SUBSCRIBE TO OUR FREE NEWSLETTER
Daily news & progressive opinion—funded by the people, not the corporations—delivered straight to your inbox.
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
To donate by check, phone, or other method, see our More Ways to Give page.
Daily news & progressive opinion—funded by the people, not the corporations—delivered straight to your inbox.
The Biden campaign called the felonious former president's threat to jail Jill Biden and Hillary Clinton the "latest proof that he will do anything to regain power, preserve his own freedom, and seek revenge."
U.S. President Joe Biden's reelection campaign on Wednesday slammed an "unhinged" threat by former President Donald Trump—the presumptive 2024 Republican nominee—to imprison political opponents including the president, First Lady Jill Biden, and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
In a Tuesday Newsmax interview, Trump said that it is "very possible" that Democrats could face prosecution if he returns to the White House next January.
Claiming his conviction in New York state last month on 34 felony charges related to the falsification of business records to cover up hush money payments during the 2016 campaign was political persecution by Democrats, Trump said, "Does that mean the next president does it to them?"
"And wouldn't it be really bad like, as an example, Hillary with the hammering of her cellphones and all of the things she did, but wouldn't it be terrible to throw the president's wife and the former secretary of state—you think of it, the former secretary of state, but the president, the president's wife, into jail?" he asked.
Trump, while arguing he didn’t jail Hillary Clinton because it would’ve set a bad precedent, alludes he may need to jail political opponents:
“Wouldn't it be terrible to throw the president's wife…into jail? ... It's very possible that it's going to have to happen to them.” pic.twitter.com/OZKFBpp0jL
— The Recount (@therecount) June 5, 2024
"Wouldn't that be a terrible thing? But they want to do it. So, you know, it's like it's, it's a terrible, terrible path that they're leading us to," Trump added. "And it's very possible that it's gonna have to happen to them."
Earlier this week, Trump denied ever calling for Clinton to be locked up, a claim belied by the many times he repeated his "lock her up" mantra during and after the 2016 campaign, when she was the Democratic nominee.
Responding to the Newsmax interview, Biden campaign spokesperson James Singer said, "Reeling and increasingly unhinged from his own felony convictions, Trump raising plans to jail his political opponents is just the latest proof that he will do anything to regain power, preserve his own freedom, and seek revenge on anyone who opposes him."
Trump still faces 54 federal and state criminal charges across three cases related to his alleged mishandling of classified documents and attempts to subvert the 2020 presidential election, including by fomenting the January 6, 2021 Capitol insurrection.
"Trump is pledging to rule as a dictator on 'day one,' punish his enemies, embrace violence done on his behalf, and warns of a 'bloodbath' if he loses," Singer added. "The warning signs are clear for all to see. Trump is a danger to our Constitution, a threat to our democracy, and so consumed by his own failed, diminished state he has gone off the deep end."
Trump has reportedly also sought advice about how he could jail journalists if he is reelected.
Trump's threat to jail his foes is relatively tame in comparison with what some of his prominent supporters want to do to Democrats. Laura Loomer, a far-right anti-Muslim activist, said following Trump's conviction that "we actually used to have... punishment for treason in this country."
"Should Democrats be in jail? No question. When Donald Trump gets elected, should he start locking them up? No question. Should there be lists of Democrats who need to go to jail? One hundred percent," Loomer—who came close to winning her 2022 congressional race—said during the "Timcast IRL" podcast.
"Not just jail, they should get the death penalty," she added.
Loomer's "Timcast IRL" episode was subsequently removed from the podcast's website and social media platforms.
Carry on, Students Interrupted: in precisely the way Vermeer’s painted girl averts her gaze and in so doing shuts down the imperious authority that looms—not in a leisurely way but steadfastly, as committed choice.
Johannes Vermeer was a Dutch painter who made profound narrative images, pictures set in the stoniness of dry paint that nevertheless contain movement. They have trajectories, like stories do. One of his best-known is “Girl Interrupted at Her Music” (1658-61). This one, permanently installed at The Frick Collection in upper Manhattan, pictures a girl of perhaps 16 or 17 years who is being schooled presumably on the cittern, a Renaissance era guitar. She is educated by a man many years her senior, a man who noticeably presides over her. He presides, that is, rather too much, is both too encroached on her personal space and too wrapped around and curtaining her. As to the girl, Vermeer’s subject, she looks the other way. For all her tutor’s efforts to crowd and dominate, to train her focus on matters he brings to hand, this girl is occupied by some other matter, indeed some other urgency. Whatever crisis that may be, it is perceptible in her facial expression and in the intense, almost painful craning of her neck, her gaze demonstratively turned toward her viewer.
