Bostopia News with Evan George -- Boston politics, redistricting, media bias, TikTok

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Today we talk with Evan George of Bostopia News. We talk about Boston politics, local vs state politics, the recent redistricting in Boston and why it's to be questioned, as well as touching on media bias against progressive voices and why it's so important to have people like Evan covering these issues on his podcast and on his very popular TikTok.

Evan George, Jordan Berg Powers, Jonathan Cohn (absent today), and Anna Callahan as we chat about Massachusetts politics. This is the audio version of the Incorruptible Mass podcast, season 5 episode 13. You can watch the video version on our YouTube channel.

You’re listening to Incorruptible Mass. Our goal is to help people transform state politics: we investigate why it’s so broken, imagine what we could have here in MA if we fixed it, and report on how you can get involved.

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Transcript

Hello, and welcome to Incorruptible Mass. We are here to help you transform state politics.

We know that we can make the policies here in Massachusetts reflect the needs of the vast majority of the residents of our beautiful state. And today we are so excited to be joined by Evan George, who runs Bostopia News, and is an amazing media person himself, bringing progressive news to tons and tons of people. Before we introduce Evan George, though, I am going to have my amazing co host introduce himself.

Jordan. Jordan Berg Powers. I use he him. And I have several years having worked in Massachusetts politics, and I'm currently recovering from that. 

Don't recover too much. We need you.

I'm Anna Callahan. She her coming at you from Medford. Lovin’ state politics, lovin’ local politics, as I have for many years. And now our fabulous guest, Evan George. Evan, tell us a little bit about yourself and a little bit about the incredible media that you do.

Yes, thank you for having me. Name is Evan George. He him pronouns.

I'm a member of a lot of different community groups, most notably the Democratic Socialists of America and Dorchester Not For Sale, which is our housing advocacy and protection group here. But I am most known for the Boston Local News in 60 Seconds that I do on TikTok and Instagram and my Bostopia News podcast covering all things involving the mayor and the Boston City Council. Fantastic.

Tell us a little bit about one or two things you've covered recently. What do you cover in Boston News? 

Well, most of what I do is I go through a couple of the different email lists, and I'm sure many of your listeners are on things like the political email list. There's one from Commonwealth magazine.

There's the master list. I read through the Boston Globe Herald, and then I try to distill that and condense it to 60 Seconds. One of my first feedbacks that I got was someone DMing me saying, I love the show, but 60 Seconds is too long for this. Do it in 15 seconds. And I was like, Great idea. I can barely do this, but thank you for the input.

And I started doing it during COVID really just to keep myself occupied. I was playing around doing a podcast years and years ago before I started actually getting involved in my local community. So I decided to bring it back.

And then I think it was there was a Trump rally that a bunch of TikTokers trolled by creating fake accounts and applications. And so they were expecting like 60, 70,000 people, and then they pull back the curtain and there's like 3000. And that made me think, oh, people do political organizing on TikTok.

I always thought it was the dance app. And so I just started recording the different local news in 60 Seconds, and people seem to enjoy it. In terms of the most recent things there's been a lot of things involving the police that I always try to highlight.

The Post Commission Decertifying School Resource Officer who was alleged for a sexual assault against a student in that school. That was some news that happened yesterday, and I have not got a chance to read the news yet today. So no sneak peeks for you, unfortunately.

No sneak peeks. That's fine. So this is great.

We talk on many different episodes about how important it is that we have these kinds of news, alternative news outlets, and how much the mainstream media just does not cover either doesn't cover a lot of these things or they cover them with a clear bias, unfortunately. So it's really important that we be in these places. And you being on TikTok, I'd love to hear a little bit.

I know actually if you and Jordan can both talk about TikTok in terms of our presence on TikTok, your presence on TikTok, demographics of TikTok. I imagine a lot of people who listen to this podcast, maybe some of those folks are not on TikTok. So just sort of understanding TikTok a little bit.

Jordan, would you like me to start it or you should start it. Okay, well, people here are familiar with it by far the largest platform, I think, in terms of the social media, at least over the last few years, definitely the fastest growing, which is why you're seeing a lot of national bands going against it. A lot of it funded by Meta, their competition, who owns Instagram, comically enough.

