Speaker 1: Push it.
Speaker 2: I'm Khalil Jbron Muhammad.
Speaker 3: I'm Ben Austen. We're two best friends, one black, one white.
Speaker 2: I'm a historian and I'm a journalist. And this is
Speaker 2: some of my best friends.
Speaker 3: Are some of my best friends? Are you know? On
Speaker 3: the other side. In this show, we wrestle with the
Speaker 3: challenges and the absurdities of a deeply divided and unequal country.
Speaker 3: And today's episode, Khalil, we go deep, deep, deep into
Speaker 3: those divides. Yeah, that's right.
Speaker 2: We're talking about trump Ism, We're talking about populism, we're
Speaker 2: talking about the far right Christian nationalists. We have on
Speaker 2: our show.
Speaker 1: Jeff Charlotte.
Speaker 2: He's a professor at Dartmouth College and the author of
Speaker 2: the New York Times best selling book The Undertow Seems
Speaker 2: from a Slow Civil War.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, this book is really powerful. Jeff's new books
Speaker 3: starts with his reporting way back in twenty fifteen. He's
Speaker 3: at Trump rallies and it continues throughout the Trump presidency.
Speaker 3: And this is the first part of the book. And
Speaker 3: he's talking with people at these rallies, the real diehard
Speaker 3: Trump supporters, and he's capturing for readers the depth of
Speaker 3: their belief and Jeff is seeing Trump really through the
Speaker 3: lens of religion. He's seeing Trump as a kind of
Speaker 3: religious leader.
Speaker 2: And this book continues after the events of January sixth,
Speaker 2: twenty twenty one. He travels the country to explore divides everywhere, guns, militia,
Speaker 2: state legislative banning of books, and overturning of reproductive rights.
Speaker 2: Jeff really believes that we are in a slow civil war.
Speaker 2: He calls it as he sees it.
Speaker 3: That's right. He thinks it's already begun. All right, let's
Speaker 3: do it. Let's get into this, all right, Jeff Charlotte, Jeff,
Speaker 3: thank you for being on some of my best friends.
Speaker 3: Are I spent a long time coming.
Speaker 1: Thanks Ben, Thanks good to be with you both today.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Jeff, it's great to meet you.
Speaker 3: Jeff Khalil is just meeting you right now, But you
Speaker 3: and I have known each other. I was trying to
Speaker 3: do the math. I think it's twenty years.
Speaker 4: Really that long. So, yeah, we met via Harper's magazine.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, you were doing your first piece for the magazine,
Speaker 3: Jesus plus Nothing, which becomes Your which was.
Speaker 4: The start of my Yeah, twenty years. So I've been
Speaker 4: going around thinking about this book. I've been reporting on
Speaker 4: right wing movements for twenty years since that story. That
Speaker 4: story was in sort of the turn in that direction.
Speaker 3: So that magazine story that we worked on together, you
Speaker 3: as writer, me as a lowly fact checker, became your book,
Speaker 3: The Family, and it also became a docu series. And
Speaker 3: I'll just sort of say, like you've always been interested
Speaker 3: in religion and power. This is sort of something that
Speaker 3: has been much of your professional life's work. And I
Speaker 3: would say that the difference between that work back then
Speaker 3: and what you've been doing more recently is that you
Speaker 3: were looking at elites. You were looking at at least
Speaker 3: people who were approximate to power, and during the Trump
Speaker 3: era you've looked more like the people who are the masses,
Speaker 3: who are not necessarily in power, but how they've been
Speaker 3: sort of controlled or sort of what they're thinking is yeah.
Speaker 4: And I think the pivot point really is Trump's descent
Speaker 4: on the Golden Escalator in twenty fifteen. And here he's
Speaker 4: bringing down a fascist esthetic. He doesn't have a movement yet,
Speaker 4: and the question to me is will he build the movement?
Speaker 4: So the question that becomes more interesting for me is
Speaker 4: one of reception rather than one of the production of
Speaker 4: the narrative, and that kind of pivots me toward will
Speaker 4: this movement form? Will I watch a social movement? Because
Speaker 4: the right has social movements too, Will I watch a
Speaker 4: social movement in real time? And unfortunately, yes.
Speaker 2: No, that's really fascinating because I know in many ways
Speaker 2: the book you've written is written for us, the undertow
Speaker 2: scenes from a civil war. And by us, I mean
Speaker 2: like people who still believe in facts, who still care
Speaker 2: about expertise, and people who read books. But you know,
Speaker 2: tell us, like, what do we need to understand about
Speaker 2: what you call the Trumpet scene to help us understand
Speaker 2: what is happening in our country from all of these
Speaker 2: Trump rallies that you've attended over the past several years.
Speaker 4: That's the first thing that we need to understand that
Speaker 4: this is an age of Trump in the same way
Speaker 4: that I think a lot of scholars will sort of
Speaker 4: date the age Reaganism not from nineteen eighty to eighty eight,
Speaker 4: but from nineteen eighty really perhaps to twenty sixteen, such
Speaker 4: that Reagan defines a kind of a vernacular in which
Speaker 4: American politics takes place. Whether you're a Democrat or Republican,
Speaker 4: and I I think the Trump is scene is he is.
Speaker 4: He has given his language to the age. And I
Speaker 4: think that's the first thing, is that we live in
Speaker 4: the age of Trump. And so these debates is whether
Speaker 4: Trump is finished or not, they're really missing the point.
Speaker 1: I think of this preacher in.
Speaker 4: Omaha, Nebraska, pastor Hank Cuneman, and he's a prophet in
Speaker 4: he or so he says, and he says Trump is
Speaker 4: coming back, whether the man himself or his spirit in
Speaker 4: the flesh of another.
