In 2026, voters in Michigan will cast ballots for races involving the office of Governor, Attorney General, and Secretary of State. Gary Peters (D-MI) is opting to retire, so there’s an open U.S. Senate seat.

Democrats have three strong candidates: Abdul El-Sayed, Mallory McMorrow, and Haley Stevens. All three have raised millions of dollars for their campaigns ahead of the August primary.

Over the next few months, Detroit Public Radio will be checking in with the candidates so our listeners can make an informed decision. The focus of this first round of interviews is to set a baseline for the candidates views on policy and what separates them from their competitors.

The series continues with Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, a public health expert who has served as the health director for both Detroit and Wayne County.

He talked with All Things Considered Detroit Host Russ McNamara on Jan. 21, 2026.

The following interview has been edited for clarity and length. 

Medicare for All

Russ McNamara, WDET: You’ve written a book about Medicare for All. Why do you prefer that over a public option for health insurance?

Dr. Abdul El-Sayed: We’re watching as healthcare is becoming very quickly one of the most unsustainable features on anybody’s budget sheet. You’re seeing premiums go up 10, 15, 20%—and that’s not even if you’re on one of the ACA plans, for which the Trump Administration has now pulled subsidies going into next year. The unsustainability of our system is going to be paramount, and it’s going to be top of voters’ minds.

I’ve been consistent about the need for Medicare for All.

Medicare for All is government health insurance guaranteed for everyone, regardless of what circumstances you’re in. If you like your insurance through your employer or through your union, I hope that’ll be there for you. But if you lose your job, if your factory shuts down, you shouldn’t be destitute without the health care that you need and deserve.

But Medicare for All does more than just guaranteeing health care. It also addresses the increasing costs that we’re seeing skyrocket in our system by being able to negotiate prices on behalf of all of us, and it also creates a system where doctors and hospitals and clinics can compete with each other in a truly free market system. This is what we’ve needed in America for a very long time, and like you said, I wrote a book on how to do it back in 2021.

The foundations of our system have just gotten less sustainable since then. It would free us of so many of the fears that people have every day, the $225 billion of medical debt that Americans currently hold, which is higher than the GDP of half of the states in the entire country.

And beyond that, it gives us the safety and security that would spur the economy. Too often, small businesses don’t get founded simply because people are stuck in dead end jobs, even if they have an amazing idea, because they’re afraid of losing their health insurance.

Now a public option is exactly that; it’s just an option. There is no reason why it would actually address any of the foundational problems in our system. It wouldn’t bring down the rising costs. It wouldn’t guarantee people health care, and we don’t really know how much it would cost. Plus, there’s an added thing that folks need to think a little bit about—that those of us who’ve thought about the health care system understand—if you have a public option, what happens is, the private health insurance system will try to dump all of the most expensive patients onto that public option, vastly increasing the cost of that public option and making it unsustainable.

That being said, I want to be clear about something. I think too often when we talk about health care we talk about this or that. To me, anything that increases health care access, anything that would do so by increasing the public’s capacity to provide it and would reduce the power of corporations, is something that I would vote for. But I’m not going to make the mistake of pretending like that’s the whole answer. The whole answer is we need to get to Medicare for all. But if you want to climb to Mount Everest, you got to get to base camp, and you got to climb some other hills.

So I understand that we need to take steps along the way. But anybody who wants to tell you that somehow a public option will solve our health care problems doesn’t understand how health care works, or has taken too much money from the industry that does not want Medicare for All because of what it may mean for their profits.

The growing wealth gap

RM: High health care costs are just one part of the equation when it comes to the high expenses that Americans are facing right now. There’s also a concentration of wealth in the top 1, 5, 10% How do you address the growing wealth gap in this country?

AE: You know, I’m the only person running for U.S. Senate who’s never taken a dime of corporate money to fund a campaign, and that shows up in the ways that I stand up to corporations. So there’s two pieces here.

Number one: we’ve got to make it so that corporations can no longer buy access to politicians to do their bidding—a system that every other candidate I am running against has willingly participated in but me—and that makes sure that the system is not rigged against the rest of us, so that big corporations and billionaires can continue to make yet more money off of a system that funnels money from our back pockets into theirs.

But the second part of this is that I think we finally need to start taxing billionaire wealth. I’ve been very clear about the fact that for too long, our system has allowed billionaires to pay a lower effective tax rate than you and I, who make our money the old fashioned way—working for it.

The way we should be judging our economy is not by how much wealth accumulates at the very top, how many more billionaires we spit out, but rather we should be judging our economy based on whether or not it provides everyday Americans access to the basic means of a dignified life.

And I think we need to rethink the way that we do taxation in mainly so that we’re taxing the wealth of people make $100 million or more, because guess what? If you tax a billionaire at 8%, guess what? They’re still they’re still a billionaire. They’re still going to have money their kids, kids, kids, kids are still going to be rich.

And I think that we can get along to making sure that our kids have great public schools, that we’re providing health care and good infrastructure for all of us. And if we can do that, I think we can start to bring down the massive wealth inequality that’s only growing in this country.

RM: Ethically, should billionaires exist?

AE: I don’t think that our system should be in the business of creating billionaires. I think our system should be in the business of empowering everyday folks to be able to live a life with access to the basic dignities that they need and deserve, good housing, good health care, affordable food, the experience of knowing that you’re sending your kid to a school that dignifies their brain and empowers them for a career into the future.

Too few people have access to that right now, and I think that the way we should be judging our economy is not by how much wealth accumulates at the very top, how many more billionaires we spit out, but rather we should be judging our economy based on whether or [it] not provides everyday Americans access to the basic means of a dignified life.