And I find it actually a much healthier space than Twitter to actually engage in political discourse. I don't know if that's because the differences between how text translates versus audio and visual mediums. You're just able to communicate a lot more.

It's a lot more fluid with being able to stitch other videos. Or if I make a video, somebody can add a little bit and then add more context and content. In terms of its demographics, I believe the predominant age range is in their 30s, despite people, again, always associating it as a younger app.

I also know that it skews a female, I think, maybe by like 55 45 or 60 40. And I'm always a little bit hesitant. Even though I love the medium.

I can point to a lot of success stories I've had with it and really champion it as like, if you are running a political campaign, you have to be on this all of your time, should be on this. In reality, the same rules still apply in terms of like, running campaigns and general awareness. We need to get people who aren't engaged on political discourse 8 hours a day involved.

But even within that, there are a lot of different things that you can do and highlight to spread information, I guess. One success story, the National Guard has been trying to build an updated firing range down in the Cape for about four or five years now, and local communities worried that all of the ammunition actually goes into the water supply, which is why you find, like, a lot of contaminated water by military bases. So they don't want it.

No one wants it. We don't need another firing range. And so I quickly highlighted the story, and I reached out to an activist there, and I just said, if you want to get involved, here's a link.

And then a few days later, I got a phone call from this nice woman saying, like, oh, you the TikTok guy. I was like, yeah. She's like, you mentioned my group.

And I woke up one morning and got 50 emails for people wanting to join. And I didn't know who you were or what TikTok was, but I tracked you down. It is certainly a great way to highlight local issues, especially, as you were saying, the media for that is so horrible.

And some of that is just larger capitalist forces that are just trying to cut down on coverage that it's just easier to leap on to national narratives because there's just so much more volume, so you can kind of just copy paste. You don't need to do the same in depth local reporting. And I always hesitate to call myself a journalist because I really don't do that type of digging.

I still rely on outlets like the Globe and the Herald, but knowing where their political leanings are, I can kind of take it and then recontextualize it for a different audience, which I think is maybe the best thing that my platform is able to do. Yeah, I'll just add to that and say, I definitely agree that we should, you know, campaigns, I always tell people, don't be on things that you're not on that you don't know. Don't parachute in and put in one video and then call it day.

I do worry about and think a lot about the fact that our organizations aren't there, our advocates aren't there, and there's a lot of people there. And I joke all the time. People will spend weeks writing a press release or content for the Boston Globe, which, congratulations, no one will read or they'll read once, and that's it.

It's a very flat conversation, right? If you're lucky, you'll get one article, copy and paste your side, copy and paste the other side, and that's it, right? That's, like, your best scenario. But TikTok allows you to be where people are, be with a different audience than that audience, but it also allows it to live longer. People will stitch it.

They'll have conversations. They'll be in the chat. It's a more dynamic conversation, as you're saying, and it allows us to really spread our values in a way differently than just sort of the flat pieces that you get when it gets filtered through corporations.

People who are interested in selling ad space, and so people who are interested in selling ad space will filter the things that you say through the median of who pays their bills, right? That's always going to be the thing that worries them. And there's a lot of decisions that get made, both consciously and mostly subconsciously, to make sure that you're not saying things that will make it harder to pay your paycheck when you're able to have those conversations directly with people on our values, values of just like everyone should count. Everyone should have homes, everyone should people should pay fair tax wages.

These things are controversial in mainstream media, but they're common beliefs among regular people. And so just I think that's why it's so important that we're there. And it's really frustrating when you get on Ma Polly or Boss Polly on TikTok.

There's not a lot of progressive content being creative, certainly not as much as there is in other mediums. And certainly if I think about all the time and energy and meetings I've been in around press releases and other things, I think you could have put together a five minute video straight to camera on TikTok and we could have had five videos. And the amount of time we spent arguing over one paragraph, that's going to go in a press release, right? And so that's the way I think about it.

It's like we really don't use our time well in terms of where are people and how are we communicating with them. And the great thing about these medias is for all the sort of fighting, meta is trying to make itself into TikTok. So everything you create for one, you can spread across many platforms, right? Like you can use it for YouTube shorts, you can use it for reels.

It sort of goes across. So this is my pitch to you, if you're listening, to be in the place where regular people are and have conversations with them, especially if you're not running for office but you are interested in being an activist and an organizer, think about being in those spaces, think about having conversations with those folks. You don't have to make a video.

