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Brian Lehrer: It's the Brian Lehrer show on WNYC. Good morning, everyone. On today's show, Lynn Manuel Miranda for his first time on this program coming up around 11 o'clock, along with Argentinian filmmaker, Augustina San Martin on work that they will both be presenting at Bam this weekend in Brooklyn, Lynn Manuel, and Protégé Augustina San Martin about an hour from now. We will talk about the legacy of Queen Elizabeth on the show. I know there's been saturation media coverage already.

Many of you are just listening to the BBC, but we're going to take calls from British experts so you can get your voices on not just the official voices, and also British subjects if that's the right word from any of its former colonies or present Commonwealth on the 70 years of history that Queen Elizabeth's reign represents. We will invite transit workers today to call in with your reactions to Governor Hochul lifting the mass transit mask mandate.

Do you feel more relieved or more threatened by that, and will complete our labor day week call-in series on jobs experiencing labor shortages, today workers in transportation from commercial airline pilots to school bus drivers? Why are you walking away from those jobs? We begin today with the news of a brand new live talk show on WNYC. Have you heard yet? This Sunday at noon and continuing every Sunday through the midterm elections, WNYC senior political reporter, Brigid Bergin also is sometimes guest host of this show as many of you know.

Will be hosting The People's Guide to Power, and she joins me now to talk about that and to acknowledge the 21st anniversary of the September 11th attacks, which is of course also this Sunday. Hey Brigid, always great to have you on this show, and congratulations on yours. I am so excited.

Brigid Bergin: Thank you so much, Brian, and it is always great to be here.

Brian Lehrer: Why are you calling it The People's Guide to Power not the people's guide to the 2022 midterm elections or something specific like that?

Brigid Bergin: Well, we will give credit to some editors that I worked with a few years ago. David Lewis and Patricia Willens and some of my WNYC newsroom colleagues, because we did a series actually back in 2017 and it was under the umbrella, The People's Guide to Power. In that series, we looked at how people across our region were engaging in all different forms of our government at all different levels. I specifically did a series looking at the Queen's Democratic Organization referred to sometimes as the Queen's Machine and how people were getting involved from the community board all the way up to Congress.

It's where I first met Adrian Adams, our new city council speaker, our current city council speaker, and Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez when she was still a candidate. It was in the run up to her ousting Congress member Crowley. That banner and that notion of how we as a community, how we as neighbors and local officials understand the paths to power and engage with our democracy, we thought

 

felt really appropriate for this election season, given how many people feel that our democracy is under threat.

Brian Lehrer: There, by the way, is a little bit of the legacy of British colonialism, right? Just the fact that it's called Queens County and Brooklyn is Kings County. We feel those things as so homegrown now up from Queens, but yes, we know where that came from. I guess it's a coincidence of the calendar that episode one is on 9/11/2022. I know you're looking back this Sunday at how that transformative event got various New Yorkers politically engaged. You brought a couple of clips for us here as a preview. You want to set these up for us?

Brigid Bergin: Yes. Part of what we're going to try to do, I think it's really hard. We are 21 years out from the September 11th terror attacks, but that day still really reverberates across our region and has changed a lot of people's lives in a lot of different ways. Two of our guests on Sunday, who I spoke with ahead of time, as I was preparing for the show have some different stories about how it impacted their lives and specifically how it impacted their notion of their ability to impact their community, their political engagement.

The first guest, city council member Shahana Hanif, she is the first Muslim woman elected to that body. She was actually just 10 years old when the 9/11 attacks took place. She grew up here in Brooklyn in a predominantly Muslim neighborhood. As we were talking about what that experience of growing up in the aftermath of the attacks was like, she talked about the rise of Islamophobia and experiencing her own community under ongoing surveillance and how that really shaped her path and here's a little bit of what she told me.

Shahana Hanif: The emotional complexity of growing up post 9/11 is really hard to articulate, but it definitely paved the way for my move into political organizing and the electoral organizing and coming into recognizing that we need us to be governing.