We are the richest, most powerful country in the world. It is a crazy thing that people are struggling to afford their groceries, struggling to afford housing, wondering whether or not if they’re under 40 they’ll ever own a home, or if they can stay in their home. If they’re under 65, worried about whether or not they are going to go bankrupt simply because they got sick. Those are choices that we make, and at the wrong end of creating an economy that spits out more and more billionaires is the opportunity to be able to solve so many of those challenges for folks.

I think we need to reorient that system. That means, yes, taxing billionaires—it also means rethinking the firewall that should exist between billionaire money and corporate money and our politics. It means standing with unions, it means empowering small businesses, and it means guaranteeing every single person the health care that they need and deserve.

Data centers and the AI boom

RM: Michiganders seem to hate data centers. The growing AI boom—if it comes to fruition—will eat up a lot of resources. How would you weigh the need to address climate change with the constant need for business growth and more jobs in this state?

AE: In the last year alone we’ve had 15 data center proposals. Each of those data centers is partnering with a corporate utility that has raised our rates without actually improving the reliability of our electricity. Our costs go up, our reliability does not and we’re watching as these huge corporations are partnering with these utilities to try and bring these projects into our communities, promising a certain number of jobs.

I understand the fears that everyday folk have about what this will mean for the price of their electricity, the water that we take for granted in a state like Michigan, whether or not they’re going to have a job in the future. And so we’ve issued a data center terms of engagement. And what these terms of engagement are meant to do is clarify what the real risks are and hold data center projects accountable to addressing those risks.

Number 1: if you’re promising jobs, you better actually create the good union jobs that you say you want to create.

Number 2: your project should not increase the price of electricity for anyone in our state.

Number 3: you should have closed loop systems that do not rely on our fresh water or stress our water infrastructure.

Number 4: there should be a community benefits agreement that is negotiated with the local community to make sure that the value of the project actually moves into the community in which it’s going to be housed.

Number 5: investments that are made should improve the reliability of our utilities.

Number 6: these should be enforceable by penalty.

And the beautiful thing about this approach is that it offers a roadmap, both for local communities to hold data center projects accountable, but also it creates the pathway for the kind of federal legislation that I’d like to get passed as a U.S. Senator.

But these are challenges that we’re facing and the kind of approach that we’ve seen on the part of the corporations and the utilities, where they try to fly by night and steamroll local municipalities to get their projects done, all it’s done is fan the flame on mis and disinformation.

So what we want is clarity. We want transparency. We want integrity. We want honesty, and we want to make sure that folks understand exactly what’s coming to their local communities.

Accountability in government, Supreme Court reform

RM: Do you support the elimination of the filibuster, and how do you feel about making significant changes to the structure of the Supreme Court, whether it’s packing it, term limits, or making sure that there’s some sort of ethical accountability?

AE: The filibuster allows senators to hide behind just one senator, in effect, veiling them from democracy itself. Because if you don’t have to take a hard vote, your public won’t hold you accountable for the hard vote that you just took.

Similarly, the Supreme Court has acted in ways that demonstrate that really it’s become just a third political arm of government. So I oppose the filibuster.

If you look at what Trump is doing, he’s doing most of it by executive fiat. Most of what he’s trying to do is he’s trying to operate through the White House itself and where checks have failed have been at the Supreme Court, and I think that we need to start talking a bit about what term limits might look like.

I don’t think that this current system serves our democracy very well. I proposed a system that says that every president should have three appointments. Every Supreme Court justice should have at least 10 years and a possible renewal for another 10 years. But what that does is it incentivizes the selection of of jurists who want to interpret the Constitution on its own terms, because all of them may not know who the person making a decision about the reappointment might be, and it addresses the fact that you don’t want jurists who are too Junior and haven’t had as much experience or too senior, and may not be at the top of their game. I do think we need Supreme Court reform. 

Foreign policy

RM: U.S. foreign policy is currently at the forefront of the global conversation with President Trump’s ongoing thirst for Greenland, his Board of Peace for Gaza and the recent attack on Venezuela for oil. As a senator, what would your ideal foreign policy for the US?

AE: I believe in international law. I read my history. I look at all the effort after World War II, to stop the next world war from happening again. And courageous leaders who watched the carnage of that war came together and said, We need international law that we all abide by.

And the frustration is that as we’ve developed as the world’s superpower, we have sometimes abided by that international law and sometimes broken it. And I think where we have abided by it, where we have stood up, for example, to protect international law in circumstances like Bosnia and Herzegovina, in circumstances like Ukraine, I think we do great good in the world, but too often, we have decided to skirt that international law. When you look at the war in Iraq, when you look at Vietnam, and right now, when you look at the unilateral funding and subsidies of a genocide in Gaza, we have been the chief violator of international law.

My vision for our foreign policy is that, yes, we are strong, but we are the first among equals to stand up for that international law, rather than being the first to break it.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement

RM: Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents have been terrorizing immigrants in communities of color – in blue states and cities – especially over the past year. Should ICE exist?

AE: No, we need to abolish ICE.

I just recently came back from my own personal fact finding mission in Minneapolis. Now I’m running for Senate in Michigan, but I also understand that if they can occupy a city like Minneapolis, they can do the same here in Michigan.

I just want to be clear about what ICE is. They tell us that this is about immigration and customs enforcement, but let’s be clear, immigration law is not criminal law, it’s civil law. So why do you need masked men carrying heavy weaponry on peaceful streets?

They tell us that this is about protecting the southern border, but I’ve looked at a map, and Minneapolis is not very close to the southern border. We can have a safe and secure southern border. We can enforce immigration law. But ICE is not about that. ICE is a paramilitary force normalizing the use of government power on peaceful streets, in thrall to one man. They are using the pretext of immigration to weaponize against the laws and norms and mores of our democracy and our Constitution itself. And I believe that it ought to be abolished.