Speaker 1: And I think that's the first thing.
Speaker 4: And the second thing is just to pay attention to
Speaker 4: that seemingly crazy you know, Trump is coming back spirit
Speaker 4: in the flesh of another. Seemingly crazy narrative, right, But
Speaker 4: it's not crazy. It's also imaginative. And I think we
Speaker 4: have to contend with the fascist movement that did arise
Speaker 4: in response to that fascist aesthetic. It is fascism is
Speaker 4: a form of imagination. And where we get stuck on saying,
Speaker 4: but what are our policies? It's not about that. It
Speaker 4: is a utopian movement. They understand that their vision as
Speaker 4: utopin and that brings with it so much momentum and energy.
Speaker 4: And I'm not saying like it's unstoppable. I definitely don't
Speaker 4: believe inevitability, but I think as a country, both left
Speaker 4: and liberals are still trying to resist it in terms
Speaker 4: of an older politics.
Speaker 2: I have a follow up question, Jeff, because this is
Speaker 2: one of the things that I would not have seen
Speaker 2: but for your reporting about this and the amount of
Speaker 2: time you spend up close at these rallies. But essentially
Speaker 2: give the anatomy of a Trump speech, and you wrap
Speaker 2: that anatomy around the sort of familiar tropes of evangelicalism
Speaker 2: in say the career of Billy Graham. But you give
Speaker 2: this anatomy where you say, there's the call, there's the snake,
Speaker 2: and there's the bullet and maybe just sketch very quickly
Speaker 2: to our listeners what exactly you mean by those three
Speaker 2: elements of a Trump rally speech.
Speaker 4: So this is maybe the most upsetting thing I say
Speaker 4: to a lot of non Trumpers, is I think Trump
Speaker 4: is one of the two best orders I've ever heard,
Speaker 4: and the other being Barack Obama. You know, radically different style,
Speaker 4: but in terms of the ability to work a crowd
Speaker 4: and own a crowd, and part of the way Trump
Speaker 4: does it is through a kind of awful comedy, but
Speaker 4: it is comedy. He does sketch comedy, he does voices
Speaker 4: and so on. And it so distresses me that our
Speaker 4: colleagues in the press and really don't pay attention to
Speaker 4: this because they call it just theater. Right, Well, there's
Speaker 4: no such thing as just theater. There's theater, and it's powerful.
Speaker 4: The call is one that was one he used in
Speaker 4: twenty sixteen, and he would sort of enact the calls
Speaker 4: he was going to make as president of bringing back
Speaker 4: the industrial base, and how quickly the chieftains of industry
Speaker 4: would bow to his will, right and sometimes that.
Speaker 3: He was making that they didn't have to have any
Speaker 3: truth to them. But I just like Grandio's promises.
Speaker 4: It wasn't even a promise. He was in enacting it.
Speaker 4: So you saw it happen, all right, So great the
Speaker 4: companies are I just heard him. I just heard the
Speaker 4: guy on the phone. Well you didn't hear it.
Speaker 3: But he's a good performer, all right, all right, So
Speaker 3: that's the first part of his speech. You call it
Speaker 3: the call, So, Jeff, what's the snake?
Speaker 1: That the snake was?
Speaker 4: He would take an old song by actually a black
Speaker 4: ceil rights activist and sort of perform it as this
Speaker 4: poem about a woman who picks up a snake and
Speaker 4: the snake bites her, and he would do voices, you know,
Speaker 4: he do the voice of the snake, and he.
Speaker 1: Do the voice of the woman. Why did you bite me?
Speaker 4: And you know, the snake, silly woman, you took me in.
Speaker 4: You knew that's what I was. And to him that
Speaker 4: represented the undocumented person.
Speaker 2: The crisis at the border that we call it now,
Speaker 2: which all of this criminalizing, racist language about immigrants and
Speaker 2: the rapes and the murderers and this sort of thing.
Speaker 2: That's where the that's where that snake metaphor shows up.
Speaker 2: And now the bullet, the last part of the speech,
Speaker 2: which you say is about the neef of violence, like
Speaker 2: to protect or defend the people against those who Trump
Speaker 2: defines as traders. You give us this crazy story, this
Speaker 2: example in the book about Trump talking about a mass
Speaker 2: execution in the Philippine.
Speaker 1: The bullet is just straight murder.
Speaker 4: And I was actually just thinking of the bullet to dig,
Speaker 4: which is a fictional history which he presents as real.
Speaker 4: It's general black Jack pershing and the Philippines and this
Speaker 4: Muslim rebellion and This never happened, by the way, but
Speaker 4: you know, just obviously, they capture fifty Muslim rebels and
Speaker 4: they dip fifty bullets into pigs.
Speaker 1: Blood, and the whole thing is acting.
Speaker 4: He demonstrates, he's swirling the bullets and the blood he's
Speaker 4: holding up. He tells the story, and he shoots forty
Speaker 4: nine of them, and he minds shooting them, and the
Speaker 4: crowd is cheering, leaves one man alive to go and
Speaker 4: tell the tale, and then he does a story again.
Speaker 4: The whole thing boom boom, boom, and the crowd cheers louder.
Speaker 4: And anything Trump says about policy after that is missing
Speaker 4: the point. It doesn't matter. He knows that that's the
Speaker 4: power of a really scary order. And it's not a
Speaker 4: you know, people say he's not fascist because he doesn't
Speaker 4: talk like Hitler and Mussolini.
Speaker 1: No, he talks like Trump. It is a different style, that's.
