Steve clemons and i have some questions as we say goodbye to 2019 what were the big stories that affected us this past year and what are the big issues that may hit us in 2020 lets get to the bottom line. What are your 21800 out to be people took to the streets across Asia Latin America and the arab world hoping for change the images from beirut in hong kong and caracas have been moving just really riveting the United States and china probably the worlds 2 anchor economies today settled in for what looks like a phantom a relationship for the long term and identity politics took hold around the world with more and more people looking inward and turning against others in their own societies in washington the muller investigation into donald trump came and went a ukraine american scandal erupted and the american president has been impeached so what do we have to look forward to as the world turns to 2020 fortunately we have 3 people in the room who have all the answers sherrilyn harley bone a republican strategist who heads project 21 of the black Leadership Network ryan grim the Washington Bureau chief for the intercept and the author of weve got people from Jesse Jackson to Alexandria Ocasio Cortez the end of big money and the rise of a movement and a fellow at the middle east institute and communication strategist that it landed 57 thank you all so much for being with us i am not going to show my cards yet on what we are going to call the biggest stories of the year but shelley i want to start with you as you look at the year what were the things that resonated with you most as you look back. The last 12 months i would say impeachment which obviously is going to carry into 2020 id say the College Admissions scandal oh i thought that was pretty important when had a normal i mean just for our audience a College Admission scandal where folks were paying yet to get into very hot out of university right and they were paying and got caught paying they were also paying people for their children to take their s. A. T. Tests they were also pulled into a lot of things that a lot of hollywood movie star lots of hollywood movie stars who did a little bit of time and that also too is the mother of an athlete people were lying and saying that their children played cruel when they did not so it wrapped in a whole lot of deception and finally i think one of the fun stories of the year is the rise of tictac and then all of the t. V. Time to well its i want to do i want to do tick tock i want to all do do them all but i want to rhyme where do you where is your map on cheryl lynns top stories of the year im not sure that impeachment will end up when we look back on it being that that big of a deal lets say it falls apart in the senate if he gets acquitted fairly quickly when nancy pelosi gets around to sending the articles over i think theyll probably be some people who over determine its importance based on the Election Results you know if he if he loses everybody will say well it was because he was impeached if he wins will say well pietschmann just drove him to victory by inspiring his supporters when you know neither of those things are probably true at the polls are showing very Little Movement in peoples attitudes towards trump you have this absolutely remarkable situation where 50 percent of the country in polls says trump should be impeached and removed from office and you have a clear path to reelection thats the scenario that there is simultaneously true i mean it was interesting with donald trump he had 42 percent Approval Rating at the beginning of last year and he got 42. 00. Cent Approval Rating today so given all of this exhausting stuff thats happened at least in washington the last year it hasnt moved numbers and theres got to be a nontrivial number of people in there who support his removal from office and also will vote for reelection but thats only way those so what is your joke like for the biggest stories of the year and i think its the protests around the world because i think were were at it were at a place were in an arc in history here where you know you had the post world war 2 kind of flowering of democracy and the clash with the with the soviet union which then ends you know late eightys or early early ninetys and i think well look back at this as the period where were now sorting out kind of what the next era looks like and so are we going to look back and think of this as a time as like 848 where there were all these protests around the world simultaneously but most of them beaten back so i think its really important so what youre saying is the popular moves weve seen in hong kong and weve seen in caracas we were just talking about a moment ago those are happening right alongside essentially ignatius nationalism White Nationalism coming on and im interested in how you see both of these going do you see a tilt towards either the victor or bonds of the world and and. You know i you know i will tell you my biggest story of the year is since john 1000000 people. Essentially setting camps so how its going i think the or bonds of the world have the upper hand partly because a lot of them are in power already and partly because just like in 848. 