Brigid Bergin: When I heard that we needed us to be governing, I think is just such a powerful part of that statement. It speaks to, here in New York City with the diversity of our communities that we need people who are governing that can bring those experiences to the table as we are making policies. We are looking at oversight of city agencies and I think that was for council member Hanif, that began in the days after September 11th.

She talked about bringing the kids from the neighborhood to her parents' basement where they wrote a letter to at the time President George W. Bush, asking for him to reduce the rhetoric, to lower the temperature so that people within her community didn't feel under threat. She talked about walking to school and having people hurl insults at her and her sister and her family calling them terrorists.

Imagine how that shapes your notion of how you are connected to your community and then idea that she went from that place and found community and built her sense of what she could, her platform, her power, and then went on to both work for city Councilman Brad Lander previously, and then run for office herself. I think that is a really interesting story and it tells us something about how you can acquire power

 

and influence here in the city.

Brian Lehrer: Did you say she's the first Muslim elected member of city council?

Brigid Bergin: The first Muslim woman.

Brian Lehrer: Right. Amazing that considering the diversity in the city, including the Muslim population of various backgrounds, that she's the first at this late date in that category.

Brigid Bergin: Absolutely. That was one of the things that was so interesting about our most recent city council elections that we could still be having firsts at this point so many years with such a diverse city. Yes, she was elected in 2021 as the first Muslim woman.

Brian Lehrer: You have another clip.

Brigid Bergin: Yes. Another woman who we're going to be speaking with is another local community activist who lives blocks away from the world trade center site. Her name is Mariana James. She was actually eight months pregnant with her third child on 9/11, and because of that experience of being a mother, having kids in local schools, she became very involved with her kids' schools, with the community board and has now become one of the leading advocates for affordable housing at the World Trade Center site five where they're pushing for a fully affordable housing for 9/11 survivors, first responders and people who have healthcare issues.

That fight I think is not over yet, and they certainly haven't secured that victory, but she described to me the ongoing challenge of dealing with these healthcare issues while also worrying about having a place to live, and this is what she said.

Mariana James: After 9/11, we also many of us lived through Sandy and now the pandemic, so it's like how many times can you try to rebuild your own life. Especially if you have to also be worried about keeping a roof over your head.

Brigid Bergin: Now, I have to admit Brian that I first met Mariana James on Twitter ahead of the--

Brian Lehrer: Podcast.

Brigid Bergin: Yes, absolutely. It's one of the places where we meet people and she reached out to AR Lewis and I ahead of the debate for the 10th congressional primary because that is obviously her district and she wanted to make sure that the candidates were pressed on where they stood on supporting healthcare issues for 9/11 survivors. It's just another example of how she has sought ways to, I think, bring attention and advocacy to issues that matter to her and to her community.

At this point, she describes herself as someone who's a volunteer in all different ways. She's also involved with her community board, and it's someone who's, I think, really giving back to her community on a lot of fronts, and so that, to me, it speaks to

 

the fact that when we talk about power, it's not only the folks in Washington or at City Hall or in Albany, while those are extremely important, and we are talking to those folks as well, but the individuals in our communities are doing things that sometimes get overlooked.

When you see things like that Quinnipiac poll last week that talks about the one thing that Democrats and Republicans agree on, are the threats to our democracy, it just plasters over so much of what is happening locally, and that is something that we as a public radio station, as a local media public with an interest in our community can help shine a light on and perhaps maybe give other listeners some guidance how they can get involved as well.

Brian Lehrer: Absolutely. One of the things that we're hearing on this show in our series 51 Councilmembers in 52 weeks this year, where we're interviewing Shahana Hanif, and all 50 of her colleagues, because City Council is majority new this year, and this year, that term limits had such an impact on turnover and the year in which city council is majority female for the first time. Yes, we're interviewing every member of the city council one by one, week by week, and the stories that we hear week after week, are of people who got to city council after years of being community-level activists or just engaged with their communities.