Speaker 3: Right, Jeff. You know, as you know, I'm in Chicago,
Speaker 3: and so we have a kind of version of Trump's
Speaker 3: the bullet speech here where he's like, you know, Chicago
Speaker 3: is this hell hole, and I spoke to this tough cop,
Speaker 3: I spoke to this great cop, and it changes in
Speaker 3: every version he tells. But it's this idea of just
Speaker 3: like oppressive policing, they could solve the crime problem in
Speaker 3: Chicago if we just let him, they could solve it
Speaker 3: in a minute or a day. It's this idea of
Speaker 3: like hyper violence and justified in some form.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's just so interesting.
Speaker 4: I hadn't thought of that as like the Chicago as
Speaker 4: one of his one of his sketches actually, And I
Speaker 4: wonder how many of those city sketches he's had, because
Speaker 4: I've also heard him do one for Philadelphia. You know,
Speaker 4: I've never I've never been to a Chicago rally. Of
Speaker 4: course I could watch them. It would be interesting to
Speaker 4: sort of see like the urban studies of trump Ism,
Speaker 4: to go through when he's near different cities, and what
Speaker 4: stories he tells.
Speaker 3: About actually that Chicago story that he is not just
Speaker 3: you know, at Chicago rallies, and in fact it's across
Speaker 3: the nation because Chicago, like Philadelphia, is a stand in
Speaker 3: for like black city. You know, it invokes all the
Speaker 3: sort of like racist and they're not even like you know,
Speaker 3: dog whistles. They're just like explicit and so you know,
Speaker 3: tough on crime rhetoric. That he's able to extol. It
Speaker 3: just works wherever he is, because Chicago has this meaning
Speaker 3: of like violent place, gun crimes black people.
Speaker 4: Well, let me ask you both a question. That's that's
Speaker 4: something I've been thinking about. Is there actually any place
Speaker 4: now in the rhetoric for the term dog whistle or
Speaker 4: is it simply misleading us?
Speaker 2: I think I think you're right.
Speaker 3: Absolutely.
Speaker 2: I mean, the explicit nature of the conversation today about
Speaker 2: saving the country in whatever context it is right now,
Speaker 2: it's the recent immigration changes by the Biden administration and
Speaker 2: the wall to wall coverage of people at the border,
Speaker 2: and the way in which the Biden administration is just
Speaker 2: unleashing people who don't belong here. Now, I'm not using
Speaker 2: the language in which it's articulated, but all you have
Speaker 2: to do is add the filter of racist trumpst white
Speaker 2: supremacists on top of that, and that's what we're hearing.
Speaker 2: So I think the notion of dog whistle as a
Speaker 2: term of art these days is as anachronistic as even
Speaker 2: a so called culture war, which we still are using
Speaker 2: to define like what should we be saying about the
Speaker 2: truth of our history or not.
Speaker 3: To normalize is something that's extreme. Yeah, it puts it out.
Speaker 4: If here's the normal flow of things and here's this
Speaker 4: other thing that intrudes dog whistle or culture war, when
Speaker 4: that is the center.
Speaker 2: I would even say on the cultural point that it
Speaker 2: minimizes it, like it's not that important. Like there's real
Speaker 2: politics and then there's these culture wars, and the culture
Speaker 2: wars are the bait and switch from the actual real
Speaker 2: thing that we're trying to get to. So to me,
Speaker 2: that's the heart of the matter at this point. For example,
Speaker 2: we just saw Maricio Garcia kill people in Texas. I
Speaker 2: believe he killed eight people and was self identified with
Speaker 2: white supremacist and Nazi culture. You actually, unlike most Americans,
Speaker 2: have seen up close what the appeals are are within
Speaker 2: these right wing fascist movements that support Trump two people
Speaker 2: of color like, so help help more people understand exactly
Speaker 2: how that works.
Speaker 4: Well, I you know, in the book I use this
Speaker 4: term from a friend of mine, Anthea Butler, who this
Speaker 4: great slim book that I recommend called White Evangelical Racism.
Speaker 4: And you know, Anthea Butler is a is a sort
Speaker 4: of a deep historian of churches and whack churches in America.
Speaker 4: But this is you don't have to be an academic
Speaker 4: to read this book, and she's got this phrase like
Speaker 4: the promise of whiteness and the problem, and it's astonishing
Speaker 4: that we're still wrestling with this, given how all the
Speaker 4: promise of whiteness is.
Speaker 1: Eric, I've just been listening to a book about Gary,
Speaker 1: Indiana and.
Speaker 4: The ways in which the factory bosses and so on
Speaker 4: so to split Serb immigrants and black migrants, who at
Speaker 4: first had such solidarity that you'd have black workers speaking
Speaker 4: Serbian and Serbs learning English from black workers. But the
Speaker 4: promise of whiteness was they could extend it to the Serbs. Right, Hey, Serbs,
Speaker 4: we had you as outsiders, but you know what, we're
Speaker 4: going to make you insiders and you can keep expanding
Speaker 4: that promise of whiteness. And I think that's one of
Speaker 4: the insights that Trump had. So when you go to
Speaker 4: a Trump rally and it opens again and again and
Speaker 4: again with a black or brown preacher, usually far to
Speaker 4: the right, and this is an important point. It inoculates
Speaker 4: the mostly white crowd, well, I'm not a racist. Look here,
Speaker 4: I am enjoying what this this black or brown preacher
Speaker 4: has to say. But then to go further than that, right,
Speaker 4: understand that one that's doing the work of inoculation. Two
Speaker 4: it is making trump ism and fascism I think safe
Speaker 4: for a certain number of people of color. And I
Speaker 4: think if we understand it as having a gravitational force,
Speaker 4: of course it is fascism. White supremacy is a insidious
Speaker 4: enough disease. I think in my understanding that it can
Speaker 4: be carried by that, so that you get down to
Speaker 4: a rally in Sunrise, Florida, very blue area, and I
Speaker 4: don't even know if the crowd was mostly white. There's
Speaker 4: a Cuban American, sure, like everyone's like, okay, I get that.