You can always just be in the comments. I don't make a lot of you make this podcast available and then I'm in the comments section just having values conversations with folks. And so I think be there.

Be where people are. Yeah, I was going to just add to that. Certainly agree with everything that you said.

And I always am just so worried that people spend too much online in terms of their campaigns. I will take one in person conversation with a stranger over 50 comments that I've gotten on a TikTok because I still think or worry that people who spend all their time online and that is their main usage or what they view as political activism, it's not really pushing the needle, to be clear. I also agree it is an augmentation.

It's an addition to person to person conversations. If you're running for office, you better be on the doors. That is the thing you need to do.

Don't at me with any other social media. I think when we teach it, we say about ten to 15% of your time should be on platforms that you already use on a regular basis if you're running for office. This is really for people who do comms work, who do activism, who do this professionally and are like just think about how you're using your time when you're in meetings.

That's the way I think about it. But I want to co sign and I think Anna and we've talked about this on this podcast, I think it's really important they all should flow together. If you are just online and you're not getting people to make phone calls, to meet with their representatives, to push their representatives in person in thing, then you are not doing it right.

And if the only thing you're doing is getting the same 20 people to meet with your meet with your congresspeople, you're also not doing it right. We need a plethora as a movement, not maybe individually. We need to be thinking about are we in all the spaces and who's picking up all the spaces, right? Like who's doing all these things? So that's the other piece that says yes, agree cosign 1000%.

Yeah. So the campaign stuff aside, I think what we're talking about here is really there's also a real dearth of news and of analysis on the progressive side that that does not come through in mainstream media, even when it's there, right? Even when there are experts to talk about these issues, to talk about Medicare for all and how it might work at the state level to talk about the different policies and how they might work, the mainstream media will often not allow the experts on those topics to be heard. And so the ability for folks, for your TikTok and the various mediums that you go through and for us as a podcast and on TikTok and in these other spaces to be able to allow there to be sort of news that comes out.

And I'd love to talk a little bit about city news and state news. I think one thing that we do find is that when it isn't an election season, it is hard to get people really interested in state politics. And state politics is so opaque.

State politics is like such a black box because it is so non democratic, it is so sort of dictatorial and there really is not a lot of democracy happening at the state house. And so it's difficult to know what's going on. Even if you're a sitting elected official, right? You're a state rep, you probably don't even know what's going on.

So imagine the people who are trying to affect state politics. It's quite difficult. And so people, I think, have trouble staying engaged.

I know in my city people tend to be a little bit more engaged in city politics. And I imagine that in Boston as well because it's such a big city and has such an impact on the state and on so many people that there is sort of some ongoing interest year round in Boston City politics. But we'd love to hear from you about that.

I definitely agree. We were speaking a little bit about this before we started the recording that at the state level, at least for me personally, it feels so depressing because there's just such a lack of information and it's just not tangible. And I think even as you were saying, our state representatives, I could ask them a question or ask them to advocate for something and besides them giving me like yeah, sure, absolutely.

They themselves that they're being open will say like I really don't have much say on this either. I'm just kind of waiting until I'm told what it's going to look like. That might be 24 to 48 hours before and then I make a decision.

And I think that contrasts with at least here in Boston is because it is so much more transparent. I can watch every video about every committee. They post their agendas ahead of time.

I get the same info packet that they get and they're able to just not just use their status as a platform, actually hold committees and hearings, bringing in different experts to voice or just lend a platform to these issues. But it's budget season and I have a much more tangible impact on the Boston city budget just as a voter, as a constituent, like never mind the things that I do in politics and media than I do at the state budget. And part of that again has to do with that transparency, part of that has to do with it's just a smaller body.

And I think that also makes it a little bit easier. And the new powers of the Boston City Council, because of recently passed referendum, they're now allowed to transfer funds from one department to another. So now there's something very concrete that organizations, advocacy groups are now able to say no, I'm looking at the mayor's budget with you.

She wants 10 million here. I want actually 15 million there. Take that other five from the police department.

And now it's such a more tangible then we get to watch it play out live. And of course it has the same background politics as everything else but it's a lot more transparent what's going on. And people know the stakes where at the state level I have no idea what's going on.