If the idea of ICE is that they’re supposed to keep you safe, go ask Renee Good, or her widow or her orphaned child about how safe Renee Good is because of ICE.

I talked about abolishing ice back in 2018 because anybody could have seen where this is going. And now we’ve gotten here, and I shudder for our state, because they’re talking about buying a facility in Highland Park. They’ve got the facility in Baldwin. I do not want to see what I saw in Minneapolis here at home.

So when I’m in the U.S. Senate, I intend to lead the effort to abolish ICE, because I do not believe that it has anything to do with keeping our southern border secure and safe—which I intend to do—or with enforcing any of the laws when it comes to immigration, this is about normalizing paramilitary force and thrall to one man on our streets. And if there is anything that’s antithetical to the idea of America, it’s that.

Transgender rights

RM: The rights of transgender people to seek care, serve in the military or just play high school sports has been used by conservatives as a wedge issue, not just between Republicans and Democrats, but within the Democratic Party, what will you do to support that small, but disproportionately targeted part of our community?

AE: I believe that rights are rights, are rights, and when you assent to somebody taking away somebody else’s rights, you are at some point assenting to somebody coming for yours.

We have to stand together to fight for our collective rights, even when those rights are rights we may never see ourselves using. And I think that is it is critical for us to recognize where MAGA has tried to use this conversation to tear people apart, to get them into positions where we’re having a conversation about high school sports, rather than a conversation about health care or a conversation about affordable groceries or a conversation about how to make sure home ownership is possible. Those are the conversations that I’m hearing about up and down my state.

So I think it’s perfectly within the means of local communities and sporting governing bodies to lead the conversation about high school sports. I think it’s important for doctors to be able to provide the health care that their patients need in consultation with their parents if they are not of age.

But that has nothing to do with our broader public conversation in our politics. And so I want politics to be solving the problems that politics should be about solving. I want to make sure that communities and parents and families and doctors and sporting bodies get to make these decisions together, in consultation with each other, to take on these problems. Because every single moment that Republicans want us to be talking about trans kids or trans kids playing sports is a moment we’re not talking about making sure that everybody gets the health care that they need and deserve, and that people get access to housing, and those are the conversations we need to take on that they are imminent in our lives.

But rights are rights, are rights, and we need to be standing up for everybody’s rights when anybody tries to take them away.

While President Trump was inside Motor City Casino on Tuesday, protesters outside were braving the elements and aggression by the Detroit Police Department.

A group of demonstrators marched from Cass Park in front of the Masonic Temple and to the sidewalk in front of the casino at the corner of Temple and Grand River Avenue.

After being allowed to peacefully assemble for a few minutes, Detroit Police forced protesters down Grand River to a less visible location on the casino’s west side at Trumbull Ave and Elm Street.

A Detroit Police officer – who would not give his name, only the numbers 168 – threatened protesters and members of the press with arrest if they did not move. At least two protesters were arrested.

What the protesters have to say

Sarah Reed of Farmington Hills carried an inverted American flag – a symbol of distress. She stood in front of the advancing officers in an act of defiance.

Reed was surprised by their aggression. “It’s a public sidewalk, and if you and I were there this evening, this morning, before any of this, they’d have no issue with us being on the sidewalk,” Reed said.

Reed, the granddaughter of a Holocaust survivor, said she wants the president to resign. But she had a message for Democrats too. “Get off your asses and fight,” Reed said.

Troy resident Jake Malacos used his lunch hour to protest. He says he was happy to be around protesters because a show of solidarity is good for the community.

As for why he was picketing: “Well, the corruption from the Trump administration. The brutality. The murder of Renee Good. Most of the policies that he’s putting out are pretty rough for me,” Malacos said.

Once DPD had pushed the protesters to the designated 1st Amendment area on Trumbull, about 1,000 protesters marched to Detroit Public Safety.

Officially, Detroit Police do not work with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, but they do share office space.

How does a global community provide for the needs of its citizens without destroying the planet? That’s the crux of “Anthropause: The Beauty of Degrowth,” a new book out this month.

In the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic, society shut down for a few months. As humans stayed inside, animals returned to their old habitats and pollution eased as industry slowed.

Retired researcher—and new metro Detroit resident—Stan Cox looks at how that “anthropause” could be a preview of the necessary societal changes to save lives and the planet.

He spoke with All Things Considered – Detroit host Russ McNamara last month. Click on the media player to listen or read selected transcripts below.

Russ McNamara, WDET: Why did you write this book?

Stan Cox, Author: The main point I’m making in the book is imagining that we as a society, if we were to rapidly phase out fossil fuels and get by just on the energy that could be generated other ways; and if we stopped plundering the earth for minerals and cutting down forest and causing ecological damage; and we had less energy and materials, and had to allocate them carefully: people know that’s going to mean sacrifice. What am I going to have to give up and so forth?

And what I’m saying in the book is okay, yeah, there are certain things, obviously that will have to be given up. But let’s consider all of the dangers and nuisances, terrible stuff that we put up with an advanced industrial society that has all this energy and materials running through it.

We would be saying goodbye to a lot of those harms and ills by simply not doing a lot of the stuff that requires so much energy input. So the rest of the book, then, is going through specific technologies and activities and so forth that are really harmful to people and the environment, of course, that we would not have the fuel to undertake them, or we would be using resources for meeting people’s basic needs, and we wouldn’t be spending a lot of energy on these other things.

RM: You discuss this and I’m reminded of data centers to run artificial intelligence. People certainly don’t seem to want them and definitely don’t want these in their backyard because there is this concern about the high cost of electricity, and the amount of groundwater that is needed.