That Girl is Vermeer’s subject; and she is not being schooled; rather she has refused the education imposed upon her; rather, she is saying something, but what? That she looks away is not subtle. No—this girl’s rejection of the authority swathing her, blocking her light, is sharp and jarring. It is as if she is interrupted by something truly ghastly, something that calls to her in the voice of Antigone, something like a genocide. Whatever that “something” is, the Dutch painter has taken pains to show that she considers it vastly more critical than whatever her too-invasive education concerns on this day.
That is to say, Vermeer’s “Girl Interrupted” is a metonym for Generation Z. Her posture in relation to her education matches their posture in relation to theirs. She, a simulacrum of today’s encamped student. Her male instructor, stand-in for the authoritarian institutions comprising today’s university system and its failed leadership. Certainly Vermeer was thinking about power, about sexual and institutional politics, in applying his brush strokes to this canvas. Certainly nearly every U.S. college where encampments have been installed has not seen fit to tolerate their students’ insistent focus on Palestine, their unbroken, virulent concern for the genocide in progress, a genocide that now advances into and ups its own appalling ante in Rafah.
Girls interrupted, gazes averted, necks craned, in your strength, your lionhearted giftedness, your principled politics, be undaunted as you herald the righteous call to justice, humanity, life, and, most importantly, to love.
And now they are stopped—by Harvard’s refusal to let 13 graduates graduate. Harmed, physically and viscerally, by an extremist attack at UCLA that was allowed to carry on for hours; the next day, adding more insult to more injury, the police came back to brutalize the students once again. Harmed, by the felony charges unleashed on them by the combined force of the administration of the City University of New York and the state—the deceitful, violent lawlessness of the Eric Adams administration. Harmed for life in being given criminal records unlawfully. The lives of those students have been cruelly interrupted because they interrupted the power the institution holds over and drapes around them, as in the painting. But those punishing disciplinary interruptions lose all legitimacy because their purpose is to continue a genocide. No criminal at all, today’s student is criminalized because they protest mass slaughter and manufactured hunger. Meanwhile, their college leaders remain too gutless themselves to speak out about that which they know to be wrong. Wrong unequivocally, wrong under the rule of law, wrong under Antigone’s natural law.
One encampment sign reads, “They’re afraid of how strongly we love.” Indeed, they are. What Vermeer represents in a visual narrative, the encampments represent: a cessation of the ordinary, they take participants out of entrenched societal and political structures, outside the schema of daily life. The individuals external to them experience a similar effect, if in reverse. As occurred in the time of Occupy Wall Street, outsiders, neighbors complained of interruption, disturbance, and aggravation inexplicable even to themselves. They do not know why they feel annoyed and call the police and file that complaint, but they do. Perhaps it is precisely because, like Occupy, the encampments constitute a substantial and sustained interruption of the everyday, perhaps it is because they are liminal spaces, uncharted and unscripted but also constructive, energized, hopeful, bastions for the flourishing of art as well as alternate forms of co-mutuality and education. Not just today but throughout the history of protest, encampment participants “look away” like the painted girl, their spontaneous consent undone for a time, the authority others hold over them interrupted, by them, if only momentarily.
As Judith Butler wrote, “There are other passages.” Other ways to live, other social formations, other ordinaries, futurities, visions, dreams, worlds that are possible. That is a critical resonance emanating from these encamped, these “squatter” protests; those who experienced them are speaking and writing about just that—the magic, the novel kinship, the distinct mutualities of those spaces. Clearly today’s protester-student has a vision for the future that is vastly unlike those projected and hoped for and molded by today’s politicians and corporate CEOs. It keeps being said, though never proved and never documented, that today’s college students “don’t know what they’re doing.” (The coward’s response to courageousness.) That they are brainwashed, duped, led around by the nose by we-don’t-know-who, that they’ve been intentionally “radicalized” by their faculties or by we-don’t-know-who.
