Summary
Today, for the very first time, a judge handed down a harsher sentence than what the government was asking for, sentencing one rioter to 45 days in prison to the rioter at the U.S. Capitol on January 6. The House January 6 Commission ramps up with new subpoenas. The deadline to raise the debt ceiling is fast approaching. Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen speaks publicly for the first time. Idaho, Alaska hospitals are rationing care amid a COVID-19 surge. Connecticut governors mandates vaccines or testing for state employees.
Transcript
JOY REID, MSNBC HOST: And that is tonight`s READOUT. "ALL IN WITH CHRIS HAYES" starts now.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
CHRIS HAYES, MSNBC HOST (voice-over): Tonight on ALL IN. A judge throws the book at a Trump rioter as enablers escape consequence. Tonight, Congressman Jamie Raskin on a big a week for the January 6 investigation and the MAGA world rehabilitation tour.
SUNNY HOSTIN, CO-HOST, THE VIEW: You`re not working for Darth Vader but you`re a Storm Trooper.
ALYSSA FARAH, FORMER WHITE HOUSE COMMUNICATIONS DIRECTOR: That`s actually very well said.
HAYES: Then, specific damning allegations from a Facebook whistleblower who says the company is ripping America apart and they can`t stop themselves.
FRANCES HAUGEN, FACEBOOK WHISTLEBLOWER: I don`t trust that they`re willing to actually invest what needs to be invested to keep Facebook from being dangerous.
HAYES: And the absolute insanity of ongoing COVID deaths around the country as health care workers face violent threats for trying to save lives, when ALL IN starts right now.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
HAYES: Good evening from New York. I`m Chris Hayes. You know, federal judges have gotten increasingly fed up with the light sentences that the Department of Justice the prosecutors have been recommending for the people who engaged in the seditious storming of the Capitol to violently overthrow the government on January 6.
There`s been a whole bunch of judges kind of hand-wringing over this. And then today, for the very first time, a judge handed down a harsher sentence than what the government was asking for, sentencing one rioter to 45 days in prison and saying, "there have to be consequences for participating in an attempted violent overthrow of the government beyond sitting at home." The government had asked for home confinement.
There have to be consequences beyond sitting at home. It`s true. It`s such a simple obvious truth that too many have lost sight of. I mean, January 6 was the most direct threat to American democracy since Fort Sumter during the civil war. It took a lot of people to make it happen. Most of those people have just gone back into normal life with zero consequences from the rioters on up.
Obviously, the now-disgraced former president who led the rioters was impeached but Republicans did have an opportunity to give those consequences the judge talked about, concrete consequences, and simply make it so that he could never run for or hold office in America again. It`s in the constitution. It would have been a frankly lenient treatment for his behavior. It was the bare minimum they could have done.
But no, Senate Leader Mitch McConnell and the overwhelming majority of the rest of his party chose not to do it. And so, that man is likely going to take another run at it. But it`s more than just him. I mean, so far, more than 600 people who participated in the January 6 attack have been arrested. We`ve been tracking these cases, right, as they go through the courts.
And a lot of them are going through some process of real accountability. Some are facing very serious prison time, again, depending on what exactly they did that way. The ones who seriously engaged in violence have been -- many of them have been in jail this entire time.
But the political structure that stoked this attack really has escaped any real consequences. Here`s one example. Former Trump Adviser Steve Bannon, he was you`ll recall, facing very serious federal charges for defrauding Trump supporters and then was pardoned by Trump at the last possible second, a get out of jail free card. And he`s now helping to train appointees for the next Republican administration telling NBC News, "If you`re going to take over the administrative state and deconstruct it, you have to have shock troops prepared to take it over immediately. I gave him fire and brimstone."
Now, let`s be clear. This is in large part the chesty braggadocio of honestly a pretty pathetic figure, but we all saw what happened last time, right, in January. And then there are the Republican politicians who voted with the mob. Again, where are the consequences? There have to be consequences.
Those folks who voted with the mob, their betrayal of Democracy was even more insidious than the rioters because while the people attacking the capital were violent and destructive, once they were cleared, every member of Congress sworn to uphold the constitution went back in there having seen what the mob wanted and what they were willing to do to get it, and every member had the option to vote to preserve and uphold democracy and yet still a majority of Republicans voted to overturn the election.
That vote itself is an egregious assault on American democracy, as egregious as the actual attack and it`s been totally whitewashed. Again, there have to be consequences and where are they? All these people are still members of polite society in good standing. Some have never continued to cultivate a seditious faction that stokes the big lie that there was fraud in the election. Others have just moved on from that vote with no actual consequences.