SC: That’s absolutely right. One of the big reasons these communities don’t want them is that they create this horrific noise at very high decibel levels and low low frequency noise, which is especially dangerous to human health. When I started writing the book, there wasn’t as much being said about A.I. and the data centers at that time, so I did eventually incorporated them, but the beginning of the second chapter is about noise pollution and and I just used it. It’s seemingly a very small thing, but it really brings out other issues. The leaf blower, especially the gas powered leaf blower, also produces this low frequency and very high volume sound—about eight times the decibel level that the World Health Organization says is safe – and they’re producing a wind about the speed of an EF five tornado. The low frequency sound can travel like three football fields. It’s still above the safe limit.

RM: So what are the societal impacts? Let’s say we start degrowth right now. What are the benefits?

SC: We can’t go on like we’re on the trajectory that we’re on now, because. A degrowth is going to happen. Either a chaotic, brutal degrowth where it’s a Mad Max kind of future, because we’ve tried to force growth to continue and have destroyed ecosystems

Or we can have a planned, rational degrowth that ensures that there’s enough for everybody and that we’re not causing ecological collapse. But there’s no way that growth can continue at this rate.

Sometime in the past three years, we passed a milestone. The quantity of human made stuff—that is everything that human society has manufactured or built or produced—if you weigh all of it up, the mass of all of that exceeds the total mass of all living things on Earth, all plants, animals, microbes, et cetera, and that quantity of stuff being produced is is doubling every 20 years. And clearly that can’t go on.

Herb Stein, an economist from the 70s or 80s was kind of the Yogi Berra of economists. He had a line: “if something can’t go on forever, it won’t” and that’s where growth cannot go on forever. So we have to pull back, create what I called in the book an “anthropause” of our own, and try to have a rational, safe and just reduction in the amount of economic activity for the good of everybody.

In 2026, voters in Michigan will cast ballots for races involving the office of Governor, Attorney General, and Secretary of State. Gary Peters (D-MI) is opting to retire, so there’s an open U.S. Senate seat.

Democrats have three strong candidates: Mallory McMorrow, Haley Stevens, and Abdul El-Sayed. All three have raised millions of dollars for their campaigns ahead of the August primary.

Over the next few months, Detroit Public Radio will be checking in with the candidates so our listeners can make an informed decision. The focus of this first round of interviews is to set a baseline for the candidates views on policy and what separates them from their competitors.

The series begins with Michigan State Senator Mallory McMorrow.

She talked with All Things Considered Detroit Host Russ McNamara on Jan. 8, 2026.

The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Healthcare access

Russ McNamara, WDET: What’s your plan to fix healthcare?

State Senator Mallory McMorrow: So I come at this from somebody who was an industrial designer, who’s solutions oriented, and our solution needs to be three fold. It needs to be universal. Everybody needs to have health care, no exceptions. It needs to be affordable. You should not be able have to break the bank or go bankrupt for a hospital visit.

So for me, that starts with a real public option, something that will force the private health insurers to compete. And I’m somebody who as a millennial, we’re around the same age, we don’t have the same job security that our parents did.

So having a real public option, there are a few states now who have implemented public options Colorado, Nevada and one other and they are starting to see real cost savings. They are starting to ensure that everybody has coverage. Vermont, on the other hand, as an example, they tried a single payer system and abandoned it 15 years ago after not being able to figure out the payment or the implementation.

RM: Just to kind of clarify on that you’re not in favor of something like Medicare for all. Vermont’s a very small sample size.

MM: I think it’s too big of a challenge. Admittedly, we are a country of more than 360 million people. When I talk to people all across the state, they don’t say that they they want one single system. They say, I want the insurance that works for me. I want to be able to see my doctor. I want to be able to go to my pediatrician, and I want it to be affordable. That, to me, requires more options, not fewer.

Abortion rights and the Supreme Court

RM: If elected as a U.S. senator, what would you do to reinstall abortion rights that were shifted back to the States by the U.S. Supreme Court?

MM: We need to codify abortion access as a fundamental right, the right that was taken away from women after 50 years of precedent with Roe [v. Wade].

I had legislation here in the state of Michigan to ensure that Medicaid covered reproductive rights abortion procedures. That was one of the things that unfortunately didn’t make it through the final version of the Reproductive Health Act. But your income should not determine whether or not you have access to the care that you need if something with your pregnancy goes wrong, and that is something that we need to fix on the federal level, and that I will fight for.

RM: Does that level of fight include eliminating the filibuster for abortion rights?

MM: Yes.

RM: Does that include packing the Court and increasing the number of justices?

MM: We have to fix the Supreme Court. I am open to any conversation on how we do that. The Supreme Court was supposed to be an independent arbiter of the Constitution. Very clearly they are not. They are now bending at the whims of this President, handing this president effectively immunity to do whatever the hell he wants. So I am talking to some constitutional experts right now, some judicial experts on whether that means term limits, whether that means oversight, whether it means reforms, or whether it means more justices. I am open to anything to ensure the Supreme Court does its job.

Affordability and wealth inequality

RM: The top one percent in this country control a third of the wealth in this country. That’s doubled since 1990. What is your plan to address the wealth gap?

MM: The average home buyer now is in their 40s. We have our population aging and declining in the state of Michigan, I talked to a lot of people who say they want to start a family. They cannot fathom how they would be able to afford to do that. So the biggest thing that we have to do is address income inequality, and one of the provisions that I just put into a piece of legislation in Lansing would prohibit companies from pursuing stock buybacks if they were to receive a state incentive. This was on the transformational brownfield legislation. We have companies continuing to pad their shareholders bottom lines instead of paying their employees. We need to raise wages. We need to create incentives so that companies are not paying their CEOs 100 times, 200 times, 300 times the average wage of their worker, and instead encourage companies to be better corporate citizens.