00 that you had all of these protests around the world there was no unifying ideology behind them whether they were happening in china in the europe or the or the United States. It was kind of an incoherent anger against the the regimes of the systems that were in power but nothing really connected them. I think that helped repel them and youre seeing that that same thing now the difference is that the orbits of the world have this Surveillance Technology do you think realty to. Be rude and some of what weve seen erupting in the middle east in another wave of demands for better governance and better lives im not even my friend on to here yet but do you think thats part of the same thing or do you think the middle east is different no i think thats you know i think theres a huge part of it and the middle east i think is the canary in the coal mine on the fake news front which youre seeing all over the place in bolivia that. We dont walk into the president ial palaces anymore and put a bullet in the head of the president or carry him out and arrest him now there are these sophisticated propaganda campaigns that push big news into the narrative in this case it was theres going to be election for others going to be Election Fraud and then the oas comes out and says there was Election Fraud and people pour into the streets like happened in egypt and as happened elsewhere and then autocrats authoritarian regimes take advantage of those of those popular movements so youre seeing it be very difficult for people to sort out you know truth from fiction and you know right wing populism from left wing populism and that just benefits i think right wing populist because theyre the ones that have the resources in the end to kind of stick it out onto what youre look like so similar so i agree completely. And while all aspects whether its in south america or middle east or even the United States have their own specific context there is an underlying Common Thread among all of them which is that system is neglecting people systems that are leaving people behind whether its or the Credit Systems in the middle east whether its democracies like you know the u. S. With being in kind of anti establishment and whether its going right or left i think the question is he the right have been able to capitalize on this and get into power like weve seen in the u. S. Break that were seeing in the middle east with the repression and the pushback against protesters in south america how can we get. The end to some of the cement aspect policies and political leaders who actually have the interest of the people at heart into these this is the power i think this is the challenge right now and that goes one of the few examples where the anti establishment but im going to push you i mean thats always the tension between people and governments and that drives a lot of change so what makes this time unique and different from your perspective i think its unique in the sense that its were seeing the fruits of globalization but in the means of Mass Mobilization so were seeing mobilization across continents where people you know like people in lebanon can see and read whats happening in hong kong and can relate and are protesting and serving the same symbols so the so ideas are just flying across the world like weve never seen before and so its just inevitable that eventually something is going to move just said something that really struck me and i think with ryan talking about the contest if you will between populism which can have a very dark side and essentially movements protesting governments that are abusive to them and abusive to their needs you talked about ideas flying around the internet we also. Going to try and see if this interesting connection between bad stuff and potentially liberating stuff hows that going i mean this is the key question and i think this is this something we need to keep our eyes on Going Forward this whole battle with facebook and the googles and i think its him to regulate the internet what does that actually mean and were seeing you know india having internet blackouts of seeing iran have internet blackouts the need to repress and weve got a tick tock so if you go a bit here to your 3rd item to talk share with the story so i mean its again. Of course is controlled by the chinese which brings in another whole similar element that talking about again its fake news its the dissemination of information and how it how it impacts the world how impacts peoples. How what type of information people get through these sources how that causes them to act i mean it really just exists to remind the audience what happened with ticktock is that a that a woman who is being interviewed on to talk shared much of what his now been revealed and leaked out about one and a half 1000000 people perhaps more were being set aside in education camps in sin john these are we and others its a horrific thing but then also the Technology Scene and the facial Recognition Software and the use and abuse of this technology by the state against their own exit that is the tick tock tick tock and also its all these different me. That kids because you know obviously adults around the world are using up but really the teens are you seeing it and its all these different means that defile up and they and other people around the world are developing the means off of one thing thats put on tick that so again its this per base of use of technology and all these different facets whether it is protests whether its just regular Popular Culture and again when you put that against the backdrop ongoing issues with facebook and google and all these other you know various types of technology that well the way i just i dont think 5 years you know the exact question of whether the facebook platforms and other monopoly platforms are going to become tick tocks and weve seen it happen one day during my show jack dorsey of twitter came out and banned all political this is where you hear about other businesses share a base book decidedly decided not to do that and not only did not do that made a statement in congress that they were not going to fact check politicians running does that concern you. That particular part doesnt i dont i dont want zucker bird in fact checking. Politicians frankly now it gets much more confusing when you get into deep fakes and its actual doctored clearly fake video you know should that be taken down. In bolivia though for