Speaker 4: But then there's a Venezuelan Americans and the Nicaraguan Americans
Speaker 4: waving Nicaraguen and Venezuelan flags. There's also folks waving Pride flags.
Speaker 4: Fascism has a gravity that can pull people in. It says,
Speaker 4: I can make you part of this movement. And once
Speaker 4: you're part of this movement, you know, and then we
Speaker 4: also like rope in the liberal lave of color blindness,
Speaker 4: and suddenly the numbers start eroding.
Speaker 2: Jeff, because I know this is such an important and
Speaker 2: hard point to appreciate for a lot of people. I mean,
Speaker 2: they're stuck on the notion that white supremacy cannot be
Speaker 2: passed on to people of color. You have this really
Speaker 2: brilliant passage, and I'm just going to read a portion
Speaker 2: of it. You said that to a color blind crowd.
Speaker 2: Quote unquote. The implicit equation is one of themselves with
Speaker 2: the formerly enslaved. Black becomes white, white becomes the oppressed.
Speaker 2: Just as white people took the land from indigenous people
Speaker 2: and then named themselves they're victims, so too, has whiteness
Speaker 2: always been a means of claiming the suffering it inflicts
Speaker 2: on others as its own. And I think that goes
Speaker 2: a long way to not only telling us why this
Speaker 2: movement has appeal, why fifty percent more black men voted
Speaker 2: for Trump in twenty twenty than voted in twenty sixteen,
Speaker 2: and why we all need to be concerned about the
Speaker 2: growing possibility that a browning of America will not save
Speaker 2: us from fascism.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and people can see this, but Jeff is nodding
Speaker 3: along to his own words like yeah, pretty good.
Speaker 4: No, No, you embarrassed me.
Speaker 1: I'm like saying, like, well cool, because what you do
Speaker 1: is like I'm.
Speaker 4: Like blah blah blah, blah blah blah, and like, you know,
Speaker 4: you wrote it in like a few sentences there, and
Speaker 4: like it's a little bit like this is this is
Speaker 4: a tribute to editors, right, Like then what I said
Speaker 4: was the first draft, what Khalil read was what you know,
Speaker 4: someone like Ben or another editor much improved.
Speaker 3: I mean, so Trump was on CNN in this town hall,
Speaker 3: and so more people witnessed what you're describing pretty recently,
Speaker 3: and I know you must think about this a lot.
Speaker 3: You said that, like, people like us need to understand
Speaker 3: the symbols of trump Ism and the depth of belief
Speaker 3: in it. But as we saw on CNN, there's also
Speaker 3: like this this danger of giving him a platform and
Speaker 3: everyone's seeing it and like we can repeat the mistakes
Speaker 3: of twenty fifteen and twenty sixteen again. And so how
Speaker 3: do you think about that? I mean, you you talk
Speaker 3: about this all the time you've written this book. Do
Speaker 3: you sometimes wrestle with this idea that you're like, by
Speaker 3: regaling us with stories about Trump, you're also you know,
Speaker 3: letting him speak more, your giving voice to it.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I mean, like that's the platform question, right, But
Speaker 4: I'll say I think the CNN town hall, I thought
Speaker 4: it was obscene.
Speaker 1: I mean, and that's not how you do it. That's
Speaker 1: part of the old politics.
Speaker 4: One they want the ratings right, but two then they're
Speaker 4: going to answer with the liberal response, we're going to
Speaker 4: fact check him live. Well, what is the point of
Speaker 4: fact checking? There is no point. I mean, that's not
Speaker 4: how you do it. I would hope that what I'm
Speaker 4: doing here. First of all, you know, I don't have
Speaker 4: three million viewers, and I think actually that does matter.
Speaker 4: This is a book. But also instead of sort of
Speaker 4: trying to fact check him, the more important thing is
Speaker 4: to show, I think, how he's constructing this story, what
Speaker 4: the pieces are, not to say it's just theater, but
Speaker 4: to really pay attention to it as theeter, and say,
Speaker 4: what are the elements of production here, what are the
Speaker 4: elements we can see the myth in the making.
Speaker 3: So, Jeff, we're going to take a quick break, and
Speaker 3: when we come back, we're going to talk about your
Speaker 3: work essentially since the twenty twenty election and explore this
Speaker 3: idea of whether we are in a civil war right now.
Speaker 3: We'll be right back after the break.
Speaker 2: We're back with Jeff Charlotte, author of The Undertow Scenes
Speaker 2: from a slow civil War. Oh, Jeff, this is really
Speaker 2: so important, I think what you've done, and the media
Speaker 2: attention to this work, I think is partly driven by
Speaker 2: this very provocative subtitle that encapsulates a lot of the
Speaker 2: reporting that first appeared in Vanity Fair and that you
Speaker 2: continue to write about, which is this whole idea that
Speaker 2: we might actually be in a civil war. And so
Speaker 2: you're kind of like a Detouqueville traveling the country right now,
Speaker 2: looking at what's happening on the ground. And so look,
Speaker 2: give us your understanding, your evidence that we might be
Speaker 2: already in a civil war.
Speaker 3: Take us on your journeys a little.
Speaker 1: Bit, Okay, sure.