Again, remember, the majority of the Republican caucus across the spectrum voted to overturn the election. Even a brand new Congresswoman Michelle Fischbach from a swing district in Minnesota that she just won from a Democrat decided to vote to disenfranchise her own voters on her third day in office. A truly stunning middle finger to throw up at your constituents, but there have been no consequences for her. She`s just, you know, chilling.
[20:05:23]
True for people like Senator Josh Hawley seen here giving the rioters a proud salute that morning. True for Senator Ted Cruz and for Senator Rick Scott I think who`s escaped a program and shouldn`t. They all voted to overturn the elections. In some ways, Scott is the worst offender because he`s now the chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee. He`s in charge of running the Republican midterm campaign having voted in the last election to disenfranchise the majority of Americans and hand the election to the loser over the winner and end two centuries-plus of American democracy. That guy running the Midterms.
And now, he`s just -- what is -- he`s just another senator complaining about inflation as if he did nothing to undermine American democracy earlier this year, to end it in fact. Now, remember, when all this happened, there were some calls for those senators to resign, calls for their expulsion even. And that sounds like a dramatic thing to do but I don`t think is that crazy considering the offense. And short of that, there could have been official censure. They could have been voted to censure them.
What they all did was an egregious offense against the constitution and the traditions of American democracy, as egregious as one that can be contemplated and yet nothing. There have to be consequences.
And then there`s all the people who are part of Trump`s orbit who brought us to the precipice who again are just out in the world doing things like working for right-wing think tanks or trying to launch a media career like for instance former White House Communications Director Alyssa Farah.
Now, like many in the world of conservatism and particularly conservative media, she is a legacy case. Her daddy is the founder of the right-wing conspiracy Web-site WorldNetDaily jokingly referred to back in the day as world nut daily. Farah was part of the vast right-wing conspiracy that tried to bring down the Clintons.
And to be fair, you cannot hold that against her. She`s an adult, did her own thing, though she did right for the site as recently as 2014. But after two years as Mike Pence`s press secretary and a year at the Pentagon, she became the White House Communications Director which is a big deal. And she held that job during what was the deadliest year in American history up to that point.
You all remember that year. We all watched as the president stoke misinformation and fear and talked about injecting bleach and turned Americans against each other and rooted on people who were threatening the Governor of Michigan and told us the virus was going away when it wasn`t and misled us about the numbers and didn`t get enough testing and then turned his attention to the big lie and began stoking it before the election as tens of thousands of people kept dying.
Alyssa Farah was in charge of messaging from the White House that whole time. That was her job and that`s what she was doing. She finally decided to exit on December 3rd when she apparently had enough. That was well after Trump had lost the election, after months and months of selling poison to Americans about how the election was rigged. And quite amazingly, on January 7th, she did an interview with Politico, part of an effort to start sanitizing her image.
She told the paper that she stepped down because she saw where this was heading in December. In the interview she also aligned herself with Senator Cruz`s questioning of the result saying, "I actually subscribed to the Ted Cruz school of thought on this. His position is fundamentally that 74 million people voted for the president and as many as 50 percent believe the election was rigged. We should go through the exercise to the full step that we can having a process that`s open and transparent to show that these results were accurate."
That`s basically the laundered version of the big lie. That`s like the big lie light. Oh now, here she is today on ABC`s The View clearly trying to make her run at being a conservative talking head. Now, to their credit, The Show`s hosts asked her skeptical questions and pressed her. But ultimately, her message was Trump was bad but I still would agree with him in a lot of things. I`m here to give you a fresh face vision of Trumpism with a slightly lower percentage of sedition.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
SUNNY HOSTIN, CO-HOST, THE VIEW: You know who this person is.
ALYSSA FARAH, FORMER WHITE HOUSE COMMUNICATIONS DIRECTOR: Yes.
HOSTIN: He`s the person that is grabbing by the you know what, and you`re working for him.
FARAH: I didn`t have any illusions about who the president was. I will say this. I believe strongly in his economic agenda. I believed in his national security agenda. My background is national defense. I believe now under Biden, we`re seeing the challenges of not having a strong national defense.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
HAYES: What on earth are you talking about? Tens of thousands of Americans died in the plague while you were doing what in the White House exactly and the president was telling us to inject bleach. Farah is very careful to try to market herself to both sides of the political spectrum. That`s because of the insurrectionist faction the Republican Party.
They`re actively plotting to run a repeat of their election challenges. They face no accountability or sanctions as a political movement and they are dependent in some ways on the social norms being such that everyone pretends to forget or actually forgets what it is they did. So, there she is trying to sort of softly whitewash what happened, trying to separate herself from Donald Trump even though she spent three and a half years working for him. She quit December 3rd.