RM: Quick yes or no: Should billionaires exist?

MM: Yes, I think they can and should exist. And I look at somebody like Mark Cuban as an example. You can be a billionaire without being a jerk. This is somebody who goes out and says very publicly that this country, the infrastructure of this country, the educational system of this country, gave him the platform he needed to be successful. And he’s out there trying to bring medication costs down. Cost Plus drugs, I think is something that we should be taking a real hard look at it.

But you don’t need to be an Elon Musk to do it. I mean, you listen to this man who wants to become a trillionaire, trillionaire with a T, and his vision of the future is so dark and dystopian that he wants to abandon the earth and go to Mars. You should be successful in this country if you work hard, you play by the rules, but you should also be able and be forced to give back so that the next person has the same chance you did.

AI in Michigan

RM: Utilities and tech companies are pushing AI. Americans are a bit more skeptical. How do you reconcile resources required for data centers with the need to address climate change?

MM: Michigan has an opportunity to be the first state to do this right. There are some states and some companies that are getting this very wrong. And for data centers and for utility companies who are jacking up residence rates for these things to come online, they have every right to be angry.

You know, I just mentioned Elon Musk. You look at Colossus down in Memphis, that is an example of a company and a man doing everything wrong where rates are growing going up. The air quality in the surrounding neighborhood has become almost unlivable. People have asthma and they feel like they did not have a choice for what this company decided to do.

Now here in Michigan, we started by passing legislation that for a data center company to receive an incentive, they must ensure that rate payers are not subsidizing the cost of that data center. They must use at least 90% renewable energy to power that data center, and they need to be responsible with their water. That is a good start for us. I think any data center should be built with unionized labor. We need to make sure that these are good jobs. We need to make sure that it does not use Michigan’s water, that it has a closed source system that does not drain the Great Lakes or harm our water system, we need to ensure that it is bringing more renewables onto the grid.

If we do this right, we can encourage these companies and these investments to force the grid infrastructure upgrades that we have been so desperately needing for decades now in a way that can actually help create jobs and opportunity.

Finding a cure to fearmongering

RM: For the past few years, Republicans and conservative media have made it a priority to attack trans people, whether it’s trans kids playing sports, serving the military, and making their own health care decisions. What is your plan to support one of the most marginalized and at-risk segments of the population?

MM: Look for people who got to know me, maybe for the first time outside of my district and outside of Michigan, it was for a speech that I gave from the Senate floor in a moment when Republicans in our state were targeting and demonizing kids, and I am never going to run away from that. You know, whether or not a fifth grader wants to play soccer with her friends, doesn’t have any indication as to your future and your ability to start a business or raise a family.

And what the Republicans have done an incredible job of doing is by playing on people’s rightful anger and fear that they are not doing as well as they had hoped or as well as their parents did, and instead of actually solving those problems for people, they’re finding somebody to blame. First it was immigrants, then it was DEI [diversity, equity, inclusion] then it was trans kids. It is a smaller and smaller group of people.

And I fundamentally believe the way forward is that we have to be the party that solves those fundamental problems for people. If we can restore the American Dream and ensure that in Michigan and in the United States, if you work hard, you play by the rules, you can achieve that life that you wanted, then there won’t be this appetite to target and hurt vulnerable kids.

If we can restore the American Dream and ensure that in Michigan and in the United States, if you work hard, you play by the rules, you can achieve that life that you wanted, then there won’t be this appetite to target and hurt vulnerable kids.

I am really proud of the work that I’ve done in the state senate to expand Elliott Larson [Civil Rights Act] to ensure that you cannot be fired, you cannot lose housing because of who you are, how you identify or who you love. But obviously people are under attack right now, and we can’t run away from that, but we have to be very clear in telling Michiganders and Americans that this man and these Republicans don’t care about you either. They’re not doing anything to fix your problems, and you targeting a marginalized community isn’t going to make your life any better.

ICE immigration raids

RM: Immigration and Customs Enforcement has been terrorizing immigrant communities since its inception, all in the name of safety and fighting crime. That has been turned up a considerable amount since President Trump took office last year. This week, an ICE agent shot and killed a woman in Minneapolis. Bluntly, should ICE exist?

MM: Yes, and it needs to be vastly reformed. Michigan is a border state. We need Immigration and Customs Enforcement to do the work of what and who comes across the border. That should be its job. Its job should not be to be unleashed on communities to terrorize people, to go after people whose skin color isn’t exactly right, or who have an accent.

Right now, we have masked vigilantes who are being unleashed across the country, being recruited into these jobs with no experience, who are high on their own power, who are throwing American citizens in vans, deporting them. As we saw, as you mentioned, in Minneapolis this week, an American citizen is dead because she stopped her car. There is no justification for that use of force. And the U.S. Senate needs to do its job of oversight of a full investigation of what happened, not only here, but across the country, and then to reform this agency so it actually does the job of Immigrations and Customs Enforcement and not terrorizing Americans and immigrant communities.

Israel-Palestine conflict

RM: In October, you characterized the deaths of tens of thousands of Palestinians at the hands of Israeli military as genocide. Have you changed that stance at all?

MM: I am somebody who looks at the videos, the photos, the amount of pain that has been caused in the Middle East, and you can’t not be heartbroken. But I also feel like we are getting lost in this conversation, and it feels like a political purity test on a word—a word that, by the way, to people who lost family members in the Holocaust, does mean something very different and very visceral, and we’re losing sight of what I believe is a broadly shared goal among most Michiganders, that this violence needs to stop, that a temporary cease fire needs to become a permanent cease fire, that Palestinians deserve long term peace and security, that Israelis deserve long term peace and security, and that should be the role of the next U.S. senator, particularly in this primary.