Maybe on a community board, maybe on a local housing issue, maybe on a local roads issue, maybe on a local education issue, whatever it is, and so if it's the President and members of Congress and governors, and those other high-level elected officials who get most of the political coverage, there are all these people working at the grassroots level on all kinds of things from all kinds of point of view, who eventually become elected officials, and they deserve the spotlight.

Brigid Bergin: Absolutely. I think part of what we hope to hear since this is going to be a call-in show is we know that there are more of those stories out there, and we know that we are going to do our best to start to unpack these issues through different lenses. As you mentioned, this first Sunday we're doing a bit of a look back and I also look forward in terms of how the attacks on 9/11 impacted our community and allowed us to recover and changed people's personal and political lives, but we want to do that through a lot of different lenses, the power of the maps.

In that case, we're talking redistricting, and that defined our summer and is going to define our midterms, both here in New York, in terms of the primary battles that we saw, but also when we think of the balance of power at the federal level. What we are seeing play out here in New York with an ongoing fight over the lines, we know that the fight for the assembly lines continues in a court battle, the city council, those lines are being drawn now.

All those city council members that you're talking to, will all be running for reelection again next year, and certainly, across the country, we are seeing those battles play out, and that could potentially impact who has control of the halls of Congress next year. Those types of conversations we think are also really important, and that we can engage with people and their stories to help us all understand them a little bit better.

 

Brian Lehrer: That's great. Listeners if you're just joining us we're talking about the political impact of 9/11 in this country, and the New York area, in particular on this 21st anniversary commemoration weekend, and previewing the fall elections, who's got a question and opinion or a story about how 9/11 changed your own politics to this day if you're someone for whom it did. 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692, or anything midterm elections related with our Brigid Bergin who launches her own election season talk show Sunday at noon here on WNYC called The People's Guide to Power. 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692, or tweet your question or comment or story at 9/11.

Do you think Brigid that echoes of 9/11 play any role in the political campaigns of this year? The terrorism these days is mostly from far right-wing domestic attackers, the national security questions seem to revolve more around who's looking at classified nuclear weapons information in Mar-a-Lago, plus there's crime and there's inflation, and then there's the pandemic. Does 9/11 matter in politics at all this year?

Brigid Bergin: I think that to the extent that 9/11 began, I think, in the view of some of this moment where the United States, the amplification of a nationalism, and that thread of self-defense, and self-protection. What I think is also striking while in the direct aftermath of those events, there was this sense of national unity. We have traveled so far from that and we are at this point of, I think, feeling divided in ways that I don't think we would have ever imagined in the direct aftermath of those events.

Brian Lehrer: That's interesting about the nationalism. I was thinking that one way that it persists, perhaps, is that the top issue for many Republicans around the country this year, you've seen these polls, is still being anti-immigration. We remember that President Trump ran in 2016, before he was President Trump, most centrally on a border wall to lock out Central Americans, and a total and complete ban on Muslims from anywhere, even entering the country. Remember that? I think we can say echoes of 9/11 contributed to the fact that we had a Trump presidency at all, and we're still living with those overtones.

Brigid Bergin: Absolutely. Certainly, the incidents of hate crimes within our own community, against the Muslim community is something that we are seeing and tracking and raises real concerns for our friends and our neighbors, and it's something that I think has direct links back to the attacks on 9/11, and so, in those ways, I think we do feel the reverberations of it, but it's certainly changed since the direct aftermath.

Brian Lehrer: President Bush's main response to 9/11 was the war in Iraq, now widely considered a disaster by members of both parties, but I think the Trump Republican version of that is we spent too much money and too much American blood helping Iraq, when we should have been spending our money here and saving those American lives, while the Democratic version is more like, "Look how much unnecessary killing there was over there," but they both land on, "Let's not do that again, if we can possibly learn those lessons." I don't know, maybe that neutralizes it as a national election issue.