Oh man. And you know why that is? Because the law says so. That's because open meeting laws mean that you have to have access to these things.

The number of states, I hope people listening to this already know the number of states that have basically open meeting law that applies to their state legislature as well. That is the norm. That is how it should be.

Those laws need to apply to the local level, the state level, and the national level. And Massachusetts is an unusual and unusually undemocratic place because we do not have access by law to what is happening at our state level. It is a reality.

So let us take a tiny little break right here and talk about just want to allow people the opportunity. We have a link right below. You can donate to the show.

We always try to make sure that you are well informed about everything that's happening at the state level, even though it is not transparent. We try to bring you all of that stuff and bring you in. And if you can donate the price of a cup of coffee a week to the show, that's amazing.

If you have a little bit more than that, you're welcome to do that as well. But we are so appreciative of those folks who have and even if you can't, please send us your questions. We've answered questions on the show.

Give us your comments. We love hearing from listeners, so we've had those as well. And we would love to hear from you.

Yeah, I'll just say share our just to that point, like our stuff on those platforms. Share them, tweet them out, share them to your stories. Make sure be in the comment section.

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We pay them fair wage, pay them well. And so your donation is good. Absolutely.

So let's bring it back to talk a little bit more about Boston. And what I would love to hear is about home rule petitions. So people on the show probably know, but we always love to go over it anyway.

So in Massachusetts, just because you have an elected city council or select board, you've elected people, that doesn't mean that they can pass whatever they want. There are many, many kinds of laws that they are not allowed to pass in the state of Massachusetts. And what they have to do is they have to send a request to the state House.

So that's called a home rule petition. They pass a law, but it doesn't actually get implemented until the state house approves. And the sad truth is, the state house usually doesn't approve.

So Boston, boston is the 800 pound gorilla in Massachusetts, right? Gigantic city, millions of people, the giant school system. We would love to hear from you. What are some of the home rule petitions that Boston has passed that have not been approved by the State House.

Well, the biggest one and the most contentious is definitely around rent control because as you were saying, I think it was around the 1960s, it's kind of like a bureaucratic cleanup method. State houses across the country were just like, we can't be weighing in on a junior staffer hiring for this local municipality, like cities and towns, you have to handle some of this stuff. But for some reason, at least here in Massachusetts, the State House decided to hold on to a lot of different powers.

And one of those is around at least rent control, but definitely some housing initiatives that we want to pass here. And so it was passed by the Boston City Council, it was approved by the mayor. And what this home rule petition would allow, really any city to do is if it's up to that individual city, they get to make that decision with rent control.

And I believe Somerville has as well. Cambridge, if they haven't yet, they're probably going to. And as we were talking about the opaqueness of the State House, it now kind of enters a black box and no one, and this is the most depressing thing is no one expected to go anywhere.

And that means it's not even going to come up for a vote. It was sent there and it's going to basically die there in committee, which now you kind of have to put that on the two committee chairs. I know Lydia Edwards is one of them because she was a former Boston City Councilor, and I'm blanking on the second, but it just kind of just evaporates.

And that's true with a lot of our initiatives. And unfortunately, what it also does is it lets local politicians off the hook because they can always shrug their shoulders and just say, well, nothing we can do. And they're right in many ways, and so we can't really hold them responsible.

And one big thing, the only way to really do it, in my mind, would be if our local officials here started to actually enter more in the statewide elections and saying, if you're not going to pass this, I'm going to put my arm around the shoulder of someone challenging you. And unfortunately, there is such a code of silence around any official doing that. And everyone is terrified.

Even left groups in the city are terrified about challenging anyone. And so if there's no pressure coming from any direction, it kind of just dies. And then the State House will say, hey, if you really want this, do a statewide ballot initiative.

That way we don't have to even weigh in on this. And I think, honestly, the major reason is just apathy in terms of our state officials that if you have a job where you're almost guaranteed reelection and you don't have to work, then why would I sit through committee meetings on this. Why would I actually put in the effort? I can do a couple of hours a week and cruise to my reelection.

If you put in the effort, it doesn't do anything because the speaker is the one who kind of controls what things are allowed to make it through committees and things. So there's this kind of a futility. But I do want to come back to something that you just said because this is something that gets me, it really gets me that there is this, you call it a code of silence, I call it a club, right? That if you are an elected official you endorse elected officials, right? You endorse incumbents.