Speaker 4: So the big part of the book, the Undertow is
Speaker 4: January sixth, twenty twenty one. We see this young white woman,
Speaker 4: Ashley Babbitt, an insurrectionist, and she's killed, and the cop
Speaker 4: who kills her as a black man. So right away
Speaker 4: we know what's going to happen. It's going to be
Speaker 4: a lynching story. She's made into a martinmoth. So I
Speaker 4: decide to go out to California to a rally for
Speaker 4: Ashley Babbitt, and I go to a rally and there's
Speaker 4: a brawl between Proud Boys and Antifa, And someone says,
Speaker 4: you really want to understand why Ashley Babbitt died. Come
Speaker 4: to my church. And it's a little megachurch in Yuba City, California.
Speaker 4: There's no crosses in this church, but the pulpit is
Speaker 4: made of swords. And they explain that as saying, we
Speaker 4: are now in a time of war. Theology Tuesday night
Speaker 4: is new militia recruit night and this is not this
Speaker 4: is a suburban church is it just regular folks?
Speaker 1: You know?
Speaker 4: And they are armed, they are ready for They pastor
Speaker 4: talks openly with joy about the executions to come. There's
Speaker 4: people around you who have already succeeded in their imagination,
Speaker 4: you know, the slow civil war that I imagine, imagine,
Speaker 4: believe is happening right now, it's not coming. People say
Speaker 4: could there be violence? And always stunts me, what do
Speaker 4: you mean? Could there be violence? There's always is already
Speaker 4: He's already violence and there's always been violence, right, but
Speaker 4: there's violence on top of violence. Now it is, you know,
Speaker 4: what has been a simmer is coming to perhaps a
Speaker 4: slow boil. They have already accepted the idea of civil
Speaker 4: war when that was back in the spring of twenty
Speaker 4: one when I started noticing some historians using civil war
Speaker 4: talk right and clearly, you know, like how in a way,
Speaker 4: slow moving especially historians can be right, like they're like, yeah,
Speaker 4: let's not jump to conclusions.
Speaker 1: But so they're saying that.
Speaker 2: Well, when January sixth happened, not only was I convey
Speaker 2: that this was possible, but I recalled that on the
Speaker 2: inauguration of Lincoln in March. It was only a month
Speaker 2: later that the South, that South Carolina fired on Fort Sumter.
Speaker 2: So the proximity of January sixth to the inauguration of
Speaker 2: Joe Biden felt eerily familiar, Like these people were doing
Speaker 2: a preemptive warfare essentially, and they essentially were so yeah,
Speaker 2: not hiberbally at this point.
Speaker 1: Preemptive that's a good phrase.
Speaker 4: There's a way in which I think so much of
Speaker 4: the arming up, and that was you know, then I
Speaker 4: started going to more churches. In every church I went to,
Speaker 4: you know, you would ask civil war, and people dance
Speaker 4: was always yes. It was just whether it's happening right
Speaker 4: now or it's coming, or whether it's something you look
Speaker 4: forward to or something you regretfully accept. I mean, you
Speaker 4: know the fact that like, look, if you've got more
Speaker 4: and more, like the state of Florida, where you've got
Speaker 4: people who really think that the books in their schools
Speaker 4: are teaching white kids to hate themselves and teaching what
Speaker 4: you understand as dramatic perversion. From their perspective, they're in
Speaker 4: the slow civil war too, and we're the ones waging
Speaker 4: the assault. I'm not like saying both sides, but I
Speaker 4: think and there's casualties.
Speaker 1: Look, every pregnant person who's dying for lack of reproductive
Speaker 1: rights is casualty.
Speaker 4: We as journalists know that, Like we hear a case here,
Speaker 4: a case there, we know there's one hundred for every
Speaker 4: one of those. I think the wave of queer and
Speaker 4: trans kids suicides, not all of them, but a lot
Speaker 4: of them are casualties. These mass shootings, those are casualties.
Speaker 3: I want to push back up against this a little
Speaker 3: bit to both of you, because you said, Khalil that
Speaker 3: you don't think this is hyperbole, and I don't know,
Speaker 3: but I think about the language of civil war being
Speaker 3: being alarmist language, either purposefully so, and I think about
Speaker 3: like what's to gain by using that language and also
Speaker 3: what's lost by using that kind of alarmist language, and
Speaker 3: I have no doubt, I mean, in my opinion onion
Speaker 3: that the drum beat of what's been going on the
Speaker 3: extreme right has shifted the center right word like the
Speaker 3: things that we accept is okay that even centrist Dems
Speaker 3: are like, yeah, yeah, I'm going to settle for that,
Speaker 3: Like we're living through that right now. But that to
Speaker 3: me is different than say a civil war, which there
Speaker 3: are If we don't have North and South, we at
Speaker 3: least have like sides, and there's some like sense we
Speaker 3: don't to connect the dots of every sort of you know,
Speaker 3: semi connected act of violence and say this is evidence.
Speaker 3: Seems like it could be a little bit loose and
Speaker 3: so so yeah, I'm throwing that back on you, both
Speaker 3: of you, like, is what's the value or and whether
Speaker 3: what's the danger of using that kind of language.
Speaker 2: I mean, for me as a historian in this conversation,
Speaker 2: I mean, the context of our actual civil war is
Speaker 2: the context of people who try to work through these
Speaker 2: issues politically. An entire political party was born in the
Speaker 2: early days of dissolution, meaning the Republican Party, because the
Speaker 2: prior Whig Party couldn't work out its differences on this
Speaker 2: question of expansion over slavery. The fact that the people
Speaker 2: who were combatants and in our civil war had gone
Speaker 2: to college together, had led together in political state houses
Speaker 2: and the US Capitol, reminds me, at least as a historian,
Speaker 2: that the line between normal and war is very thin.