[20:10:29]
Now, I continue to think there should be federal criminal investigation and seditious conspiracy by the president and his enablers. I don`t think that`s happening. It`s not clear but it doesn`t appear to be happening. There is an actual criminal investigation in Fulton County Georgia into Trump`s obvious blatant attempt to solicit fraud from the Secretary of State.
But short of that it seems the locus of accountability is on the January 6 Commission. All those political players and the actors who participated in the attempt to overthrow democracy and before that to bring us to the crisis point, the only sanction they now face is the subpoena power and investigatory potency of the January 6th Select Committee. And that committee, I`m happy to say, have been flexing their muscles on this.
Politico reports the panels held its first closed-door transcribed interviews with willing witnesses. And Congressman Jamie Raskin of Maryland who led the second impeachment of Donald Trump now sits on the January 6 Commission joins me now.
Congressman Raskin, it`s good to have you. What can you tell us about the first rounds of interviews that are happening?
REP. JAMIE RASKIN (D-MD): Well, I can tell you that there are voluntary witnesses who are coming in who are cooperating who want to describe the whole sequence of events that led both to the inside political coup against the vice president and the Congress waged by the president and also the parallel insurrection which enveloped and surrounded the coup and tried to aid that process of coercing the vice president to reject electoral college votes for the first time in American history to declare a power that`s not in the constitution. And that`s what you know led to him being chased out of the body and people yelling hang Mike Pence and so on.
And you know the problem with the word coup is people think of a coup is something that takes place against a president. This was a coup waged by the president against the vice president and against the Congress.
HAYES: So, you go to work every day in the United States Capitol. You guys have lots of stuff to do. I`m sitting here talking to you on -- you know, in early October months after this happened. You know, the root of the word news is new. We report on new things that happen. It continues to be this - - the case to me that like what happened then is the most like, gaping wound in the American bodym politic, has not been sutured up, has not been really treated to or attended to.
And yet you work next to these people. And I do feel the power of the inertia of everyone just sort of forgetting it happening getting back to business.
RASKIN: Well, I mean, business for them of course is a very simple agenda. You know, the Republican Party had no program adopted at its convention in 2020 for the first time I think in modern political history. There`s never been a major party without a program, without a platform, but it`s very clear what their agenda is voter suppression, gerrymandering of our congressional districts, use of the filibuster to thwart all progress, and then packing the courts with right-wing judges and justices to cement this whole system.
There`s a very troubling situation because the vast majority of the American people rejects Trump, Trumpism, violent insurrection, and all of their big lies on everything from climate change to COVID-19, to the election to January 6. And yet, they manipulate so many of the key levers of political power in the country.
HAYES: The consequences though have been largely absent. I mean, there has been no sanction. There is no sanction. Again, the 600 people been arrested, the folks that actually went in there -- the president was impeached which is definitely not nothing. It was the most bipartisan impeachment in American history which is also not nothing.
But as far as I can tell, like again, there really hasn`t been sufficient, to my mind, accountability or sanction. It`s basically your committee is left with that job even though at one level, you`re really a fact-finding investigatory committee. How do you understand your dual roles in that respect?
RASKIN: Well, we are primarily a fact-finding investigative committee which is going to produce a report that I trust and hope will change American history because it will basically present to the American people this whole sequence of shocking events and lay out the case for defending democracy against dictatorship and autocracy.
Because all over the world, the dictators and the autocrats and the kleptocrats, the Putins, and the Xis, and the Duterte`s, and the war bands are simply saying democracy doesn`t work, we can`t get it together we can`t move quickly enough, and you need authoritarian regimes and authoritarian rule.
So, we`re going to lay out a very strong case for democracy and what we need to do to repair our democracy so we`re not vulnerable to fascist violence in the future.
[20:15:07]
HAYES: The subpoenas that have been issued so far, there are some talk about invocations of big executive privilege, non-cooperation, court appeals. What is the status thus far of the subpoenas that have been issued?
RASKIN: Well, on Thursday, I think all of the documentary evidence is due in. We have subpoenaed a whole bunch of documents relating to everything connected to January 6th and the coup and the insurrection. And then there`s another week within which we are arranging for interviews and depositions against people who`ve been called forward.
So, you know, again, we don`t do these in any sense as discretionary or optional. People used to understand, when you get a subpoena from the United States Congress, you snap to attention and you come -- you bring the documents that you ask for and you come and testify unless you`ve got some kind of Fifth Amendment privilege or some other lawful privilege that you can assert.