instance a bunch of mosques politicians in a party have had their accounts their Facebook Accounts taken down and their message and their Facebook Messages they are using human get blocked and so you have you have this disparate power going on within within facebook and thats the real thing that i think people need to contemplate when theyre calling for facebook to ban speech or ban ads is that its going to be used against people with less power by people with with more power let me jump in to chew other stories that i see out there that are both erupting this week but they represent big things that have happened during this year today Dennis Miller the c. E. O. Of boeing just resigned over the 737 max issue and this could be a story of taking on big corporate interests brian youve written about this and the 2nd is the sentencing to death of 5 individuals who were involved in journalist. Murder ryan what do these 2 stories represent for you and are they big or will they also fall by the wayside as we look back at the boeing one is big just as a matter of economics boeing canceling production of its 737. 00 or postponing it indefinitely has an actual measurable impact on the American Economy and probably. The Global Economy as well what i think people are missing is that its its a story thats tied to kind of american decline and rot and corruption. Has talked about this in his new book goliath about monopolies that the u. S. Doesnt really build things anymore and so the u. S. Can build a plane anymore and also and it ties into the corruption because regulators you know had evidence that this. It was not safe and kind of allowed to go anyway and it has ties to to the to runaway greed where they saw they sold a plane 737 with an optional feature that you needed to buy if you didnt want to crash that is that is insane and so some. Airlines will will will just take the basic model that youve got that doesnt have this feature that controls for this problem that youve identified that will plunge your plane into the ground if something goes wrong and so without that feature a couple 100 people died and theyre shutting it down and its not clear when it will come back up so its kind of a symptom of all of these different problems i think is that something that kind of ties into everything i think weve discussed we will discuss in the next few minutes which is at the core of this is the absence of regulation whether its talking about facebook and google where were talking about boeing and the Airline Industry with a complete absence of regulation from a u. S. Government so. That the coal there is regulation that is it does strike me that when donald trump came into office he said for every regulation the United States put in place he will remove 2 that may be there i mean this reminds of other things hes done of removing president obamas clean power regulations or a lot of other than a sort of occurred which i know has taking us into a topic that we havent discussed which is climate but before that i want to get into Jamal Khashoggi and the state of journalists in journalism i know Glenn Greenwald of the inner 7 this felt under pressure from the brazilian government and i i do think myself its a big story of journalists under siege sherrilyn in your world does that resonate well as well and i think just in anybodys world i mean this is one example where we have you know social media has not been able to give us information i mean were reading the stories and were like well who are the people convicted we still dont have that information so theyve succeeded and you know making sure that theyre clamping down. Media that they are keeping things under wraps and that you know mohamed still hes coming out smelling like a flower because he said the mohammed bin salma yeah not all mohamed you know not all know what. Hes saying well you know i didnt have anything to do with it and even the cia analysts and turkish officials are saying well its pretty hard that he didnt know what was going on but right let me get you this is it you know i think just very quickly on the side of the case which was actually a case in the year before but weve seen this proceed as a comment on on journalism under under pressure around the world today is that a big story because i know i read in the intercept about some of Glenn Greenwalds problems you know but how do you and jim rise in one of your rights as well if one of the New York Times certainly is the powerful have been pushing on journalists you know for on for hundreds of years and Thomas Jefferson i think said that you know that the 1st man is not worth the paper its written on it you have to have the culture around it to support that there are plenty of countries that have laws that support journalists but if the culture doesnt also support journalists then those laws dont matter and what what we saw ironically is that the world does still care and i think and i think saudi arabia miscalculated they kind of convinced themselves of their own fake news that showed he wasnt a journalist that he was just a Muslim Brotherhood fanatic conspiracist and and if they killed him they could get away with it the the reaction of the world i think showed them showed them thats why they had to find 5 patsies to execute. Now it also shows that you know a year plus later the corporate world is looking for ways to forgive and forget and move on but it did have an impact and in brazil in the same way you know glenn was under extraordinary assault hes he still is its not particularly safe but but the Supreme Court stepped in Tucker Carlson even fox news host put out of state. Defending Glenn Greenwalds right to journalism i dont agree with most of what glenn says but i respect his journalism and nobody should be attacking the free press and i think things like that that