Hillary Clinton, and many of her generation and her political ilk, fail to understand this, fail again by denigrating these student leaders, by declaring that they “don’t know very much.” What a shock it was to hear those words given so much evidence to the contrary, given the intellectual acuity and articulacy of so many college students that is visible and audible literally everywhere right now. They don’t know very much, she insisted, about history and not just U.S. history but that of “many areas of the world,” quote, unquote. So, “history” is lost on these “alarmingly” “radicalized” students, so says Clinton, students who’ve shown, who keep showing that they know a great deal about that subject especially.
Those comments stand as some of the most embarrassingly ironic of the moment, for it is Clinton herself who misrepresents history, shows herself to be the ignorant person in the room by admonishing Palestine for not having accepted the “come-ons” of her husband and boiling down a complex political quagmire to the simple “failure” to swallow the political suggestions of a place called the United States which has colluded in Israel’s oppression of Palestine ever since LBJ. Everything would be fine in Palestine, she protests, if only they’d done as Bill told them to do. In this, Clinton appears not just politically tone deaf but also unethical in giving herself “time” to lambast protesting students who risk everything in the fight for justice but in finding no time, not one half of one minute, to comment on the genocide itself. No—bringing only condescension, condemnation, and a grotesque display of supremacism, Clinton makes no space in her discourse to call for a cease-fire, for the resumption of peace talks, to advocate for anything humane or anything at all. A woman who considered herself fit to run this country, who once held the post of secretary of state, does not see fit to call out war crimes committed with relentless abandon against the people of occupied Palestine.
So much for ethical, effective leadership that might have come from my generation. But that genocide is, as we know, the entire point. My generation, my Union, the PSC CUNY—one more exemplar of the matter at hand. Last Thursday a public meeting of the delegate assembly was held for which one agenda item was the resolution calling for a number of important actions, including divestiture. It was said by self-identified “progressive” delegates that the resolution then before the union “went too far.” Why—because, in solidarity with students the world over who risk it all in encamped protests that likewise make this demand, it calls for the union to call for City University to divest from Israel. (The union isn’t listening to our students, the constituency the entire university edifice was built to serve, probably because, like Hillary, they believe the students “do not know very much” despite being those students’ teachers.) Demonstrated last Thursday was clear evidence of a concerning deafness, like Clinton’s, to what is happening in the world today and why. That the union leadership suffers deafnesses and blindnesses, further illustrated in the president’s choice to speak first and against the resolution. But how, pray tell, could the resolution have had any chance of succeeding then? That generational deaf, blind gap was demonstrated finally in a 114-40 “no” vote last Thursday.
The union that is supposed to protect and defend the major share of the labor pool at the largest public university in the world voted, by a wide margin, to not divest from extermination. That a leadership overhaul is necessary is both a given and a matter for another time. For now, let it be clear that we either were not paying attention or we forgot that previous generations have not had, have not shown the boldness and dedication of Gen Z in response to the 76 year bludgeoning of Palestine. Let it be clear that we either did not bother to know or we forgot—now eight months into merciless, pitiless, heartless slaughter and starvation now augmented, shockingly, in the very place Israel has said all throughout this horror was safe, Rafah—that for several dreadful grief-stricken months those same students had been protesting, holding rallies, sit-ins, die-ins, shouting out to the political world until their throats were so raw they could no longer speak—Stop the Genocide! Palestinian Lives Matter! At first they appealed to the world’s conscience, assumed that crying out for a genocide to end—the unambiguously righteous call, the unequivocal Antigonean claim—would be heeded. But they were wrong. We were wrong. I waited for that; I was wrong.
No—the world was and remains deaf to justice, its political leadership carrying on even now in smug barbarity—supplying the weapons, stood still now, with almost 40,000 dead in Gaza, in solidarity with the racist, rogue, fascist regime now governing Israel. It became clear, painfully, only after those several months that no one but no one was listening, that the global community of nation-states—other than those countable on one hand—was ignoring all the protests and all the protesters, the voice of the people those thousands of politicians were elected to represent, summarily erased.
As occurred in the movement to free South Africa, today’s struggle has become about divestiture. Its central call, now: “Disclose! Divest! We will not stop! We will not rest!” Giving up not being an option for Gen Z, the struggle was forced to morph, to train its focus, in response to the fact that any world actor or agent with the capacity to stop the ethnic cleansing in progress, to render unlawful and restrict the supply of armaments or intervene to achieve a cease-fire, failed to or, like Secretary Clinton, has been unwilling. With unconscionable arrogance, with a ruthless kind of viciousness not seen in international politics in over half a century, they simply and entirely disregard the residents of planet Earth. We, the world, the people en masse, call and call and call again for the killing to STOP. But our elected leaders, our university leaders turn from us—their backs to us, their stance one of absolute denial: See no, hear no evil, their only protest: “What genocide?”