But these are not optional things. And you know, of the many excesses and depredations of the Trump administration, one, was the idea that when you get a subpoena, you just figure out a way to fight it. And that`s a guy, of course, who`s been surrounded by an army of lawyers for his entire adulthood if not before that.
HAYES: Congressman Jamie Raskin, as always, good talking to you. Thank you very much.
RASKIN: Thank you so much, Chris.
HAYES: Last week, progressives and the House of Representatives successfully held the line on the Biden agenda. Now, many of the moderate Democrats or the ones opposed to that full agenda are showing their hand. If there`s one person in Washington who could possibly know where all this is going, it`s Democratic majority whip James Clyburn. He joins me next.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
[20:20:00]
HAYES: We left our legislative drama in the Halls of Congress. House Progresses had just pulled off something incredible, indeed unprecedented in the 15 years I`ve been covering Congress. They held the line and it worked. Progressives stopped that bipartisan infrastructure framework from passing by itself and they also accelerated negotiations in the Senate for President Biden`s full Build Back Better agenda including child care, elder care, paid family leave -- we`re the only country in the entire western world that doesn`t have it -- cheaper health care and big climate investments.
The theory of the case from progressives all along and Pramila Jayapal has been on the program spelling it out is that the people who most want to kill off that full Biden agenda with all the things I just named, they`re the same people who want most to pass the bipartisan bill so they can declare victory and say look, we did something, then walk away and do nothing more.
And I got to say, the reaction to what progressives have done in delaying the passage of that bill kind of shows they were totally right. For instance, one of the leaders of the U.S. Chamber of congress -- Commerce said the bill should have been passed years ago and was angry about the delay. But of course, the Chamber wants to kill the Biden agenda.
Moderate Democratic Congressman Josh Gottheimer of New Jersey called the failure to bring the bill of the floor deeply regrettable. Democratic Senator Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona echoed that calling it inexcusable. I mean, the big takeaway is that Progressives are exactly right. The big question now is well, what happens next?
Congressman Jim Clyburn, Democrat of South Carolina is the majority whip and the third-ranking Democrat in the House. And he joins me now. Congressman, let me first start with just some news we just got which indicates that there are meetings happening right now between White House officials, the Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer about hammering this all out. What is your understanding of what these talks are and where we`re at?
REP. JIM CLYBURN (D-SC): Well, thank you very much for having me, Chris. I have not talked with the Speaker today. I will be talking with her tomorrow morning. And I suspect I`ll find out then what they`ve talked about tonight. But I do know uh that she is very focused on passing both these bills. He`s been that way from day one.
Now, she got some pushback when he made comments when the first bill, the so-called bipartisan bill passed the Senate and was sent to the House, she said at the time that she was not going to move that bill until such time as we dealt with the Build Back Better. She said that way back then. She`s never wavered from that. And is don`t know why people were thinking that she did. She did not waiver at all.
And that`s where we are today, waiting for us to get an agreement on Build Back Better and then move both these bills in concert. And that`s what i think we will do.
HAYES: There is of course the climate aspect in this -- in this legislation which is, you know, particularly a focus and concern for a lot of folks particularly because the last time around there was democratic unified government 10 years ago, that climate legislation Waxman-Markey ultimately was killed by the Senate. There were not sufficient votes.
A climate reporter today just made this point that I thought was really important, that focusing on the $3.5 trillion misses the economic context of climate change, that the current trajectory has us looking to spend four percent of GDP or about 840 billion a year just on climate issues, just on the -- on the additional cost caused by climate change. Do you feel like the party has explained to people how much of an -- sort of insurance policy this is?
CLYBURN: I don`t think we`ve broken through on that. I do know that we are quite aware -- this product is quite aware for the fact that the arctic is melting, storms are raging, rivers are rising, and we`ve got to do something to protect the future of this planet, and that`s why we`re making this investment.
And so, I think that we might be able to do a much better job of getting people to understand what we`re doing because we`re going to have more storms. What we`ve seen happening in the gulf now, we`ve never seen that happen before. Before one storm gets to his destination, two others are forming.
And so, all of that is a result of the change that`s taking place in our climate. I live here in South Carolina. I`ll be in Charleston this weekend. And people are concerned that the rivers are rising and we want to do something in order to stop that so that we can get climate conditions under control.
[20:25:29]
HAYES: You have served in Congress for decades. You`ve been in leadership for quite a while. You`ve been through a bunch of legislative fights, brutal ones amidst COVID, amidst the aftermath of the great financial crisis. Where does the difficulty of this current one rank one to ten, ten being the hardest, one being like an easy thing unanimous bill that everyone votes for. Where do you put it?