Speaker 2: And the thing that I think makes the future more
Speaker 2: precarious than the prior Trump administration is that now trump
Speaker 2: Ism has metastasized, and whatever governors we imagined in terms
Speaker 2: of normalcy, amongst most elected officials, people like Mike Pence,
Speaker 2: who was not too far away from being the victim
Speaker 2: of a lynch mob on January sixth, like Mitch McConnell,
Speaker 2: and like much of the Republican leadership, have accepted trump
Speaker 2: Ism as a political base of the Republican Party and
Speaker 2: seemed to have no capacity to reverse course from that.
Speaker 2: So the again brothers in arms on different sides of
Speaker 2: this equation led to nearly a million people dying in
Speaker 2: this country. And I'm not convinced that what we think
Speaker 2: of is normal today or is not something beyond the
Speaker 2: pale isn't a reality for us all to come to
Speaker 2: terms with. So when you say hyperbole, I say, we
Speaker 2: need an appropriate early warning system. And I think that's
Speaker 2: where Jeff's work is really helpful.
Speaker 1: Yeah, thank you for the historical context.
Speaker 4: And that makes me think in terms of.
Speaker 1: The sort of the nearness of people.
Speaker 4: The other objection that I often hear is like, you know,
Speaker 4: either you had this north and the South whatever, and
Speaker 4: now we're all mixed up. And you know that the
Speaker 4: central trip of the book begins in Sacramento, California, where
Speaker 4: I mean a young LATINX couple actually who are pretty
Speaker 4: full Trump fascists, and they are leaving California. So we're
Speaker 4: talking about, you know, these sort of blue supposedly blue areas.
Speaker 4: They are sifting themselves out. They're moving inland. They said,
Speaker 4: they wouldn't say exactly sure where maybe Oklahoma, looking for
Speaker 4: red territory. And so there's a little bit of on
Speaker 4: the one hand, this sort of centrifuging out of people
Speaker 4: sorting themselves out. And of course I just met the
Speaker 4: other day some folks who have moved from Texas to
Speaker 4: sconnecting New York. They need to get out of Texas,
Speaker 4: trans folks. I have friends who have moved out of
Speaker 4: Wisconsin because they do not feel safe there. There's that,
Speaker 4: and I think the advantage, the advantage of the alarm
Speaker 4: is to sort of say, hey, look this is what
Speaker 4: we're messing around.
Speaker 3: With, all right, Jeff, this is powerful stuff and despairing
Speaker 3: in some ways. That your book became a New York
Speaker 3: Times bestseller is wonderful for you, but a little bit
Speaker 3: problematic that this is where we have.
Speaker 2: To know that's good, that's good. We wanted to be
Speaker 2: a best seller.
Speaker 5: I have to say, there was like some hope. I'm like,
Speaker 5: what if I call it slow civil war?
Speaker 4: But man, a year and a half from now and
Speaker 4: this comes out he thinks of just so mellowed out
Speaker 4: that people like, oh, give me a break, and instead
Speaker 4: it's like, you know you do NPR and like can
Speaker 4: I use the F word fascism? And they're like, oh yes, yes, please,
Speaker 4: we better talk about that. And that's that's not good.
Speaker 4: Better that the book be remaindered.
Speaker 3: So when we come back from a short break, we're
Speaker 3: going to talk about the future. We'll be right back.
Speaker 2: Welcome back to some of my best friends are We're
Speaker 2: talking to Jeff Charlotte today about his really powerful and
Speaker 2: despairing and to some degree hopeful. Surprisingly enough, study about
Speaker 2: a slow civil war. And why do I say hopeful.
Speaker 2: It's hopeful because, Jeff, you opened with this surprising tribute
Speaker 2: to Harry Belafonte. You talk about a man whose artistry
Speaker 2: was his activism and who could never separate those two things,
Speaker 2: and someone who just passed away this spring, just a
Speaker 2: couple of weeks before the recording of this interview. I
Speaker 2: have to say I was moved.
Speaker 1: Ninety six.
Speaker 2: I was moved by what you said about Harry Belafonte,
Speaker 2: not just because I think people don't really appreciate the
Speaker 2: life of this giant, but also because I knew Harry Belafonte.
Speaker 2: I was at the Schomberg Center in some of the
Speaker 2: last productive years of his life before he sort of
Speaker 2: retreated from public life. I got to know him and
Speaker 2: his wife, Pam. I've been in his apartment, and Harry
Speaker 2: never mister B as we call him, never stopped moving
Speaker 2: chess pieces on a board. He was always thinking about
Speaker 2: where people needed to be on the battlefield racial justice
Speaker 2: and social justice in this country. And I had just
Speaker 2: taken a job at Harvard's twenty sixteen, and he sits
Speaker 2: down with me in his apartment and he says, I
Speaker 2: need you to take over Sankofa, which is an organization
Speaker 2: that he started that Dina Belafonte's dart is leaving now.
Speaker 2: It's a cultural organization committed to sort of building the
Speaker 2: cultural muscle and infrastructure of social justice warriors and of
Speaker 2: the left more generally. And while we're in the middle
Speaker 2: of this conversation, I'm like, oh shit, like I just
Speaker 2: got this job at Harvard. I can't turn mister B down,
Speaker 2: Like what is happening right now? That was one of
Speaker 2: the hardest knows I ever had to give to somebody,
Speaker 2: to turn mister be down for an opportunity to help
Speaker 2: be part of his legacy.
Speaker 3: But oh boy, what a guy, what a.
Speaker 2: Person, what a human being? And tell us, like, why
Speaker 2: do you tell us about Harry Belafonte in this book?
Speaker 2: What is the message about the future you are trying
Speaker 2: to impart from someone who just left us.