 

Brigid Bergin: Yes. I think again, what we're seeing now is this turn inward. If you are looking at some of those same holes, the issue that is often dominating is this idea of inflation and pocketbook issues and economic issues, which are felt differently across our communities, but I think speaks to this idea of some of these other more global issues are not dominating our politics in the same way.

Brian Lehrer: Rosa in Queens, you're on WNYC. Thanks for calling in Rosa. Hi there.

Rosa: Hi, thank you for taking my call. My name is Rosa [unintelligible 00:19:18]. I'm a licensed clinical social worker and have volunteered advocating for the undocumented workers who were recovery and cleanup workers of ground zero. These were immigrants who sacrificed their lives, their health to be part of the recovery of the city, of this nation, and it's been 21 years in which they have not received not first of all acknowledgment, and most importantly, a pathway to permanent residency and citizenship so that they also can benefit from what is available and what they rightly deserve.

There was a bill that was introduced, The Immigrant Worker Freedom Act first by James Corley, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has continued to introduce that yet, nothing has really happened. I hear that there's housing, there's different things available. We call the project Nuestras héroes, which is our heroes in Spanish. These are heroes who have been totally forgotten, and that's how they feel in relation to 9/11. We have reporters coming in from different parts of the world, mostly in Spanish, but we're not getting any kind of visibility to really bring awareness to this population who continue to suffer 21 years later.

Brian Lehrer: Rosa, was there ever any special consideration given to a path to citizenship for the undocumented workers? People who around here for 9/11, I certainly remember it. We talked on this show at that time about this as an issue that for all that people talked about the stock brokers and other relatively elite people who were the direct targets of 9/11 and were obviously killed in great numbers and affected in great numbers in the world trade center towers.

They were also the workers at windows on the world in the restaurant and people who were building employees. Many of whom fall into the category that you're talking about. Was no special consideration ever given for a path to citizenship among those who were undocumented.

Rosen: No. At least not for the recovery workers. I'm speaking about the people who were part of the recovery and cleanup.

Brian Lehrer: I see. Primarily [crosstalk]

Rosen: With the windows of the world, that population, they got more, but these are specifically the recovery cleanup workers who worked tirelessly for up to four years cleaning the area office buildings. At the time as they went to get work, no one asked them for their papers. They said, "Come on in. You're welcome." They also said, "We want to be part of this." At the end of the day, they have not received any kind of

 

acknowledgement. Many of them have died, have returned to their countries. We have no count. We have nothing to let these people know how much we appreciate and acknowledge what they did.

Brian Lehrer: Thank you for raising the visibility of those workers, Rosa. Thank you for calling, calling in. Mark in Brooklyn, you're on WNYC. Hi, Mark.

Mark: Yes, thanks very much. With respect to the elections, I'm getting more and more intrigued by open primaries and rank-choice voting. I know in Alaska they used open primary and rank choice voting, which allowed Sarah Palin to be blocked. Here in New York, of course, we've got Dan Goldman, I live in the district, and congratulations to him. I think if we had open primaries in rank choice voting, I think he now would be facing off against Carlina Rivera or somebody in November. I just think finally that rank choice voting can block candidates whether it's Herschel Walker, not to pick on Herschel Walker. I don't know if Bergin wanted to talk about that.

Brian Lehrer: I think that's great that you brought that up with Brigid because boy, did you cover that last year? I think a lot of New Yorkers who voted in the rank choice election mayor primary and city council primaries last year were surprised to find that these congressional primaries this year did not have them.

Brigid Bergin: That's right. It's something to remember that at this point, rank choice voting is something that is only in place for our city primaries and special elections. It's not at the state level, so we don't currently use it for any state-level primaries, state legislative primaries, or congressional primaries, but certainly, we came surprisingly closer to having something like, not quite an open primary, but we had this small window, this past August where because of some of the court rulings in the redistricting cases, there was this loophole that was created that would have allowed voters and did allow for a longer period of time voters to change their parties ahead of the August 23rd primary.

