mass organizing strategies and understanding the current material conditions we face today. I think a dialectical perspective on how we got here might be the most important awakening. It’s not good enough to be educated.

You have to have an awakening.

And unfortunately, most people’s awakenings come when something horrible has happened to them, when they have a child that gets hurt, you know, they have a spouse that gets killed, they have a home that is seized, they have a car that is destroyed or their career is ruined, whatever. Then they have their awakening.

It’d be nice if we could let people learn vicariously and have an awakening based on someone else’s world as opposed to having to experience it themselves. But the fact is that voting is simply not enough. I don’t really think it does anything. But on the same hand, I’m not here to tell you don’t do it.

I’m here to tell you that I don’t think that’s where the change happens.

I think taking action, direct action, organizing really, truly, honestly, having a sober understanding of the forces that are against you and not Pollyanna-ing the political parties and making excuses for the destruction of Gaza. Because “…what do you want, Trump?” No. You stand for the right no matter what, period. You stand for the correct thing. Period.

And when it comes to making a stand, the kind of change you need to see, that we need to see, I don’t believe just happens at the ballot box. I think it really requires us to mentally, spiritually and emotionally embrace that we’re in a war whether we asked for it or not.

This is not business as usual. This is not a day in the life. This is a new reality that is an old reality that we’re just finally…

It’s kind of like you’re going into the Wizard of Oz and you finally get into the great Emerald Castle or whatever, and you pull back the curtain and there’s this little elf pulling the stuff. We are finally seeing behind the curtain a little bit. And we’ve had moments during COVID where we got to see behind it.

We had moments during the TikTok live streaming of a genocide in Gaza where we got to have a look. We’ve had peeks behind the curtain multiple different times.

Little things like the ability to conjure up enough money to keep us staying at home and closing businesses down during the pandemic. And guess what? We didn’t go broke because the country creates its own money. Stop believing that the country is broke.

The country is a creator of its currency. So we have to really, really, in my opinion, ratchet up our direct action, ratchet up our organizing.

Otherwise, people are just going to go stand in line, get an “I Voted” sticker on their forehead, brag at brunch that they went and voted for… you know, John Fetterman, who is now saying Donald Trump should be given the Peace Prize. What did that get you right? “Oh, gosh, aren’t I happy I voted for John Fetterman?”

You know, these are things that I think that if people stop hero worshiping, stop celebrating rich people, stop glamorizing the elite and start realizing that there is a real class war going on right now and that these surveillance tactics are a tool of oligarchy. They’re a tool of that elite suppression of our rights and of our lives. I think then we have a chance.

But the more we glamorize, like, fake things. We put our hope in false gods, false idols, false outcomes based on false tactics that are sold to us just to manufacture consent and keep us engaged in the lie.

You know, I think of the Truman Show where Jim Carrey was living his life and everybody else knew it was a lie about him, and he just bounced around. He finally figured out, “Oh, my God, it’s a lie.” You know, it’s kind of like a Westworld moment, if you remember that.

This feels very much like a moment where we need to get very sober very fast, have very frank and honest conversations with one another, and work together. Vote to your heart’s content. Vote twice on Sunday. Whatever it is you want to do with your voting habits, do your thing.

But in order for the change to happen, I believe that it takes place through community impact and through direct action and through organizing. Your thoughts as we check out here.

Heidi Boghosian:
00:55:07

What a wonderful way to end, because I love direct action. My organization supports it with money. I love grassroots organizing.

The grassroots organizing is behind some of the most significant movements in this country that have fought for social change to benefit the rights of all and for equality. I’m going to mention quickly a book that a friend of mine wrote called The Young Lords: A Radical History.

The Young Lords were a political group in New York and Chicago, often compared to the Black Panthers as the Puerto Rican counterpart.

They engaged in colorful, clever street actions and made enormous reforms in New York City in how healthcare access to economically disadvantaged communities was improved. They had a garbage offensive action when their neighborhoods weren’t having garbage pickups. I think that we have to be creative.

We have to be fearless as best we can. And we have to realize we are the ones who rightfully dictate our country’s trajectory.

And we have to be vocal, and that means going beyond our comfort zone and fighting for the values that so many of us were brought up to think this country stands for.

We haven’t seen those practiced in many years, but I think that everyone taking some kind of action, being clever, bringing humor, being willing to work on an issue that isn’t as polarizing as some of the big ones we know about now, but things that will improve your local community and then sharing word about them that with photos and clever mottos. It’s time to step up, people.

Steve Grumbine:
00:57:00

I love it. Thank you so much. I really appreciate it. Heidi, where can we find more of your work and tell us a little bit about your radio program.

Heidi Boghosian:
00:57:07

I am a co-host for 20 years now of lawanddisorder.org. It’s a civil liberties radio show that airs every week and on about 140 stations around the country and its podcast. My website is just heidiboghosian.com and I try to keep that updated.

Steve Grumbine:
00:57:29

Well, we are going to be putting your books on our bookshelf@realprogressives.org and I hope between our relationship with Project Censored and your own grassroots network, that we’re able to get this podcast out far and wide. Because I think there’s some really important information that we were able to cover today. I’m sure somebody’s gonna say, “hey, you forgot about this.”

And you know what? Maybe we’ll have you back on another time so we can find out what those things we missed were and we can cover them next time. You are a great guest.

I really appreciate you joining me today, Heidi.

Heidi Boghosian:
00:58:01

Thank you so much.

Steve Grumbine:
00:58:03

All right, folks, my name is Steve Grumbine. I am the host of Macro N Cheese and the founder of this nonprofit, Real Progressives. We survive on your donations, not somebody else’s donations.

Because don’t believe the hype. They didn’t donate. We’re surviving on your donations.

So if you believe the content that we produce is valuable, that we’re working hard as volunteers trying to produce this information for you to help keep you in the know, your donations are going to help us with that process. We really need your help. You can go to our website, realprogressives.org there’s a dropdown menu. Please select donate.

Or you can go to our patreon@patreon.com/realprogressives or you can go to our Substack, realprogressives.substack.com and become a monthly donor there as well. Folks, it’s that time of year, so if you become a donor, these are tax deductible.

I hate to ask you for the purpose of tax deduction, but my goodness, we need the money. We need the help.

So with that, on behalf of my guest, Heidi Boghosian, myself, Steve Grumbine, the podcast Macro N Cheese and the nonprofit Real Progressives, we are out of here.

End Credits:
00:59:22

Production, transcripts, graphics, sound engineering, extras, and show notes for Macro N Cheese are done by our volunteer team at Real Progressives, serving in solidarity with the working class since 2015. To become a donor please go to patreon.com/realprogressives, realprogressives.substack.com, or realprogressives.org.