Odette Youssef
speaker
202 appearances
14 recordings
3 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard 27 May
Odette Youssef’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 10 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 5.
Appearances
But I think, you know, what Eric Ward said, that this kind of messaging quietly signals who this country is for, really gets at the heart of the harm that happens when we see extremist messaging sort of make its way into
the federal government.
It's super divisive.
And that division, I think, distracts us from coming together on national issues that need to be solved together.
And more immediately, I think it signals that harm done to people
In the outgroup, if you will, the outgroup certainly in this moment being immigrants, you know, harm done to these people that are not being presented as true Americans, that harm will be tolerated, maybe even encouraged.
And so it's really dangerous, I think, to the fabric of the society and also potentially even to people's physical safety.
It's interesting, Aisha, because, you know, the size of the protests, their reach into places across the country, I think it felt like a rare moment of broad consensus. You know, at that time, the Pew Research Center found that two-thirds of U.S. adults supported the Black Lives Matter movement.
It found that almost 70 percent of Americans were talking about racial justice issues with their families and friends. And 70% were recognizing general tensions between police and Black Americans. And so it felt like these difficult issues were finally out in the open and people were ready to discuss change to address them.
But what I think what we didn't see clearly at that time was that deeply radicalizing forces were also organizing. And in many respects, I think it's fair to say that they won.
Well, the pandemic. You know, I was in Minneapolis about six months ago meeting with a local named Kimmy Hull. One morning, Kimmy and I were at what's now called George Floyd Square where he died. And she said she thinks the movement wouldn't have launched if the country hadn't been sheltering in place.
The thing that gets Kimmy and many others is the earliest days of protest were peaceful. When it was largely locals, many who lived in and were invested in the neighborhood. But two days after Floyd's death, there was a change.
Kimmy's uncle, Bobby Hull, lives down the street and around the corner.
One of the gaping holes that remains five years after Floyd's murder is the AutoZone auto parts store arson. This was the very first structure in the area to burn. It's been cited as the trigger event that turned peaceful protests into lawlessness. The police named a suspect from a suburb of Minneapolis.
An arson investigator's affidavit identified him as an affiliate of organized white supremacist groups, including the Hells Angels and a prison gang called the Aryan Cowboys. To this day, there has been no arrest. The details of it all have faded for some locals.
What hasn't faded is the conviction nurtured among many Americans that summer that actually the violence came only from the left, the side that, in this case, did not set off the chaos.
Data from the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project find that at least 27 people were killed during the demonstrations across the nation. Most of them were not tied to any obvious ideological motivation. Instead, they appear to have just been criminal in nature. But of those where the perpetrators had an identifiable ideology, only one was a self-identified anti-fascist.
Six, by comparison, were far-right actors. Still, an internal report from the Department of Homeland Security suggests top officials were interested in a single predetermined narrative. Focusing on the drawn-out rioting in Portland, Oregon… The head of Intelligence Gathering, quote, stated that the violent protesters in Portland were connected to or motivated by Antifa.
This, even though his analysts had no evidence of that. But it wasn't just Trump and some administration officials who manipulated public perceptions of the unrest that summer.
Pete Simi is a sociology professor at Chapman University. He says extremists did what they always do. They clocked the high level of uncertainty among the public and swooped in. Simi says the movement for racial justice also created its own problems in retrospect. The defund the police slogan ultimately wasn't helpful.
Showing 161–180 of 202 · page 9 of 11
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