Initially, you were going to be able to change your party affiliation up to and including on the day of the primary itself. That would've been almost like a defacto-open primary.

We reported that and not long after the judge who had issued the initial redistricting ruling setting that second primary date updated it at the request of the state board of elections to make a tighter window. Under current state law, you have to change your party affiliation really months ahead of the primaries.

In this case, you were able to do it up until mid-August, which is much later than normally for a primary, but it would've been, and I thought it was really intriguing to consider that you might have been able to see some potential independent voters or Republican voters even, switching parties right up until primary day to participate in some of these more competitive primary contests, like in District 10 or in District 12. We didn't see the numbers. I asked the board of elections, what those numbers looked like.

 

They weren't hugely significant, but given the margins of how close these races were, any number of voters who changed their affiliation up until the primary could have had an impact. There's a lot of pushback, more broadly speaking about the idea of open primaries in the state. Not surprisingly from people who are members of the Democrat and Republican parties. There are a lot of officials who just believe that it is baked into our state election law and our state constitution. The idea of an open primary system is something that sets party officials off often when you talk about it.

Brian Lehrer: Sure. They would lose-

Brigid Bergin: I think they moved to that. Yes. They lose power.

Brian Lehrer: -their power. Do you remember that Mayor Bloomberg was an advocate?

Brigid Bergin: Absolutely.

Brian Lehrer: Non-Party elections for mayor and other things. Of course, that was consistent with who he was. He ran as a Democrat and an independent, and a Republican, all of those things at one time or another to be elected mayor and did not have strong party ties and considered his own thinking to be independent. It came out of his own sensibilities and maybe his own interest, but he also wanted to see a less polarized electorate that divides itself up into parties that has these primaries, where people who are the candidates are incentivized to run to the polls of each party's electoral base.

Yet, I think one of the good arguments on the other side that you were just getting at was that not just the parties have power, but the parties also deliver services. If everybody's independent, if everybody's non-affiliated then where are the organizations that are really going to hear the complaints of people in the many neighborhoods of New York City, just to say on the city as a political sector and really represent them institutionally, maybe alternative organizations would spring up, but that's the debate.

Brigid Bergin: I think thinking about the function of parties more historically, the idea that these were, as you said, institutions that were supposed to deliver services. Do they deliver services as much these days, or is part of the service they deliver getting voters out. I think that is certainly a function that they play. Depending on how organized the local party is in your respective part of the city or part of the state, that function may be more effective or less effective. Certainly, we here and across New York City are often lamenting low voter turnout, which I think raises fair questions about how effective parties actually are. Are they turning out more voters?

Are they just turning out their voters? Are they reliable voters? As you said, Brian, this idea of nonpartisan elections or open primaries is something that we have heard here in the city before and is something-- I talked to John Opdycke , who is the head of an organization called Open Primaries and advocates for this nationally. I wanted to hear what he thought about this loophole that had emerged here in New York state this year.

 

While he thought it was really intriguing and was excited by the prospect of it. He was also, I would say, fairly cynical about the idea that it would ever actually happen, and he was right. The parties acted quickly to just close that down because that is not how we conduct at this point, elections in New York.

Brian Lehrer: We're going to have Lynn Manuel Miranda on the show later this morning, and even thinking about Hamilton and the focus that, that brought to the era of the founders, that was something they were talking about at that time. George Washington and others were warning against the toxicity of being too identified with political parties, and something the country has been navigating all these years. Abel in Fort Green, you're on WNYC with Brigid Bergin. Hi, Abel.

Abel: Good morning, Brian. Good morning, Brigid. Thank you for doing this segment. I want to just make two points, one that I pointed at your screener, for the reasons why the aftermath of 9/11 pushed me much further to the left. The first is after the towers fell and the cleanup was underway, I remember the EPA administrator under George W. Bush, Christine Todd Whitman was also the former governor of New Jersey.