Speaker 4: I wanted to start the book, which I was writing
Speaker 4: partly because I have a fourteen year old non binary
Speaker 4: trans kid who is despairing and I was looking for
Speaker 4: some hope, but not cheap grace. And I thought, Okay,
Speaker 4: that's what mister B is. And I think about all
Speaker 4: these tributes since he died.
Speaker 1: And I've done.
Speaker 5: There's someone who wrote about him.
Speaker 4: You do some interviews and so on, and there's a
Speaker 4: certain kind of folks who's sort of really surprised to
Speaker 4: hear that he was angry.
Speaker 5: Right, I'm like, oh, yeah, that guy was angry all
Speaker 5: his days.
Speaker 2: Yeah, he cursed a lot, he did not miss words.
Speaker 4: Yeah, they want him to be a sweet old man.
Speaker 4: And the hope is that anger In that line he
Speaker 4: says that I think is really powerful. It says where
Speaker 4: your anger comes from doesn't matter as much as what
Speaker 4: you do with it.
Speaker 1: Now.
Speaker 4: It matters where it comes from, but not as much
Speaker 4: as what you do with it. And that transformation. The
Speaker 4: other thing that you said is that the culture is
Speaker 4: his art and his activism are one and the same.
Speaker 4: So to those of us urging us to see culture
Speaker 4: as somehow a separate issue, not for this guy in
Speaker 4: ninety six years in the struggle who transformed American.
Speaker 3: Life, Jeff Hope, but not cheap grace is a beautiful line.
Speaker 3: Maybe I'm being more of the e or in this
Speaker 3: conversation again, but he's dead, he died, and you're you're
Speaker 3: you're talking about a kind of activism that is a
Speaker 3: thing of the past, literally like he's he's a relic,
Speaker 3: and you know, so I worry about that of like
Speaker 3: whether this continues. And so then the question is, how
Speaker 3: do you see sort of the Belafontes today doing this work,
Speaker 3: Like who is carrying on that legacy that we're supposed
Speaker 3: to see this work still happening? Where do we see
Speaker 3: the resistance? Where do we see the fighting? Where do
Speaker 3: we see the protest?
Speaker 5: I mean partly, isn't it what this show is supposed
Speaker 5: to be?
Speaker 4: Right here?
Speaker 3: Kid, right here? That that's what we're looking for? A
Speaker 3: ding ding ding you are now you are now one
Speaker 3: of our best.
Speaker 4: Well actually, like let's think about this like cultural historians
Speaker 4: and always astonishes me. I don't know if historians are
Speaker 4: doing it, but I'm in an English department and there's
Speaker 4: nobody paying attention to podcasting as a text of our times,
Speaker 4: which is astonishing to me because it seems really relevant
Speaker 4: and there's a lot of challenge, you know, and we
Speaker 4: could each little podcast, we could say, oh, is that
Speaker 4: really making the difference?
Speaker 5: No?
Speaker 4: And each fundraiser mister b did whatever, Did that really
Speaker 4: make the difference?
Speaker 5: No?
Speaker 4: In fact he was defeated. Right, that's part of the
Speaker 4: hope not cheap grace. And that's why it ends with
Speaker 4: this other line that I always knew the last line
Speaker 4: of the book was going to be this line from
Speaker 4: this guy, Lee Hayes, a songwriter who was broken by
Speaker 4: the Red Scare.
Speaker 1: And he says, from the nineteen fifties.
Speaker 4: Nineteen fifties, and you know, people know HI from me
Speaker 4: if I had a hammer like the American Songbook. He's
Speaker 4: Pete Seeger's songwriting partner, and he's got this line, for
Speaker 4: a while, it was possible not to be scared even
Speaker 4: And he's describing seemed very much like one that mister
Speaker 4: b endured of being chased through.
Speaker 1: For mister b it's being chased by the clan.
Speaker 5: Through the Mississippi Nightsissippi. For Lee, it's being chased in Arkansas.
Speaker 4: He's in a car with union organizers and gun thugs
Speaker 4: are on their tail, and they're singing hymns, and he says,
Speaker 4: for while, it was possible not to be scared even then.
Speaker 4: Let me put this in the context of an activist
Speaker 4: named Suzanne Farr, who I met some years ago, a
Speaker 4: very sweet, old white Southern grandmotherly lady. She had built
Speaker 4: a lesbian separatist commune in rural Arkansas, I believe it was.
Speaker 4: And then these these these his head women start showing up,
Speaker 4: running from their violent partners and said, will you take
Speaker 4: us in? So they took them in, and then the
Speaker 4: partners come with their guns, and Suzanne and her comrades
Speaker 4: stand the ground, and I was with Suzanne and a
Speaker 4: younger activist, and the younger activist says, oh, that's so
Speaker 4: wonderful you built us.
Speaker 5: And Suzanne's sweet old grandmother puts her hand on the
Speaker 5: younger activist's hand and says, oh, honey, noah, no fucking
Speaker 5: safe spaces.
Speaker 1: But there might be these safe moments.
Speaker 4: Right for a while, it was possible not to be scared,
Speaker 4: even like, where is that work happening? It's not happening
Speaker 4: so much in a space as in moments. Maybe the
Speaker 4: moment is a podcast, maybe the moment is there. But
Speaker 4: you're right, I can't point to anyone. I mean, Harry,
Speaker 4: I think ninety six years he ran the good race,
Speaker 4: Like who is the next mister b. We don't know.
Speaker 4: We'll know after they have lived their ninety six years.
Speaker 4: I'm like, God, damn that person. We didn't realize all
Speaker 4: that they were doing. They are there among us. That
Speaker 4: doesn't mean we win, but it means we could.
Speaker 3: Yeah, we need to expand those moments. We need to
Speaker 3: expand those moments so that they become our reality.