We’ve got some candidates who are using this as a political weapon and fundraising off of it, and I think that that is just losing the humanity of what we’re seeing in the Middle East. And we deserve better.

RM: Should the US be giving money, weapons, military aid to Israel if they are indeed running a genocidal regime?

MM: We need to use the leverage that we have. You know, I came out in support of the Sanders resolution that would have blocked offensive weapon sales to Israel, and the more that Netanyahu pushes into Gaza, the worse this gets. And to be very clear, being in support of Israelis is not being in support of Netanyahu, in the same way that being in support of Palestinians is not the same as being in support of Hamas. And centering the humanity of what we see on the ground, and especially being sensitive to how many Michiganders are directly impacted by the impacts of the Middle East, is where we need to be.

So we need to use the leverage that we have as the United States as an ally to ensure that this war ends and that the ceasefire is a permanent ceasefire.

Campaign funding

RM: You’ve said you will not be taking campaign money from AIPAC, the powerful pro-Israel lobby. Where is the money in your campaign coming from?

MM: So far to date, we have outraised every other candidate on both sides of the aisle, and it is with zero corporate PAC dollars, and it is from people. We have raised more than $3.9 million for more than 60,000 individual donors. More than half of our donations are from people donating $200 or less. That is significantly more than any of the other candidates. In fact, I’ve got more grassroots support than my two Democratic opponents combined.

So it is by people, people who are donating $5 and $10 people who are donating what they can all across the country, and I am incredibly proud of that.

RM: So you’re turning away corporate money?

MM: Yes, no corporate PAC dollars at all.

The music landscape has changed a lot since the turn of the 21st century. Not just styles, but how we consume music. Nothing illustrates that better than the rise of the indie music scene.

In his new book Such Great Heights: The Complete Cultural History of the Indie Rock Explosion, Stereogum managing editor Chris DeVille looks at how changes to TV, the internet, and the record industry fueled the rise in early ’00s indie music.

DeVille talks with WDET’s Russ McNamara. Click on the link to listen or read selected excepts below. 

The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.

RM: So why write this book?

DeVille: There’s many different sort of through lines that are being traced here. One of them is technology. It’s a subject that I think is really complex and really fascinating, and it involves a lot of my favorite music ever.

This stuff that has been kind of chronicled and debated online for years in blog posts and social media posts and a lot of the documentation of it is starting to disappear, because websites just go offline, or people delete their social media accounts. And so I wanted to create a little bit more permanent record of some of these things that happened—some of the ways that these bands broke through, some of the conversations that were being had around this music.

One reviewer compared it to like a yearbook that you look back at and you get some fond memories, and you get some cringe, but yeah, it’s kind of like a history of my listening as an adult.

Russ McNamara, WDET: In the book, you mention the TV show ‘The OC’ which was a popular teen soap opera in the early ’00s. How much did that show’s soundtrack play into the rise in indie rock?

Chris DeVille, author of “Such Great Heights”: I was surprised as I was writing the book, how much it became like a shadow history of the evolution of the Internet over the last couple of decades. And you know The OC thing, it’s like they’re putting these bands in front of a much bigger audience. Like Death Cab for Cutie is like a fairly obscure band at the time, and then this character on this popular teen show is like making his whole personality that he loves Death Cab for Cutie.

It’s like giant platform, but then they lose cool points with some people, as you know, sort of a more norm-y audience discovers this band, but it’s definitely, there’s no doubt that it was a huge like funnel, bringing a bunch of bands to a much broader audience

RM: What about the added accessibility of file sharing sites like Limewire and Napster?

CD: Whatever platform you were using to pirate music I think contributed to the accessibility of stuff. Stuff could blow up, even if it didn’t fit into a particular radio format, or it wasn’t getting past the MTV gatekeepers. It didn’t have to fit into any existing niche or existing format to blow up. It could just catch fire and go viral on these file sharing servers.

I mean, the same thing was still true when iTunes came in and kind of formalized and commercialized the process. You could still have a song that people would download it like crazy.

RM: Which indie bands benefitted the most from this setup in the early 00’s?

CD: Arcade Fire was definitely the biggest. The other dimension that I talk a lot about in the book, is Pitchfork. And just like the power that Pitchfork had to make or break someone’s career. If they gave something a 10.0 people were just going to jump on it and worship it. And if they kind of talked smack about a particular band or completely panned a band, then there were instances where that basically ended someone’s commercial prospects. And so like Arcade Fire were like the perfect storm.

RM: So where is indie rock at now? Is it dead? Does the genre really mean anything anymore?

CD: Over time, indie became like more of a genre, and then the genre itself started to change. But I think what we saw happen in the 2010s is sort of like the indie goes pop thing. It was like a bubble, and it really did pop. We still have these sort of like boutique pop stars like Clairo.

We had artists that came out of the indie world become pop stars of a sort because of stuff like Tiktok. Like Mitski is a good example of that where she’s coming from, from the indie rock infrastructure, and she is making music that jumps across genres a little bit.

There’s a hunger for bands that have a little bit more of an edge to them, that are a little bit less smooth, a little bit willing to be weird or noisy. That’s what you see with a lot of the biggest indie bands today – ones that have gone against that sort of, like Spotify-friendly, passive-listening experience. There’s now a hunger for music that’s a bit more abrasive, something that will jolt people out of their stupor.

Music wants to evolve. It wants to find new audiences. And so the whole idea of like, gatekeeping and having the right audience versus the wrong audience, like, that’s something that factors into the book too.

It’s a crowded field in the race for the Democratic nomination for Michigan Secretary of State.

