El-Sayed went into the proverbial lion’s den back in August with Jesse Watters on FOX News state TV:
This is instructive, since Watters doesn’t even pretend to be anything but a partisan hack in the interview. (Trigger warning! Non-Republicans may find Watters’ approach to be downright skin-crawling.) Actual journalists try to ask probing and challenging questions. But parodies of journalism like FOX News are only interested in “gotcha questions” and seek to elicit comments that can easily be clipped and used out of context against El-Sayed or any other Democratic figure they can pillory.
It’s interesting in a tactical sense to see how El-Sayed responds to Watters’ non-stop provocations in a way that gets across his own points while highlighting the Watters’ obvious and pronounced attitude of sneering contempt towards him. The Republicans and their media hacks are good at that approach, and Democrats constantly have to look for ways to counter it.
It’s also notable that El-Sayed treats Watters as what he is, a polemicist attacking him on a partisan basis (with dumb talking points) while constantly highlighting the sort of hack pseudo-journalism that Watters embodies.
He doesn’t flinch when Watters says, “you want socialized healthcare.” He doesn’t quibble over the phrasing but instead talks about how his proposal would bring down health care costs. With the Republicans babbling this year about Democrats being Communists - a Golden Oldie of an accusation that they never seem to be able to give up entirely – it’s worth keeping in mind that Medicare for All would “socialize” health insurance, just as the current Medicare program does, i.e., the government would provide it instead of private insurers.
Back in the 1940s when President Harry Truman was advocating his own version of Medicare for All, the Republicans seized on the concept of “socialized medicine” to characterize the government-owned hospitals that were part of the new British public healthcare system that the postwar Labour government had enacted – which the Republicans then as now regarded as a terrible thing to have. One advantage of having more Democratic candidates now explicitly embracing the concept of democratic socialism is that they are more accustomed to handing the use of “socialism” as a smear word. But there is also a general history of Democratic advocacy for government-provided heath insurance since Truman’s day that has pushed back on such rhetorical postures – including contrasting the frustrations millions of people experience with private health insurance to how well the nationalized health insurance known as Medicare functions.
A notable moment is when Watters asks El-Sayed if he wants to abolish the Second Amendment, with FOX News featuring this caption during that part of the discussion:
El-Sayed doesn’t duck the question, though he dismisses it. And why shouldn’t he? If he’s not advocating a particular position, there’s no reason to play the game of answering a clickbait question.
Not that any Republicans actually care, but it was first in 2008 that the Supreme Court in District of Columbia v. Heller recognized the Second Amendment as supposedly conveying any private, individual right to own guns. The Amendment itself is explicit that it’s about the right of states to form their own official militias, known as the National Guard these days. And at the time, such state militias were used as slave patrols to capture runaway slaves. It was an explicit concession by the free states to the slave states.
The fact that the 2nd Amendment specifically authorizes state militias could wind up playing an important role in blocking attempts by the Trump Administration to use state militias to interfere with November’s voting and vote-counting procedures. California’s Gov. Gavin Newsom just made a a move that's both substantive and usefully symbolic:
... Governor Gavin Newsom today signed a bill that would prohibit other state militaries from entering California without the Governor’s explicit permission.Finally, around 18:00 in the video clip, Watters does his duty as a FOX “News” hack and sets himself up to look ridiculous by asking El-Sayed if he supports sex change surgeries for minors. As anyone with the slightest familiarity with US laws on the subject knows, such surgeries for minors are illegal in all fifty states. This is a classic hack tactic to try to get a Democratic candidate to sound like he’s defending something that is not “A Thing” because it’s illegal across the country and no Democratic nominee for anything is advocating it. Watters asks El-Sayed (who’s a medical doctor) if he thinks “it’s okay for a parent to slash his kid’s ding-a-ling off?” (FOX News always tries to keep it classy!)
At a time when the Trump administration is increasingly treating states as targets rather than partners, Senate Bill 1354 by Senator Bob Archuleta (D-Pico Rivera) makes clear that California will not surrender its constitutional role, its values, or the rights of the nearly 40 million people who call this state home.
This new law gives the Governor — as commander in chief of California’s militia — a defined role in determining when out-of-state military forces may enter California for state missions.
El-Sayed’s response: “Do you really want to have this conversation? Are you circumcised? … You probably should want to move on.”
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