That most of those leaders ought to resign, give over their posts to student and other Gen Z leaders—to Shruthi Kumar, to Maha Zeidan, to Britt Munro or Lily Greenberg Call or Sally Abed—goes without saying. Today’s student activists are not perfect, the encampments, not perfect, mistakes are made in any endeavor, be it political or otherwise. But Gen Z is not failing in the most vital way: to answer the call of justice, the call of their moment and of the present century. The civil rights challenge of our epoch is twofold: abolition—from mass incarceration, racism and (racial)capital, the migrant crisis, the climate emergency—and, the abolition of Palestine. What Clinton, a self-identified feminist, fails to recognize is that today’s feminists are not just educated, they are also intersectional thinkers, which means they have a keener, more nuanced understanding of matters political, social, interpersonal, and historical. They know, for example, that Covid-19 and climate change and their and their children’s futures are inextricably tangled and that the urgency of the triptych is lost on many of their leaders whether in the educational or the political sector. They understand that we cannot separate the overturning of Roe v. Wade from the deaths and the woundings and the chronic and generational trauma of all those mothers and grandmothers in Gaza, all those little Gazan “girls,” their lives more than interrupted more than brutally. Today’s feminists know, and this is perhaps Clinton’s most disgraceful oversight, that anti-racist struggle is of a piece with the struggle for Palestinian rights, safety, and sovereignty; that the loss of affirmative action is tethered to the utterly despicable loss of life in Gaza, to the fact of more than 80,000 wounded, to all of what has been interrupted for them for the remainder of their lives if they survive their injuries.
Today’s feminist is not “Hillary Clinton.” Her name is Shruthi Kumar, who gave a brilliant valedictorian speech at Harvard in solidarity with the 13 prohibited from graduating. Her name is Anne Jones, an 82 year old British woman who cycled up a treacherous mountain to raise funds to build life in Gaza. Her name is Maha Zeidan, a young woman just graduated from the University of Toledo College of Law who gave one of the most splendid graduation speeches I’ve ever heard. Her name is Lily Greenberg Call, perhaps the bravest, smartest, and most ethical member of the Biden administration, now resigned from it, resigned over Gaza. Her name is Britt Munro. Her name is Serene Jones. Their name is Judith Butler. Their names are Maya Peretz-Ruiz and Sally Abed. (Also on the leadership of Standing Together, Sally was the first Israeli woman of Palestinian descent to be elected to a council post—still, the newly elected representative from Haifa gets arrested at a protest.) Their names are Rula Daood and Alon-Lee Green. His name is Motaz Azaiza. His name is Michael Roth. His name is Macklemore. Their names are Mark Ruffalo and Jonathan Glazer. Her name is Alana Hadid. She is a peacemaker; they are peacemakers; their name is withheld: “‘They want to split us up and divide us, because they’re afraid of what we can accomplish with consistency, with principle, and an unrelenting focus on our demands,’ said a student who declined to give their name.” All these feminists, these “girls” interrupted whether girls, boys, or trans persons, they interrupt their own lives, their own educations to stop a genocide they cannot abide.
Let it be clear the degree to which my generation is failing, not just failing students and not only by not understanding or not respecting them, but failing simply and purely—politically, morally, failing justice full stop. Let it be clear that the Good Fight of the 21st century is being fought and won by Generation Z. Hillary Clinton, the PSC CUNY, and anyone else who may still feel uncertain—hear this: As persons of conscience in a world that has misplaced its moral center, it is our responsibility, no—it is our duty to support them. Those who remain humane in this time of inhumanity, those with eyes wide open, who listen with all of who we are—mind, spirit, body—we hear you, Generation Z, we recognize the sacrifices you make and you risk. (Remembering Whitman: We “are with you, you men and women of a generation.”) You are breathtaking, to us, in fact. No—not because you are flawless, because you are fearless, because you are persons of conscience, and you are right. You are in the right and on the right side of history. Carry on, Students Interrupted: in precisely the way Vermeer’s painted girl averts her gaze and in so doing shuts down the imperious authority that looms—not in a leisurely way but steadfastly, as committed choice—whatever you do, Gen Z: stay the course of your chosen interruption, your backs turned to the normalization of brutality. (Whitman again: “We do not cast you aside” but “plant you permanently within us.”) Girls interrupted, gazes averted, necks craned, in your strength, your lionhearted giftedness, your principled politics, be undaunted as you herald the righteous call to justice, humanity, life, and, most importantly, to love. (Whitman, once more: “Appearances now or henceforth, indicate what you are.”) Show the world the way, build the future you want to see, make this planet the place you willingly choose to occupy.