Ingham County Clerk Barb Byrum and Deputy Secretary of State Aghogho Edevbie are already in the mix.

And now another entrant, Suzanna Shkreli. She’s a former Deputy Legal Counsel for Governor Whitmer and recently resigned as Michigan Lottery Commissioner.

She recently spoke with WDET’s Russ McNamara about why she decided to run.

The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Russ McNamara, WDET: So why are you running?

Suzanna Shkreli: There is so much on the line. I believe that our democracy is at stake. My parents came to this country as children to escape an authoritative government. They fled the former Yugoslavia, and really it’s unthinkable that those same dangers that they fled from have taken root right here at home.

From my work securing convictions against child predators and murderers, as an assistant prosecutor in Macomb [County] to serving in Governor Whitmer’s cabinet as Michigan’s child advocate, I know I have the track record and toughness to make sure this office stays in Democratic hands and to take on those extremists who would try to mess with our elections and silence our voices.

I also know that this job has the opportunity to make working people’s lives, a little bit better and more convenient. I grew up working in my parents restaurant as a child. I learned great customer service early on in my life, and I’ve taken those lessons to every single position I’ve had, and I want to use this job to make Michiganders’ life a little bit easier, from implementing a digital driver’s licenses to working towards faster election results to special walk-in hours for seniors. This job can protect Michiganders fundamental right to vote, but also make the lives of Michiganders more convenient, too.

RM: Given your extensive legal background, why not run for Michigan Attorney General?

Shkreli: So to speak quite frankly with you, this position requires somebody who has taken on tough fights to protect those who don’t have voices. Or those, in this instance, whose voices are trying to be silenced and that’s what we’ve seen with the rising extremism across our state and our country. We need to make sure that we have somebody who can defend the Constitution and defend people’s rights, which is what I’ve done in the past.

I want to use this job to make Michiganders’ lives easier.

RM: Do you have any experience with election administration?

Shkreli: When I served in Governor Whitmer’s office, I was a deputy legal counsel, and I worked on a variety of issues while I was there. I volunteered elections in the past. I’ve worked polls in the past, but also I worked hand-in-hand with the Secretary of State’s office in December of 2020 to deliver the meeting of the electors.

That day the Michigan State Police had flooded the Capitol because of the threats that we received, we did not know what to expect that day. And you had the the electors, [and then] the fake electors try to come into the capitol to deliver those electoral votes. And because of our preparation with Michigan State Police, and because of our preparation with the Secretary of State’s office, we were able to complete the governor’s constitutional requirement and deliver those electoral votes. And that memory is seared in my brain because of the rising level of extremism that we’re seeing against government workers, poll workers and election workers.

RM: Where is this extremism coming from?

Shkreli: I think that there’s rising extremism happening. And Americans and Michiganders all need to step up and call a spade a spade when we’re seeing that. Secretary Benson has done such a wonderful job and who knows where we would have been in 2020, if she wasn’t in that position. So I’m ready to continue that work forward.

I’ve been talking to political leaders throughout the state, and I hope to seek the endorsement of them, but the truth is that this nomination will be on the grassroots level, and that’s what I’m focused on.

I’m running for this office because I know that I’m the best candidate to win the convention as well as win the general. Just in 24 hours, we earned $200,000 which is the most that any Secretary of State candidate has raised in 24 hours. Which is more than some candidates in this race have raised for the last 10-11 months since they’ve been running. So it’s a sign of enthusiasm.

RM: Where are those donations coming from? Are we talking large money donations or a lot of individual ones?

Shkreli: We have donations for Michiganders across the state. We’re really excited about the enthusiasm. We expect this just to be the beginning.

Michigan Congresswoman Haley Stevens introduced articles of impeachment against Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on Wednesday.

“Enough is enough. We cannot allow a public official to weaponize misinformation while cutting the very research that saves lives. It’s time today to impeach RFK Jr.,” says Stevens. 

She initially stated her intention to file articles of impeachment against the Make America Healthy Again Secretary in September.

Like many other Democrats, Stevens says Kennedy’s attempts to delegitimize vaccinations and promotion of pseudo-science makes him unqualified for the job.

Kennedy Jr. has taken heat from epidemiologists for turning anti-vaccination misinformation into policy, disregarding decades of research that points to the effectiveness of vaccines. Public health officials also condemn his promotion of conspiracy theories around autism.

Rep. Stevens says he has violated his oath, citing how how cuts implemented and supported by Kennedy Jr. have made insurance less accessible and hurt research institutions, like those at Michigan universities. “I’ve heard from Republican doctors in Michigan who’ve been calling me to thank me for standing up for science,” says Stevens.

Kennedy Jr. oversaw the firing of thousands of public health experts from the Centers for Disease Control and the National Institutes of Health.

Stevens’ impeachment attempt likely won’t go far in the Republican-controlled U.S. House. It’s unclear whether the move is backed by Democratic leadership.

When asked if House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries backed the impeachment bid, Stevens said she’d let Jeffries speak for himself.

It’s been over a week since Democrats showed up to the polls and secured big wins in places like Virginia, Maine, and New York City. Turnout—especially in the Big Apple—was high.

Was it the messaging of affordability that drove turnout… or was it raging against the Trump Administration?

Detroiter Branden Snyder is the state director for the Working Families Party.

Snyder talked with WDET’s Russ McNamara. 

The transcript below has been edited for length and clarity.

Russ McNamara, WDET: What is the platform for the Working Families Party?

Branden Snyder, Working Families Party: The Working Families Party, or WFP, is a national organization that is working to build political power for the multi racial working class. And so in some states, like in New York, it’s an actual party, where it has a party line where people are able to vote for candidates who are WFP endorsed candidates, as well as candidates who are Democrats, through the system that’s called fusion voting.