And there's this quiet thing that if you're in power you support the other people in power. It's a club and you only will endorse people who are sitting elected officials. God forbid you endorse a challenger against an incumbent.

It's so interesting to me because it seems like something that those of us on the outside, right, people who are not in that club, we pretty clearly think that that's what is there's something wrong? Why is this always happening? Why do progressive, even deeply progressive sitting incumbents endorse someone that we know to be a more conservative, pretty crappy, terrible sitting state representative over an, obviously has a long track record progressive challenger. This happens over and over and over again. Why? To us on the outside it makes no sense.

And yet the minute you get into that club there's some sort of brainwashing that happens. Suddenly you are only allowed to endorse sitting incumbents because now you're in the club and you got to follow the club rules, I guess I would say. I think that the answer to that is that they're worried that you'll get somebody to run against them, right? They're always worried about their own jobs and things.

And I think ultimately the problem with this circle is that it just reinforces itself and it lacks sort of moral clarity. You get this sort of bizarre dance because everybody's ultimately only thinking about how they can win their next election. And so that's why it needs so much interruption from us.

I just want to take us into the other piece of big thing that happened which is the Boston Redistricting. And I'd love your thoughts about how that went. What happened? I have some old thoughts having done a lot of work on redistricting but I'd love your thoughts about it.

Just to put the stage for folks, Boston passed a redistricting plan, I would say one that really gave a lot of power to the people of color in the city. A judge said that they over relied too much on ensuring that people of color have a say and relied too much on the Voting Rights Act. That's all they said.

The judge did not clarify more beyond that. The City council then passed another sort of rush to pass something so that it could be for this election cycle. Passed another map hastily, recently.

Is that a good summation? Yes, it was great. And I had people DMing me about more information on it and then saying, please don't tag or credit me for this. I run an organization here, and I'm terrified that blank, blank, blank is going to retaliate in local office.

Kind of like, again, that court of silence, which, I'm a bartender, my job is safe, so I can say whatever I want. And so, yes, the Boston City Council passed a few months ago. What was a map that I think described by the Boston Globe was one that gave power to communities of color and thinned, historically strong white conservative voting blocks in Boston, which redistricting my perspective, is it is mostly an incumbency bracket.

If you're in office, you're the one who gets to make the map. You kind of protect the precincts that you want, maybe get rid of the ones you did less in. And an added bonus is you can maybe screw over some of your political rivals.

And there was one that passed a nine to four, as you were saying. This judge said that they predominantly relied on race. There's half a dozen federal cases that go through this as one right now being viewed by the Supreme Court.

And as we know, judges can kind of just make up any decision they want, pound the gavel, and that's really it. You don't need to rely on precedent. And one thing that the judge did highlight that I do agree with was that no one for the city spoke on behalf of this map.

It was part of the legal strategy of the city that they allowed one, I think she works at MIT to speak on it. No city councilors, no one else. So the only people who could speak on it were the ones challenging it, which were all the white conservative city councilors.

So the judge only heard from them. She mentions it twice in her briefing, saying significantly, no one from the city council was here. And that was the legal strategy of the city.

That was not any of the decisions made by the Boston city councils. There's some conspiracy theories about, did they want this to get thrown out? We don't necessarily have time to go into that. But then the mayor submitted a map.

Three more maps were submitted, and then Ruthzee Louijeune was put in charge of this effort in another kind of behind the scenes effort. And it became very clear that some of the more moderate liberals sided with some of the more conservatives, saying, like, we're going to run this through. We're going to get a map that at least the majority of us agree with.

And as you were saying, that was a rush process. We had some time restraints around. If we weren't done by about May 30, and we still wanted to have early voting, then we were going to have to push back the election. Another thing that we would need the State House to approve us on, they were lucky enough to give our people seeking City Council an extension. If you're looking for a district seat, they punted that a month when you need to return signatures.

And at the end result of this process, which passed ten to two, so an even more significant margin, we ended up protecting some of the more white conservative districts in District Two and District Three. And then they tried to go after areas like Matapan, one of the poorest districts in the city, one of the most predominant people of color. And I just have to give credit to both Julia Mahia, at large city councilor, and Kendra Laura from District Six, who were the only two no votes who fought against this correctly highlighting if the purpose of this redistricting was because the District Two, where the seaport is, grew by 13,000 people.

