June 14, 2023 • 42 mins
Jeff Sharlet started reporting from Donald Trump’s rallies in 2015, when his presidential campaign stoked a resurgence of white nationalism and white supremacy. Since then, Jeff has traveled the country exploring the growing threats and eruptions of political violence. He writes about these experiences in his New York Times bestselling book The Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War, and he sat down with Ben and Khalil to discuss the book and his belief that we are, today, in the midst of a gradually unfolding civil war.
Additional links:
The Undertow by Jeff Sharlet
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:14):
Push it.
Speaker 2 (00:25):
I'm Khalil Jbron Muhammad.
Speaker 3 (00:26):
I'm Ben Austen. We're two best friends, one black, one white.
Speaker 2 (00:31):
I'm a historian and I'm a journalist. And this is
some of my best friends.
Speaker 3 (00:36):
Are some of my best friends? Are you know? On
the other side. In this show, we wrestle with the
challenges and the absurdities of a deeply divided and unequal country.
And today's episode, Khalil, we go deep, deep, deep into
those divides. Yeah, that's right.
Speaker 2 (00:56):
We're talking about trump Ism, We're talking about populism, we're
talking about the far right Christian nationalists. We have on
our show.
Speaker 1 (01:04):
Jeff Charlotte.
Speaker 2 (01:05):
He's a professor at Dartmouth College and the author of
the New York Times best selling book The Undertow Seems
from a Slow Civil War.
Speaker 3 (01:12):
Yeah, yeah, this book is really powerful. Jeff's new books
starts with his reporting way back in twenty fifteen. He's
at Trump rallies and it continues throughout the Trump presidency.
And this is the first part of the book. And
he's talking with people at these rallies, the real diehard
Trump supporters, and he's capturing for readers the depth of
(01:34):
their belief and Jeff is seeing Trump really through the
lens of religion. He's seeing Trump as a kind of
religious leader.
Speaker 2 (01:41):
And this book continues after the events of January sixth,
twenty twenty one. He travels the country to explore divides everywhere, guns, militia,
state legislative banning of books, and overturning of reproductive rights.
Jeff really believes that we are in a slow civil war.
He calls it as he sees it.
Speaker 3 (01:58):
That's right. He thinks it's already begun. All right, let's
do it. Let's get into this, all right, Jeff Charlotte, Jeff,
thank you for being on some of my best friends.
Are I spent a long time coming.
Speaker 1 (02:20):
Thanks Ben, Thanks good to be with you both today.
Speaker 2 (02:23):
Yeah, Jeff, it's great to meet you.
Speaker 3 (02:25):
Jeff Khalil is just meeting you right now, But you
and I have known each other. I was trying to
do the math. I think it's twenty years.
Speaker 4 (02:33):
Really that long. So, yeah, we met via Harper's magazine.
Speaker 3 (02:37):
Yeah, yeah, you were doing your first piece for the magazine,
Jesus plus Nothing, which becomes Your which was.
Speaker 4 (02:43):
The start of my Yeah, twenty years. So I've been
going around thinking about this book. I've been reporting on
right wing movements for twenty years since that story. That
story was in sort of the turn in that direction.
Speaker 3 (02:53):
So that magazine story that we worked on together, you
as writer, me as a lowly fact checker, became your book,
The Family, and it also became a docu series. And
I'll just sort of say, like you've always been interested
in religion and power. This is sort of something that
has been much of your professional life's work. And I
would say that the difference between that work back then
(03:15):
and what you've been doing more recently is that you
were looking at elites. You were looking at at least
people who were approximate to power, and during the Trump
era you've looked more like the people who are the masses,
who are not necessarily in power, but how they've been
sort of controlled or sort of what they're thinking is yeah.
Speaker 4 (03:38):
And I think the pivot point really is Trump's descent
on the Golden Escalator in twenty fifteen. And here he's
bringing down a fascist esthetic. He doesn't have a movement yet,
and the question to me is will he build the movement?
So the question that becomes more interesting for me is
one of reception rather than one of the production of
(04:00):
the narrative, and that kind of pivots me toward will
this movement form? Will I watch a social movement? Because
the right has social movements too, Will I watch a
social movement in real time? And unfortunately, yes.