Speaker 2: Jeff Charlotte, it was amazing to have you on today.
Speaker 2: You've shared a lot with us that we all need
Speaker 2: to pay attention to. Go folks, go out there. Continue
Speaker 2: to keep this book on the bestseller list for the
Speaker 2: New York Times. Jeff Charlotte, The Undertow. We're just grateful
Speaker 2: for what you've done and what you'll continue to write about.
Speaker 3: And Jeff, we've been on this journey alongside one another
Speaker 3: for twenty years. Let's keep it going another twenty all right,
Speaker 3: take care, Thank you.
Speaker 2: Oh man, this was a really powerful conversation with Jeff
Speaker 2: ben And I don't know, there's something that stuck out
Speaker 2: to me at the top of the conversation when Jeff
Speaker 2: described this book The Undertow in terms of like a
Speaker 2: social movement on the right. I mean, often we hear
Speaker 2: the words populism, but this notion that it could be
Speaker 2: a social movement, you know, it doesn't hit our ears
Speaker 2: the same way that we often think about social movements
Speaker 2: as always being about the expansion of democracy, justice, truth,
Speaker 2: And because where he's.
Speaker 3: Thinking about social movements on the left, you mean, like, yeah,
Speaker 3: and that's right, he's talking about it on the right
Speaker 3: of this this rising tide, that it's organized. Yeah, that's right.
Speaker 2: And the extent to which he's right makes perfect sense
Speaker 2: when we look at the grassroots mobilization down to local
Speaker 2: school boards fighting for misinformation and censorship, and like, when
Speaker 2: he talks about fascism as a mass movement, it reminded
Speaker 2: me of this essay that Tony Morrison wrote in nineteen
Speaker 2: ninety five.
Speaker 3: Get Literary. I love it. I love it Getting Literary.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's a really powerful quote, and I think it
Speaker 2: speaks to this moment so clearly. She said, fascism can
Speaker 2: only reproduce the environment that supports its own health, fear, denial,
Speaker 2: and an atmosphere in which its victims have lost the
Speaker 2: will to fight.
Speaker 3: Okay, break it down.
Speaker 2: Well, I just think that what Jeff is telling us
Speaker 2: in this book is that the other side is mobilizing
Speaker 2: to fucking fight, like that's what they're doing. And he
Speaker 2: talked about casualties already, you know, even including victims of
Speaker 2: reproductive injustice and talking about of course the proliferation of
Speaker 2: guns on the right and the mass killings.
Speaker 3: And his own child, like his fear for his own
Speaker 3: child who is non binary. Yeah, that's right.
Speaker 2: And so I think as we move forward in this moment,
Speaker 2: I think part of the challenge on the left is
Speaker 2: to meet the challenge of a social movement, which is
Speaker 2: to say that a lot more people have to be
Speaker 2: mobilized to stand up for the democracy that they claim
Speaker 2: to believe in.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, that's interesting. I mean because then it's also
Speaker 3: why to give a bigger platform to these issues is
Speaker 3: because we have to figure out how to confront them.
Speaker 3: We have to organize, we have to have a social
Speaker 3: movement that matches in some ways what's actually going on.
Speaker 3: We have to know the other side much more, much better.
Speaker 2: That's right, And I mean then thinking about like how
Speaker 2: do you do that? I mean, part of it, even
Speaker 2: having this conversation about Harry Belafonte, is also about the
Speaker 2: power of culture to mobilize people, meaning that the symbols,
Speaker 2: the sound, the music, then stories we tell are all
Speaker 2: part of the infrastructure that you need to build a
Speaker 2: social movement. And the right is clearly mobilized to do that.
Speaker 2: The Left seems to be still trying to figure this out.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, I mean, you know, you talk about bringing
Speaker 3: a knife or a pen to a gunfight, and you
Speaker 3: know that's part of what's so scary about this is
Speaker 3: that the proliferation of guns, of bringing automatic weapons just
Speaker 3: holding them on the street. I don't think the answer
Speaker 3: is to respond with the same. You know, we have
Speaker 3: this disease of guns in this country, and certainly, like
Speaker 3: what he is witnessing by travel the country is seeing
Speaker 3: the sort of cult the religion of guns. Yeah. I mean,
Speaker 3: there's a way we have to confront that. And what
Speaker 3: you're describing I don't think is like, you know, matching
Speaker 3: weapons to weapons, which is not a slow sive a war,
Speaker 3: but a fast one. But there is some deeper kind
Speaker 3: of organizing and even cultural movement which has to happen.
Speaker 2: Yes, And when Tony Morrison says the victims have lost
Speaker 2: the will to fight, listen, the world is a violent place.
Speaker 2: There are one hundred and ninety three countries in the world.
Speaker 2: Conflict happens. There's a war in Russia and Ukraine. The
Speaker 2: Ukrainians didn't sit around and wait to have a debate
Speaker 2: when bomb started dropping and when violence occurred, and so
Speaker 2: I just think we have to be really honest about
Speaker 2: what's happening in this country, and we have to use
Speaker 2: all the tools at our disposal, including culture, including the
Speaker 2: right to self defense, including the right to stand up
Speaker 2: for truth and justice wherever it is necessary, in all
Speaker 2: the places that is required because the other side is
Speaker 2: not playing games.
Speaker 3: I'm hearing you by any means necessary, And I just
Speaker 3: want to say I'm glad if we're not on the
Speaker 3: front lines, I'm glad we're on the second lines together.
Speaker 3: So I love you, rel love you too.
Speaker 2: Some of My Best Friends Are is a production of
Speaker 2: Pushkin Industries. The show is written and hosted by me Khalil,
Speaker 2: Jabon Muhammad and my best friend Ben Austin.
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