CLYBURN: Ten-plus.
HAYES: Oh really? So, this is -- this is -- this one is very hard. Even compared -- even compared to -- the one that I think of is the ACA after Scott Brown got elected when the House had to go past that Senate bill which was a really hard one. Harder than that?
CLYBURN: Yes, simply because we knew then how hard it was, we knew what we were battling against, we knew exactly what we needed to do in order to get people to do a good place and we got that. This time, so much misinformation is going out and people are really reacting to stuff that makes no sense.
COVID-19 is real. And why people will not vaccinate is a problem for me. I can`t understand that. We`re not going to get our economy to where it needs to be until we get this pandemic under control. And aside from all of that, there are people who deny science. Climate is all about science. And so, when you`ve got these kind of denials, it makes it tough. And so, this has been the toughest battle that I`ve been in yet.
HAYES: All right, 10-plus. Congressman Jim Clyburn, thanks for your time.
CLYBURN: Thank you.
HAYES: Coming up, if there was one bit of good news from Mark Zuckerberg today, it`s that during Facebook`s five-hour-long outage, no one on Facebook could read, share, or comment the damning tell-all Facebook whistleblower story. We`ll talk about it all with a former Facebook executive next.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
[20:30:00]
HAYES: Facebook and its family of services including Instagram and WhatsApp went down today shortly before noon Eastern Time. The outage lasted more than five hours affecting billions of users worldwide. Facebook staffers said their own internal systems were also broken. They were operating off the same technology and the same servers.
One employee telling New York Times they were not even able to enter buildings this morning to begin to evaluate the extent of the outage because their badges weren`t working to access doors. As a result, Facebook`s stock price tumbled falling nearly five percent by the time the markets closed, knocking CEO Mark Zuckerberg`s personal wealth down by more than $6 billion in a matter of hours. Of course, that`s all paper wealth.
The cause of the outage remains a bit unclear. And coincidentally it comes the day after a Facebook whistleblower reveals her identity to the Wall Street Journal and 60 Minutes. Frances Haugen says, a 37-year-old former product manager who worked on misinformation or misinformation on Facebook in the run up to the 2020 election copied thousands of pages of internal documents before leaving Facebook earlier this year.
Those were the basis of the complaint that she filed last month at the Securities and Exchange Commission claiming the tech giant hides what its own research says that the platform amplifies hate, misinformation, and political unrest.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: To quote from another one of the documents you brought out, we have evidence from a variety of sources that hate speech, divisive political speech, and misinformation on Facebook and the family of apps are affecting societies around the world.
HAUGEN: When we live in an information environment that is full of angry, hateful, polarizing content, it erodes our civic trust, it erodes our faith in each other, it erodes our ability to want to care for each other. The version of Facebook that exists today is tearing our societies apart and causing ethnic violence around the world.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
HAYES: In addition, Haugen explained that Facebook`s algorithm deliberately chooses divisive content to show users because well, anger inspires more engagement. The documents she leaked today showed that this leaked show that this led European political parties to feel forced to skew negative in their communications on Facebook leading them into more extreme policy positions.
Another key revelation came from the company`s own research about Instagram showing that 13.5 percent of trained girls say Instagram makes thoughts of suicide worse. 17 say it makes their eating disorders worse. Holding social media companies accountable for what they do to kids was the subject of a Senate hearing last week chaired by Democrat Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut.
And as Senator Blumenthal told me when he had him on, his subcommittee is holding another hearing tomorrow where this Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen will testify.
Carole Cadwalladr is a reporter at The Guardian. She was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2019. Her work on the Facebook -- for her work on the Facebook Cambridge Analytica scandal, also the co-founder of the Real Facebook Oversight Board, an independent watchdog group.
And Katie Harbath has spent 10 years at Facebook as director of public policy. She left the company earlier this year and is now an elections fellow at the Bipartisan Policy Center think tank. It`s great to have you first -- both.
Carole, let me start with you and just ask, the revelations from this whistleblower to me are not shocking or -- well, they`re not surprising. They are kind of shocking morally. But to me, more than anything, they`re sort of confirmation of what we always suspected. How do you see these documents?
[20:35:27]
CAROLE CADWALLADR, REPORTER, THE GUARDIAN: Yes, I think -- I mean, I think you`re exactly right. We can`t be shocked by the contents. So many people have been sort of shouting about this for years now. But nonetheless, I think having somebody who`s come from within the belly of the beast who was right there in the civic integrity team, and who can come forward who explains in this very human way what these problems are, and who`s also bought this wealth of evidence, I mean, I think it was eight SEC filings that she`s made. She`s giving evidence to five state attorney generals.