And Occupy it. Remember, because you looked the other way, you are driving our fallen world toward the good and the just, not away from it. Toward love, not away from it. We—Hillary Clinton’s generation, my generation, my father’s generation—have failed. Yours has not. Turning your gaze, like that Girl, you turn the gaze of the world, you force the people, finally, at last, once and for all, to see Rafah.
As Netanyahu spews his lies.
And the struggle continues.
And the death toll rises, day by day.
And the beatdown of Palestine goes on…
Her recent placing of all the blame on the Palestinians is typical of inside-the-Beltway Goy Zionism, and is profoundly ahistorical.
Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton delivered herself of some ahistorical and distorted remarks about Palestine on Morning Joe, maintaining that the young people protesting the Gaza atrocities do not know history.
Ms. Clinton’s self-serving description of the 2000 Camp David process has been debunked by many historians. In fact, her husband Bill Clinton promised in the Oslo Accords in 1993 that Israel would withdraw from Gaza and the West Bank by 1997. He then allowed Benjamin Netanyahu to sabotage that process and allowed the Israelis to double the number of squatters they sent in to the Palestinian West Bank to steal property and terrorize people. When Netanyahu went out and Ehud Barak came in, Clinton sponsored negotiations, but Barak was maddeningly vague about what he would offer and never produced a text that Yasser Arafat could sign. It is not clear why Arafat needed to sign anything more; he already signed the Oslo treaty, which should have resulted in an Israeli withdrawal that never came. Soon thereafter Barak lost to Ariel Sharon, who was as determined to sabotage any land for peace deal as Netanyahu had been, and he wrecked the whole process.
Her placing of all the blame on the Palestinians is typical of inside-the-Beltway Goy Zionism, and is profoundly ahistorical. The young people can’t be fooled by these glib words. They see what they see.
I have also never understood the trope that Israel made generous offers to the Palestinians (it never did) but that the Palestinians rejected them, and therefore the Palestinians should be deprived of all their basic rights forever. What is this, an Original Sin doctrine? If the negotiations of 2000 fell through, why couldn’t they have been picked back up in 2001? It is because the Israelis wouldn’t pick them back up, and went on to steal vast swathes of private Palestinian property and to brutalize the occupied population.
That is, in understanding these events, values as well as historical understanding are important, and I fear the Clintons have never had much of either.
In contrast, Irish American rapper Macklemore (Benjamin Hammond Haggerty, b. 1983) dropped his single, “Hind’s Hall,” on May 10. He is donating the proceeds to United Nations relief work in Gaza.
It may be the most powerful anti-war statement in music since Bob Dylan’s protest songs in the early 1960s against the nuclear arms race between the U.S. and the Soviet Union. And the song displays a firm knowledge of what exactly has been done in history to the Palestinians.
The reference is to Columbia University’s Hamilton Hall, which students occupied briefly and renamed “Hind’s Hall.”
Hind Rajab was a Palestinian little girl who got into her uncle’s car in northern Gaza on January 29, along with her aunt and four cousins, to head south, which the Israeli military said was a “safe zone” (that was a lie). Under the shockingly inhumane Israeli rules of engagement, unlike anything in any civilized democracy, the car was fair game just because it was in motion out in the open. Israeli pilots and tank and artillery commanders appear to make no effort at all to avoid killing civilians, explaining why they have murdered over 40,000 people from the air (over 34,000 confirmed and thousands more under the rubble). The car was hit, and everyone was killed but the five-year-old Hind. Her cousin had tried calling the Red Crescent rescuers, but then she died of her wounds. Hind called them back herself, in an incredible feat for a wounded child surrounded by the corpses of her loved ones. She was asked by the operator, what about your relatives. “They’re dead,” Hind replied.