She was telling people that it was perfectly safe not to wear protective gear, not to wear masks, even as workers were cleaning up and inhaling the incinerated bodies of thousands of New Yorkers. Also, the trash left behind by these towers that had just fallen. So many people got so sick years later, the complete disregard for public health and safety, even after so much had already been lost, was really striking to me. It was this parallel that we saw 20 years later with COVID. We just saw the exact same thing, with public health and public safety and just this complete disregard for human life and public health.

Brian Lehrer: It's such an interesting connection and not one that many people make so explicitly. Abel, thank you very much for making it. Abel's call and comment and the connection that he makes leads me to this question. Brigid, for you as somebody who's covering the New York state governor's race, do you see Kathy Hochul's lifting of the mass transit mask mandate this week in the context of the campaign? Do all candidates from both parties now, even in Blue New York have to have a touch of Ron DeSantis on COVID?

Brigid Bergin: I think it's one of those questions that in some ways if you've ridden the subways or rode on a plane recently, and looked at polls, getting back as far as April, where voters were saying that the numbers of people who felt like masks should be required were creeping down. I think inevitably, we are just seeing this fatigue when it comes to dealing with COVID.

Even though the irony of what you're saying, Brian, that this week, she would lift the mask mandate for public transportation, while also getting the new booster for the latest COVID-19 variants. It's a little bit of trying to speak to all audiences, but I think in a general election where you need to turn out vote that is not necessarily just your party, but you also need some of these unaffiliated or potentially Republican voters, that is part of what we're seeing in what she's doing.

 

Brian Lehrer: By the way later in this program, we're going to invite transit workers to call in with your reactions to governor Hochul lifting the mass transit mask mandate. Do you feel more relieved as many of you probably do, or do you feel more threatened by that as some of you probably do? We will be doing that later in the show specifically. Brigid, as we wrap up, I'm going to tell the listeners one more time that you have, listeners, Brigid has a brand new live talk show.

If you like this show, you're going to like that show through the election season on Sundays. Sundays at noon, here on WNYC called People's Guide to Power. She will be taking your calls as well as having all kinds of guests. I'm going to be one of the guests this Sunday. Don't tell anybody. Brigid, do you want to just give people one more quick overview of what you're going to be doing these next number of Sundays?

Brigid Bergin: As you said, Brian and thank you for joining us on this first episode, our premier episode on Sunday. Really we want to bring together people who have power with those who are seeking power, and of course, as one of the producers on our show, Zach said so well, those who bestow the power, and those are our listeners and our voters and the people in our audience, to have a conversation about some of these really important issues.

I also want to make a note that our first guest on this show, this coming week will be New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, someone who fought pretty relentlessly for healthcare for 9/11 survivors-

Brian Lehrer: That's right.

Brigid Bergin: -through the Zadroga Act, and more recently has been fighting for veterans exposed to toxic burn pits. Now for health care workers who are on the front lines of fighting COVID-19 and monkeypox. I think there's a really interesting conversation to have with her about what are the lessons learned from how she had to have these fights over and over and over again, about how power works in Washington and can that be extended to other issues.

Certainly, get her perspective on the upcoming midterms. I just want to make so clear and thank the amazing callers who called in just during this segment, please call back on Sunday. We would love to hear your stories again, talk more about them, pose your questions to Senator Gillibrand, to city council member Shahana Hanif, to Mariama James, and share those stories. I think it is a space for all of that. Hopefully, it will be something that energizes us all as we head towards those November elections.

Brian Lehrer: The People's Guide to Power, Sunday at noon here on WNYC with Brigid Bergin. I won't even say good luck because you're so good, you don't need good luck. I'll just say, enjoy the ride. I'll be listening and I'll talk to you on Sunday.

Brigid Bergin: Thank you so much, Brian. It's from all the time I spend listening and working with you. I appreciate it.

 

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