I mean i think you cannot downplay the amount of material that she`s bringing forth and potentially, you know, I think the very serious actions and consequences as a result of this potentially.
HAYES: Katie, you worked there for years and you`ve left. And as someone who did work there and was part of that civic integrity unit or task force, does this jibe with your experience there and how you think about what the company does and what it maybe could do better?
KATIE HARBATH, FORMER DIRECTOR OF PUBLIC POLICY, FACEBOOK: It absolutely jives in terms of the fact that the members of the civic integrity team, those that are there and those that have left, have a deep commitment to trying to figure out the best ways to make the platforms better for society and better for democracy.
And they feel so passionate about that that many are still there trying to make it better. And others feel that there needs to be more conversation out in the open about these types of issues and the things that Facebook is seeing. And so, what this is showing is sort of the hard trade-offs that we oftentimes debated within the company that are now starting to spell out open into the public.
HAYES: Here -- you know, we had the outage today. And there was a lot of joking, right? There`s all this joking about like, wouldn`t it be better if it never came back and then there were people saying, well, actually throughout the world, particularly in the global south, like WhatsApp is the major means that people use to interact with each other. It`s essentially a kind of unregulated utility.
But when we talk about Instagram and Facebook -- let`s put WhatsApp to the side which I think is a little different. I can`t decide it. Is Facebook like automobiles which is that they are incredibly useful and they`re incredible machines and also kind of dangerous if not regulated, or is it like cigarettes where there`s like actually nothing redeeming about it.
You know, if tobacco went away tomorrow, no one would be worse and wiser. And I`m -- you know, today in the in the outage, I was sort of pondering this. What do you think, Carole?
CADWALLADR: Well, I think as you say for large parts of the world actually is the Internet. And I think, you know, it`s very -- I think it is really easy to forget that in places we know like the Philippines where there`s been devastating impacts on their elections which Katie, of course, would know about since she was in charge of the platform at that time.
You know, the population, they access the internet so many of them via free basis. And that is the way that they sort of see the world. So I think -- I think there is a difference. For us -- for us, yes, I think it was great today. It wasn`t that I think a lot of people discovered that actually, you know, maybe this was something that they could do without it in their lives. And I don`t know. maybe there is going to be a longer-term behavior change because of that. I guess we just have to see.
HAYES: Katie, how known -- I mean, when we talk about these sort of key pain points, right? The sort of outreach children, the sort of, you know, toxic effect on civic discourse or political polarization and extremism, like, how present and aware is that in the minds of the people working inside the company?
HARBATH: I think it`s very present. It is one of the things that frankly kept me up at night and continues to keep me up at night is the amount of work that we needed to continue to do and there were a lot of many great people that were trying to figure out the right solutions to this.
And clearly, there is a lot more to do. Clearly there were decisions that were made that in hindsight I think should have been absolutely done differently. And I think though that at the same time too that we shouldn`t expect Facebook to make these decisions on their own. And I do think that it is good that we as a society are out there debating all of these in the open to figure out what the new norms and regulation and other guardrails should be.
HAYES: Carole, go ahead.
CADWALLADR: Can I come in? Because I think -- I think one of the things we`re forgetting here is that a lot of this -- some things can be fixed with money and that I think is what Frances sort of articulated so clearly that she was in (AUDIO GAP) six people dealing with counterespionage and she said that`s just not possible. You cannot deal with the world`s counter-espionage on Facebook with six people.
[20:40:10]
I think you -- I think in your team, I`ve just read on Linkedin, Kate, that there were 30 people who were in charge of elections globally. Now, living in a country where we had an election which was decided on Facebook in a deluge, a deluge of misinformation which has now been deleted from the internet so we can`t study it, it`s not there for our archives, for academics to study, this is a massive problem.
And frankly, if Facebook just took a tiny little bit less profit and employed a few more people in key roles, we could solve a lot of these problems overnight. And i look particularly actually your content moderators who are employed on these terrible contracts. They`re not profitable employees. They do awful work with very, very low pay. Why not - - why not just -- why not just pay them some more money. Have some more of them. Give them proper jobs. Train them properly. I mean, this is not science. It is just money.
HAYES: That`s a great, great point um money can`t solve all things, but there`s a lot of things it can. Carole Cadwalladr and Katie Harbath, thank you both.