The call went like this:
HIND RAJAB: [translated] Come take me. You will come and take me?
RED CRESCENT DISPATCHER: [translated] Do you want me to come and take you?
HIND RAJAB: [translated] I’m so scared. Please come. Please call someone to come and take me.
The Red Crescent Society, the Middle Eastern branch of the Red Cross, got permission from the Israeli military to send two rescuers. They appear, however, to have been hit by an Israeli tank shell not far from Hind’s position. She spent the last four hours of her life bleeding out.
There are no Hamas operatives in this story. It is a tale not just of reckless disregard for civilian life but of the deliberate targeting by the Israeli army of civilians. The Red Crescent ambulance was clearly marked, and the society had gotten Israeli permission to rescue Hind, but they were murdered anyway. This is not an error. It is systematic sadism.
So the student protesters at Columbia University named Hamilton Hall after Hind (rhymes with “wind”), who did not live to celebrate her sixth birthday. She joined some 15,000 dead Palestinian children casually wiped off the face of the Earth by Israeli war criminals. The student protesters were themselves assaulted by police and arrested.
Macklemore’s lyrics celebrate the bravery and determination of the campus demonstrators:
The people, they won’t leave
What is threatenin’ about divesting and wantin’ peace?
The problem isn’t the protests, it’s what they’re protesting
It goes against what our country is funding
(Hey) Block the barricade until Palestine is free
(Hey) Block the barricade until Palestine is free
The first stanza implicitly contrasts the threats issued by campus administrators and municipal authorities with the peaceful demands of the students. It also highlights the hypocrisy of the U.S. government, which proclaims itself a supporter of liberty, in keeping Palestinians stateless and unfree.
The second stanza slams the role of the police in protecting property rather than persons, on behalf of a system of white supremacy. Macklemore here implicitly draws a parallel between the Black Lives Matter movement and these protests for Palestinian rights:
Actors in badges protecting property
And a system that was designed by white supremacy (Brrt)
But the people are in the streets
He goes on to slam Meta (Facebook and Instagram) for having been “paid off” to suppress news about Palestine. (I actually don’t think Meta was paid off to do this, it is just something management wanted to do.) He then criticizes the politicians who take money from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), which serves Israeli interests in shaping the U.S. government.
The so-called “land of the free,” he complains, is beset by fear-peddling. The new generation, however, is not taking it. Nothing, not banning TikTok and not using algorithms to hide the atrocities, can now make the youths unsee what they saw.
But it’s too late, we’ve seen the truth, we bear witness
Seen the rubble, the buildings, the mothers and the children
He insists on the frame of white supremacy for the denial to Palestinians of the right to resist being occupied and subjected to ethnic cleansing. That right is granted only depending on “dollars” and “the color of your pigment,” he says.
He blasts the claim that it is antisemitic to be anti-Zionist, saying
I’ve seen Jewish brothers and sisters out there and ridin’ in
Solidarity and screamin’ “Free Palestine” with them
Organizin’, unlearnin’ , and finally cuttin’ ties with
A state that’s gotta rely on an apartheid system
To uphold an occupyin’ violent
He agrees with many Palestinians that the Israeli project of ethnic cleansing—that began with the Nakba or catastrophic expulsion of over half of Palestinians from their homeland in 1948—has never really ended.
History been repeating for the last seventy-five
The Nakba never ended, the colonizer lied (Woo)
He wonders if it is really more of a challenge to law and order for students to set up tents on a campus lawn than for Israel to commit genocide, a set of war crimes in which the president of the United States is deeply entangled:
Where does genocide land in your definition, huh? (Hey; hey)
Destroyin’ every college in Gaza and every mosque
Pushin’ everyone into Rafah and droppin’ bombs
The blood is on your hands, Biden, we can see it all
And fuck no, I’m not votin’ for you in the fall (Woo)
Undecided
He also calls out his colleagues in the music industry:
Yet the music industry’s quiet, complicit in their platform of silence (Hey, woo)
He acknowledges that if he was on a label he might well be dropped, but he says he would be fine with that.
What you willin’ to risk? What you willin’ to give?
What if you were in Gaza? What if those were your kids?
If the West was pretendin’ that you didn’t exist
You’d want the world to stand up and the students finally did, let’s get it (Woo)
Macklemore’s historical understanding runs rings around that of Ms. Clinton.