In states like Michigan and Ohio and Wisconsin, the Working Families Party is a community labor coalition where we take action in primary elections, and in non-partisan city council races like we just had last week. And so what we’re trying to build here in Michigan is a political system that works for the many and not the few, and that means being able to recruit and advocate for candidates who are working for the many and not the few, working on economic justice and social justice issues, and being able to actually champion them both from the starting point all the way to the finish line.

RM: The WFP endorsed two candidates: Gabriela Santiago-Romero and Denzel McCampbell. Both were elected to Detroit City Council. What made them worthy of the endorsement?

BS: Well, a number of things. I think. The first is that both Gabby and Denzel are community leaders. Gabby and Denzel, come from working class households and working class communities. I think the things that may us champion them for is their pledge to not take corporate corporate PAC dollars to their commitment to being able to pass economic justice and affordability policy at the city level.

And then [they have] a commitment to co-govern. So co-governance is really this fancy sort of political science term of this idea that we want to govern with the community – the idea that they will take direction and leadership from community organizations, from regular people, and not just billionaires and party elites. They are the ones who…actually want to be able to engage with working class people, working class communities, community organizations, labor unions, etc. So those issues and those stances and values really set them to the top of the heap for us.

And I think the other thing that we want to do was we wanted to be able to throw a punch at what we call corporate Democrats.

RM: Should I read too much into there not being an endorsement in the mayor’s race?

BS: No. In my in my previous life, I was the executive director of Detroit Action, which is a community organization that works really closely with [now mayor-elect] Sheffield on housing issues. We worked to be able to help pass and promote the people’s agenda for Detroit City Charter commission in 2021. I was on the industry standards board for arena workers with Mary Sheffield over this past year to be able to produce, produce policy for arena workers. So our endorsement didn’t reflect policy or values.

Her win is actually a historic coalition between community, labor, and faith.

RM: Zoran Mamdani, the mayor elect of New York City, has drawn a lot of attention for his Muslim faith, but maybe even more than that, was his platform is steadfastly to the left of the current Democratic Party mainstream. Is this a one off thing, or is there a distinct leftward turn in democratic politics?

BS: We’ve been working for years to build leftward momentum in Democratic politics. Part of the Working Families Party is in for lack of a better term, to pull the party towards the left and actually using that energy and that gravity to bring in folks who are MAGA voters, working class people who are feeling the impacts of SNAP cuts or the impacts of the government shutdown. So we’ve been doing a lot of work to bring in people into this sort of larger coalition that can actually win on economic justice. I think that Mandami is win in New York. It’s also a win for economic justice.

RM: There seems to be a disconnect right now between the people that showed up at the polls last Tuesday and then what happened over the weekend, where eight Democratic senators broke away from the party to end the shutdown. That move pissed a lot of people off in Democratic circles. Does the Democratic Party have an authenticity problem?

BS: I think there needs to be a changing of the guard. There’s a lot of millennials and Gen Z and even some Gen Xers who’ve been waiting in the wings to be able to showcase and be able to display power, and be able to lead from the front and lead with community.

There’s also a real desire to have candidates who will fight for people and actually fight for policy and on values.

Shutting down the federal government was a matter of principle for U.S. Senate Democrats back in October.

Tens of thousands of federal workers were furloughed. Air traffic controllers were forced to work without pay. The Trump Administration fought in court to reduce SNAP food assistance.

Tax credits tied to plans through the Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare, were set to expire, and without them premiums were set to skyrocket. That was unacceptable to most Democrats, who wanted to leverage the shutdown to extend healthcare subsidies.

This week, seven Democrats and one independent changed their strategy and voted to end the shutdown.

They received only a promise of a vote on the ACA tax credits and assurances that federal workers fired by the Trump Administration would be rehired.

In the meantime, people are receiving notice that their premiums are going up. In Michigan, insurers are ending coverage for people through Obamacare. That could leave as many as 200,000 people in the state without coverage.

Michigan U.S. Senator Gary Peters voted to keep the government closed. He thinks it’s going to get worse unless those ACA tax credits are restored.

“Nationally, well over 20 million people are seeing large increases in their health care estimates, somewhere around 10 million will lose their health care coverage as a result,” Peters said.

Peters says he would like the Democrats who capitulated and voted to end the shutdown to speak for themselves.

“I know that they were focused on working on health care costs, but we’re also concerned about the cost of the shutdown itself,” Peters said. “Certainly government employees who had been going without a check for quite some time, which puts a real strain on our families.”

A failure of leadership?

Many Democratic voters—and some Democratic politicians—view the ending of the shutdown as a betrayal of trust and the latest instance where the party refuses to follow through on a promise.

Peters disagrees this was a failure of leadership.

“We don’t work for Chuck Schumer,” Peters said. “Every Senator represents the people in their state. I work for the people in Michigan, and my colleagues around the country work for the people in their individual states, and they have to ultimately do what they think is right.”

The Epstein emails

The White House is scrambling following the release of a new batch of emails to and from rapist and sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein.

The emails seem to implicate that President Donald Trump was aware of Epstein’s crimes, and that the president maintained a relationship with the disgraced financier well into his first term in office.

Epstein died in federal custody in 2019.

After promising on the campaign trail to release all the evidence collected in Epstein’s prosecution, the Trump Administration has backed off that pledge.

Peters says the American public needs to see all of the documents.

“Bottom line, I think there’s enough information out now that raises so many questions that have to be answered that we need to see the release of all of the documents,” Peters said.

Earlier this year, the Trump Administration moved Epstein co-conspirator Ghislane Maxwell to a minimum-security prison.