Ahead, hospitals overwhelmed with COVID patients without enough beds to treat them. The heartbreaking stories from the front lines as the pandemic of the unvaccinated intensifies, after this.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
[20:45:00]
HAYES: Over 215 million Americans have now had at least one dose of the COVID vaccine. That`s in a nation of about 330 million people. There are still large pockets in this country that are mostly unvaccinated. The thing about this virus is that it`s like water finding the cracks in your foundation. It will find those vulnerable spots.
Look at Alaska and Idaho, for example. Both states lag behind the rest of the country when it comes to getting the eligible population vaccinated. Both states are facing down a pretty devastating fight against the virus. Idaho now in the depths of its fifth COVID surge. The state has authorized hospitals to ration care as they are inundated with COVID patients, many of whom are younger than in previous waves, and nearly all are unvaccinated.
The situation is so bad the morgues are now running out of space. We`ve heard that before. In Alaska, the state is now experiencing its worst COVID spike to date. It has also now authorized hospitals to ration care if necessary.
The New York Times outlined what that looks like right now. "There was one bed coming available in the ICU in Alaska, the largest hospital. Doctors now had to make a choice to make. Several more patients at the hospital, most of them with COVID-19 were in line to take that last ICU spot. But there was also someone from one of the state`s isolated rural communities who needed to be flown in for emergency surgery, so who should get the final bed?
One doctor gathered with his colleagues for an agonizing discussion. They had a better chance of saving one of the patients in the emergency room, they determined, the other person would have to wait. That patient died. This shouldn`t be happening. We should not be seeing this play out all over again, not when every American has access to safe and life-saving vaccines.
But we are and for primarily one reason, conservative politicians, their allies in the right-wing media see anti-vaccine skepticism as a useful political tool or a useful marketing tool, a way to secure voters and viewers. They`re whipping their supporters into a frenzy resisting the vaccines or vaccine requirements ignoring the reality of the pandemic and becoming so openly hostile towards the health care system that some nurses are now carrying panic buttons after incidents of patients attacking people in one Missouri hospital tripled between 2019 and 2020.
It`s still the case vaccines are the way out of this. And we are seeing encouraging results unfold right before our eyes in parts of the country with high uptake. This tale of two Americans is almost entirely voluntary. The right way ecosystem should stop cynically playing with people`s lives.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
[20:50:00]
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
California`s governor is mandating kids 12 to 17 to get a vaccine to go into the schoolroom after around January. Are you going to mandate it for school kids as well?
GOV. JIM JUSTICE (R-WV): No chance. No chance. Listen, all these --
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Why? You mandate as governor -- as governor, you mandate -- we looked, measles, mumps, rubella, tetanus polio, other vaccines. Why won`t you put COVID on that list?
JUSTICE: Now, Margaret, you know, you don`t have to come in so hot? You guys asked me to come, you know. But Margaret, the bottom line of the whole thing is this.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: I`m asking to clarify.
JUSTICE: I truly -- I truly believe that the mandates only divide us and only divide us more.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
HAYES: West Virginia Republican Governor Jim Justice making the case while he will not be mandating vaccines in his state. I should tell you, Jim Justice has been one of the Republican governors who has been quite strong in encouraging people to get vaccinated. He`s been very consistent that message. he hasn`t (INAUDIBLE) footed with it. He`s actually done it. He even offered $100 for West Virginians 16 to 35 who get vaccinated but no mandates.
And the thing is, you can see the need for such a mandate in the numbers. His state has the lowest vaccination rate in the share of eligible population receiving the vaccine according to the CDC. The state`s own data shows the biggest lag is with 12, 15-year-olds. You see that right there at the top. Only 30 percent of them are fully vaccinated.
But justice is still refusing to add it to school-age kids vaccination requirements. That`s despite the fact that we are starting to see mandates across all ages really work. New York City mandated vaccinations for public school employees. Now, 95 percent of all full-time school employees have received at least one dose.
After California`s vaccine mandate for hospital workers went into effect last week, major health systems reported the mandate had helped boost their vaccination rates to 90 percent or higher. In Connecticut which saw an uptick in cases in July, Governor Ned Lamont ordered all state employees and staff of child care facilities to be vaccinated, saying he would deploy the National Guard to fill any personnel shortages.
And Governor Ned Lamont, Democrat of Connecticut joins me now. Governor, it`s good to have you. Take me through what the requirements in your state are or where are places where you are requiring the vaccine and what the result of that those policies has been.
GOV. NED LAMONT (D-CT): Good evening, Chris. I`ll tell you that through encouragement and incentives, we got about 88 of our adults vaccinated. We got the overwhelming majority of our nurses and teachers vaccinated, but that wasn`t good enough, so we put in place mandates.
