The Vanguard sat down last week with former Alameda DA Pamela Price who announced she is launching a new podcast.
David Greenwald: All right, we got Pamela Price, who’s still here. So what are your thoughts on everything that happened in the last year? Loaded question.
Pamela Price: Yeah, I mean, I think we have to kind of put it in a historical perspective, and I was listening to some commentator on CNN this morning about how the rest of the world is realizing something has really changed in America. They were saying the first Trump administration, they thought, oh, this is just a fluke. He is a crazy guy. He got over, okay, fine. Then Biden comes in and things from their perspective go back to normal. And I mean, to the extent that Biden represented and certainly reflected that he was a return to normalcy, to the values and the norms and the constitutional expectations that we all share regardless of our political sort of ideology, we all sort of take it for granted, there’s a constitution, there’s a peaceful transfer of power. This is how it works. And the things that we saw Trump doing in the first term were like, he’s just crazy, but we got rid of him, fine. And then we brought him back. So I don’t know what to tell you. I was struck by the comment that the rest of the world is recognizing that things have changed in America. And for us as Americans, the question is, when are we going to recognize it?
David Greenwald: I’m in denial, personally.
Pamela Price: I can’t afford it. When you’re a Black woman, you can’t be in denial. You just got to know, I got to figure out how to survive. And my sister put it aptly the day after the election, she said, today is the day for all Black women to rest. Okay, we’re just going to rest now. We’ve been spending centuries trying to save democracy, and today we’re going to take a rest day because everything that we have thought of as normal is no longer normal. And that’s what we see now. It is a very tenuous place. I’m very cognizant of the fact that I have studied the Holocaust a little bit and truly believe never again. I do believe never again. From the moment that I walked out of the Holocaust Museum in Los Angeles, I don’t know, 20, 25 years ago, I truly understood the horrors of that. And I just see the sign of what happened, what Hitler was able to do in Nazi Germany, I see Donald Trump doing in these United States.
David Greenwald: Well, we’re talking again about using Guantanamo Bay, which we didn’t learn the lesson the first time from that.
Pamela Price: Right? Yeah, yeah. I just saw a flight of detainees from Guantanamo were returned to Venezuela. And again, the worldwide impact, a lot of people in America are under the misimpression that immigration and the need to deport detainees is all about Mexico. And it’s not really that, it’s much broader than that. And for us in Alameda County, it has a broad impact because we are the fourth most diverse county in the country, believe it or not. We have people here from Afghanistan, from Yemen, from Thailand, from China, Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador, Africa, Nigeria, Ghana, Eritrea, Ethiopia, from all over the world. People have come and settled here and raised their children. And what I’ve seen is a statistic that 53% of all of the children in this county, at least in 2021, lived in a household where one of their parents was born outside of this country.
David Greenwald: So from your perspective, what was it like to be the DA for the time that you had? And I understand the negatives of it, but I mean just what do you feel like you accomplished even though you only got two years to really do anything?
Pamela Price: Well, I feel like we did change the game somewhat. We certainly brought a fresh perspective to the DA’s office. It was an organization that hadn’t changed in 50 years, at least 50 years. And that was pretty much stayed and stuck in just not only the historical contours of it where every DA was appointed, appointed, appointed. So it really was the good old boys passing it down to the good old boys, to the good old boys, to the good old boys. But also what we found once we got there was that the office was still very much operating pre-pandemic. The technology was outdated. You had some offices that didn’t even have Wi-Fi. People were using their hotspots to get online and do their work, the lack of connectedness in the office. So the office had a lot of problems. We had to focus on health and wellness because when we first got there, that’s the first thing you were hit with, was that people were very traumatized.
David Greenwald: So I’ll ask you this question this way. Were you surprised by the vitriol of the media in their treatment towards you?
Pamela Price: Absolutely. I ran for office in 2014. I ran for office in 2016. I ran for office in 2018. I was never attacked. And some of those elections I won, some I lost, and particularly in the 2018 race, I challenged the incumbent. I was the first person to run for that seat in over a hundred years, and I did not experience that level of attack and media scrutiny before. I think in the age of Trump, we’ve entered a new day in our civil discourse. Politics has always been dirty, but it’s really dirty now, and the media amplifies the dirt more than anything else. The level of attention we got from the media was simply unprecedented.
David Greenwald: Tell us about Pamela Price Unfiltered.
Pamela Price: Yes, Pamela Price Unfiltered is my new podcast. My goal is to help people navigate the complexities of the world as it exists today. In Alameda County, we’re in complete flux. Nationally, we don’t know what will happen next with issues like mass deportations. We need a place where we can talk about these things. So I want to create and use the platform for raw, unfiltered conversations about the news of the day and the issues that matter most.
David Greenwald: Was Pamela Price ever filtered?
Pamela Price: Pamela Price was very filtered in the DA’s office. There were so many things that you can’t say due to confidentiality and legal constraints. Many times I had to say, “No comment.” So yes, I was very filtered and muzzled as DA.
David Greenwald: All right. Well, we’ll leave it there. Thank you so much for your time.
Pamela Price: Yes, thank you, David. I appreciate you and the work that you do. I appreciate Vanguard News and thank you for alerting people to check out Pamela Price Unfiltered, the new podcast for raw, real conversations. Thank you.
Pamela Price Unfiltered will be streamed on all major platforms: Apple, Spotify, YouTube, iHeart podcasts, Google podcasts and Amazon music.
Trump got elected in a landslide.
Price was outed from DA by 65.2% of voters rejection in a landslide.
Nuff said…
“The appeal to popularity fallacy is made when an argument relies on public opinion to determine what is true, right, or good.”
I ran that saying through the whopper and here’s some of what came up:
“Popularity can indicate practical wisdom, social consensus, or even evolutionary advantage.”
“If someone constantly dismisses popular opinion as “wrong” just because it’s mainstream, they might be using the fallacy rejection as a shield against reality”