District Three, where I personally live in, lost about 6500 people. The only thing they really have to do is make the math right. So, like, okay, if you have overpopulation District Two lesser population, district Three, that's where the changes should be made.

Why are ten councilors fighting for a map which is going to carve up District Five in Matapan, and they hanging that out there? The obvious reason is because they want to thin and dilute the power of some of the communities of color in a very disingenuous and disgusting way. Maybe that was to attack a City council there, ricotta Warrior. Maybe that was just to, again, secure a little bit more of a leaning on a City council, which has been skewing progressive, but not nearly enough, at least to my liking, or, I'm sure, many of the people here.

So that map is passed and now it's kind of locked in for the next ten years unless there's going to be a lawsuit almost, and there is already a lawsuit going on, I think this one, they'll end up saying, no, we're not doing it. Which, again, it's just the judge's discretion. It's completely up to whatever judge gets it.

They're the one who gets to decide. And that's the situation that we live in in this country. Yeah, I just wanted to highlight the thing I think that was most frustrating for me watching this process is that essentially the judge didn't say that you had to give back all the power to the white conservatives.

They just said you overrelied. And there were some really easy fixes you could have done that wouldn't have so back went against and diluted the power of people of color. I definitely, after having seen the map that the mayor put out, feel like they purposely botched the hearing so that they could put forward a map that clearly so dilutes people of color and gives power to people.

They're trying to basically get on their side. And so it's a real shame because there was a community process that put together a community map that people old sort of power lines, and instead of fighting for that, the city councilor sort of easily got bought off behind closed doors to a really just mediocre status quo. And the status quo is people, black people specifically have less power than they should in the city of Boston.

Yeah. And unfortunately, we've seen this for a lot of key votes for the Boston City Council is there are four white conservatives who work together, who coordinate, who operate as a bloc, and then you have nine, now eight, because Kenzie Bach has moved on, councilors who don't fit that description, and they all work independent of each other.

This is something that I think we see in Democratic politics, definitely at the national level, and it's like herding cats to get them to operate as unison. And it's very easy, as you said, to kind of like pick off or buy off one or two or to form different coalitions, and then the whole thing falls apart. We see this in the budget year after year, and we just saw it for the redistricting.

And so I just want to end, I think, really quickly with how does that look different from the state, the Massachusetts state, largely what it did was it maximized the opportunity for people of color to have power. We created a lot of districts of what they call districts of opportunity, districts where people of color will have a say on who their elected official is. It doesn't mean that they'll elect a person of color, it means that they have, as a bloc together, will have a say on who their elected official is.

So it's really weird to say this, but on the state level, we actually did a pretty good job. They met with community groups. Community groups helped draw maps.

The maps that ended up being put into place on the state level largely gave power to disparate community groups. They did a pretty good job. There's certainly places on the maps, there are certainly places here or moved a line there, throw some game.

So I actually have a lot of patience for how hard that is. If you move a line, you lose five people. You literally have to find someplace else, and that's not easy.

And so I think the state senate is a different model. I think Brownsberger really screwed over Boston. I think they really packed black people into one district, which it was pretty shameful, actually, I think, but except for the sort of Boston sort of, I think having diluted power again, I actually think the senate largely did a good job of again, there were places which lost every place in Massachusetts gained people.

That's actually a mistake that people make. But the average around the country was 7%, western Mass had 3%, boston had about twelve to 15% of growth. So they shifted the state sort of more districts in Boston and around the and around where people and also the Cape and North Coast also gained a lot of people.

Right. So they added peace there. And unfortunately for people who live in western Mass, they have now more towns being represented by fewer people.

But that's sort of where population went. So they did a good job on the state level. And I think that's a real shame that Boston went the opposite direction of the state.

Yeah, I was going to say, you can just see how bad of a job Boston City Council must have been if the Massachusetts state government did a better job. Yes. 

And on that note, we would love to talk to you for another half an hour or more.

Maybe we'll have you back on the show, but we are going to go ahead and call it a day. It's been fantastic having you. Thanks everybody, for listening and we hope to see you all next week.

Thank you so much. Thanks. Take care.