That means that all teachers must be vaccinated and they are all getting vaccinated. All health care workers must be vaccinated. All state employees as of midnight tonight must be vaccinated or at least give us their testing protocols and how we can keep people safe. And I`d like to tell you that well over 90 percent of our folks are following that.
[20:55:17]
HAYES: Right now, if I`m not mistaken, according to the CDC data we have, you`ve got the most vaccinated state in the -- in the union in terms of percentage eligible population. These numbers float around but that`s 12 and up, 79.3 percent. What is that meant for what Delta looks like, what normal life looks like, your hospital system, as you have seen cases go up a bit as delta hit Connecticut, but what`s it meant for the state, for businesses and hospitals?
LAMONT: I think a lot of pride that we`re getting it right. That our schools are open and they don`t have to shut down for quarantine like what`s happening in other states. That our hospitals have extra capacity so we can take care of surgeries for all of our citizens. And some of the other states that are less vaccinated, they`re flying their patients into Connecticut so we can provide life-saving surgeries for them as well. You know, I know everybody is exhausted but people are staying the course a little bit longer.
HAYES: You have -- there are some requirements at college and universities. And so far, that was another place I think a lot of folks were worried. You`ve got people in dormitories, you`ve got young people very close to each other. So far, it looks like that`s also a bright spot. Official saying that high levels of vaccination have not only limited cases, also allowed schools to lighten up on pandemic related restrictions they imposed last year in your state. How are things in higher ed in Connecticut?
LAMONT: Right now, all of our higher ed institutions mandated vaccines for everybody. Overwhelmingly, people are complying with that. And they have the lowest infection rates in the state. You know, these are young people living in congregate settings. It`s working.
HAYES: You have not taken the step that California was the first state to take, which is to add COVID vaccination to the list of required vaccinations for school entry, that`s for kids that are 12 to 18. Why not?
LAMON: Right now, we`re using encouragement. I`d say we`ve got well over 75 percent of those kids vaccinated. And I am recording the mask for everybody K through 12. And I think that`s keeping people safe.
HAYES: So, you`ve got 75 percent of that eligible population vaccinated just through -- I mean, there`s so, what`s going on there? Is this a reality about Connecticut, about the demographics of your state, about outreach? Like why is this going this way in Connecticut?
LAMONT: Chris, we got hit really hard very early along with New York and New Jersey. I think that this is a state where we look out for each other. It`s not just our personal freedom but what we can do. When it came to our high schools, we really wanted them to be open in person.
You know, the best advocates were our coaches. They said you`re part of a team. We want you on the field. If you have to quarantine. the rest of our team can`t play.
HAYES: That`s interesting. So, they`ve been a key aspect of this. You would -- you would imagine that`s a -- that`s a sort of key authority figure in a lot of places around the country that are really struggling to get their vaccination numbers up.
Do you think about life in Connecticut going into this winter? How different do you see it being than last winter which, of course, was bad across the country, not you know -- not particularly in Connecticut, but like everywhere, it was -- it was a tough winter?
LAMONT: It was a tough winter because we thought we were getting out of the woods. You know, a year ago summer, we opened up our schools, all of our businesses were open, but thankfully everybody wore the mask. And Connecticut was one of the first to get people vaccinated. So, that second wave of Delta hit us a lot less severely than they did some other states.
I think people who are in Connecticut feel like these protocols are working and they`re willing to hang in there a little longer to stay safe.
HAYES: But what is hanging there longer means?
LAMONT: Hang in there longer means kids in school wearing the masks a little bit longer. Hanging in there means those who are sort of, I don`t really want to get vaccinated are more likely now to get vaccinated, overwhelming majority. People looking out for each other and I think because they see it is working.
HAYES: Well, we`ll see. Your state may be the first to sort of cross into a threshold where we`re really looking at something that at least approaches herd immunity or really stamps out transmission. I hope we all arrive there sooner rather than later. Governor Ned Lamont of Connecticut, thank you.
LAMONT: Thanks, Chris.
HAYES: That is ALL IN for tonight. "THE RACHEL MADDOW SHOW" starts right now with Ali Velshi in for Rachel. Good evening, Ali.
ALI VELSHI, MSNBC ANCHOR: Chris, it was good to see you earlier this evening in person.
HAYES: Great to see you too.
VELSHI: It`s a little bit of a sausage being made that the viewers don`t know, but we have not crossed paths a lot in the last year and a half. So, we`ve spent a little time catching up but it was nice to see you, my friend.
HAYES: Nothing better than a little -- a little makeup room chitchat which is been missing from all of lives for a long time.
VELSHI: That`s right.
HAYES: Great to see you, man.