Speaker 2 (04:12):
No, that's really fascinating because I know in many ways
the book you've written is written for us, the undertow
scenes from a civil war. And by us, I mean
like people who still believe in facts, who still care
about expertise, and people who read books. But you know,
tell us, like, what do we need to understand about
(04:34):
what you call the Trumpet scene to help us understand
what is happening in our country from all of these
Trump rallies that you've attended over the past several years.
Speaker 4 (04:45):
That's the first thing that we need to understand that
this is an age of Trump in the same way
that I think a lot of scholars will sort of
date the age Reaganism not from nineteen eighty to eighty eight,
but from nineteen eighty really perhaps to twenty sixteen, such
that Reagan defines a kind of a vernacular in which
American politics takes place. Whether you're a Democrat or Republican,
(05:08):
and I I think the Trump is scene is he is.
He has given his language to the age. And I
think that's the first thing, is that we live in
the age of Trump. And so these debates is whether
Trump is finished or not, they're really missing the point.
Speaker 1 (05:24):
I think of this preacher in.
Speaker 4 (05:25):
Omaha, Nebraska, pastor Hank Cuneman, and he's a prophet in
he or so he says, and he says Trump is
coming back, whether the man himself or his spirit in
the flesh of another.
Speaker 1 (05:36):
And I think that's the first thing.
Speaker 4 (05:37):
And the second thing is just to pay attention to
that seemingly crazy you know, Trump is coming back spirit
in the flesh of another. Seemingly crazy narrative, right, But
it's not crazy. It's also imaginative. And I think we
have to contend with the fascist movement that did arise
in response to that fascist aesthetic. It is fascism is
(05:58):
a form of imagination. And where we get stuck on saying,
but what are our policies? It's not about that. It
is a utopian movement. They understand that their vision as
utopin and that brings with it so much momentum and energy.
And I'm not saying like it's unstoppable. I definitely don't
believe inevitability, but I think as a country, both left
(06:21):
and liberals are still trying to resist it in terms
of an older politics.
Speaker 2 (06:27):
I have a follow up question, Jeff, because this is
one of the things that I would not have seen
but for your reporting about this and the amount of
time you spend up close at these rallies. But essentially
give the anatomy of a Trump speech, and you wrap
that anatomy around the sort of familiar tropes of evangelicalism
(06:50):
in say the career of Billy Graham. But you give
this anatomy where you say, there's the call, there's the snake,
and there's the bullet and maybe just sketch very quickly
to our listeners what exactly you mean by those three
elements of a Trump rally speech.
Speaker 4 (07:06):
So this is maybe the most upsetting thing I say
to a lot of non Trumpers, is I think Trump
is one of the two best orders I've ever heard,
and the other being Barack Obama. You know, radically different style,
but in terms of the ability to work a crowd
and own a crowd, and part of the way Trump
does it is through a kind of awful comedy, but
(07:27):
it is comedy. He does sketch comedy, he does voices
and so on. And it so distresses me that our
colleagues in the press and really don't pay attention to
this because they call it just theater. Right, Well, there's
no such thing as just theater. There's theater, and it's powerful.
The call is one that was one he used in
twenty sixteen, and he would sort of enact the calls
(07:51):
he was going to make as president of bringing back
the industrial base, and how quickly the chieftains of industry
would bow to his will, right and sometimes that.
Speaker 3 (07:59):
He was making that they didn't have to have any
truth to them. But I just like Grandio's promises.
Speaker 4 (08:04):
It wasn't even a promise. He was in enacting it.
So you saw it happen, all right, So great the
companies are I just heard him. I just heard the
guy on the phone. Well you didn't hear it.
Speaker 3 (08:12):
But he's a good performer, all right, all right, So
that's the first part of his speech. You call it
the call, So, Jeff, what's the snake?
Speaker 1 (08:18):
That the snake was?
Speaker 4 (08:19):
He would take an old song by actually a black
ceil rights activist and sort of perform it as this
poem about a woman who picks up a snake and
the snake bites her, and he would do voices, you know,
he do the voice of the snake, and he.
Speaker 1 (08:33):
Do the voice of the woman. Why did you bite me?
Speaker 4 (08:35):
And you know, the snake, silly woman, you took me in.
You knew that's what I was. And to him that
represented the undocumented person.
Speaker 2 (08:42):
The crisis at the border that we call it now,
which all of this criminalizing, racist language about immigrants and
the rapes and the murderers and this sort of thing.
That's where the that's where that snake metaphor shows up.
And now the bullet, the last part of the speech,
which you say is about the neef of violence, like
to protect or defend the people against those who Trump
defines as traders. You give us this crazy story, this
(09:04):
example in the book about Trump talking about a mass
execution in the Philippine.
Speaker 1 (09:10):
The bullet is just straight murder.
Speaker 4 (09:12):
And I was actually just thinking of the bullet to dig,
which is a fictional history which he presents as real.
It's general black Jack pershing and the Philippines and this
Muslim rebellion and This never happened, by the way, but
you know, just obviously, they capture fifty Muslim rebels and
(09:32):
they dip fifty bullets into pigs.
Speaker 1 (09:36):
Blood, and the whole thing is acting.
Speaker 4 (09:39):
He demonstrates, he's swirling the bullets and the blood he's
holding up. He tells the story, and he shoots forty
nine of them, and he minds shooting them, and the
crowd is cheering, leaves one man alive to go and
tell the tale, and then he does a story again.
The whole thing boom boom, boom, and the crowd cheers louder.
(10:00):
And anything Trump says about policy after that is missing
the point. It doesn't matter. He knows that that's the
power of a really scary order. And it's not a
you know, people say he's not fascist because he doesn't
talk like Hitler and Mussolini.
Speaker 1 (10:14):
No, he talks like Trump. It is a different style, that's.
Speaker 3 (10:18):
Right, Jeff. You know, as you know, I'm in Chicago,
and so we have a kind of version of Trump's
the bullet speech here where he's like, you know, Chicago
is this hell hole, and I spoke to this tough cop,
I spoke to this great cop, and it changes in
every version he tells. But it's this idea of just
like oppressive policing, they could solve the crime problem in
Chicago if we just let him, they could solve it
in a minute or a day. It's this idea of
(10:39):
like hyper violence and justified in some form.
Speaker 1 (10:44):
Yeah, that's just so interesting.
Speaker 4 (10:45):
I hadn't thought of that as like the Chicago as
one of his one of his sketches actually, And I
wonder how many of those city sketches he's had, because
I've also heard him do one for Philadelphia. You know,
I've never I've never been to a Chicago rally. Of
course I could watch them. It would be interesting to
sort of see like the urban studies of trump Ism,
to go through when he's near different cities, and what
(11:06):
stories he tells.
Speaker 3 (11:06):
About actually that Chicago story that he is not just
you know, at Chicago rallies, and in fact it's across
the nation because Chicago, like Philadelphia, is a stand in
for like black city. You know, it invokes all the
sort of like racist and they're not even like you know,
dog whistles. They're just like explicit and so you know,
tough on crime rhetoric. That he's able to extol. It
(11:29):
just works wherever he is, because Chicago has this meaning
of like violent place, gun crimes black people.
Speaker 4 (11:37):
Well, let me ask you both a question. That's that's
something I've been thinking about. Is there actually any place
now in the rhetoric for the term dog whistle or
is it simply misleading us?
Speaker 2 (11:46):
I think I think you're right.
Speaker 3 (11:47):
Absolutely.
Speaker 2 (11:48):
I mean, the explicit nature of the conversation today about
saving the country in whatever context it is right now,
it's the recent immigration changes by the Biden administration and
the wall to wall coverage of people at the border,
and the way in which the Biden administration is just
(12:10):
unleashing people who don't belong here. Now, I'm not using
the language in which it's articulated, but all you have
to do is add the filter of racist trumpst white
supremacists on top of that, and that's what we're hearing.
So I think the notion of dog whistle as a
term of art these days is as anachronistic as even
(12:31):
a so called culture war, which we still are using
to define like what should we be saying about the
truth of our history or not.
Speaker 3 (12:41):
To normalize is something that's extreme. Yeah, it puts it out.
Speaker 4 (12:44):
If here's the normal flow of things and here's this
other thing that intrudes dog whistle or culture war, when
that is the center.
Speaker 2 (12:51):
I would even say on the cultural point that it
minimizes it, like it's not that important. Like there's real
politics and then there's these culture wars, and the culture
wars are the bait and switch from the actual real
thing that we're trying to get to. So to me,
that's the heart of the matter at this point. For example,
we just saw Maricio Garcia kill people in Texas. I
(13:13):
believe he killed eight people and was self identified with
white supremacist and Nazi culture. You actually, unlike most Americans,
have seen up close what the appeals are are within
these right wing fascist movements that support Trump two people
of color like, so help help more people understand exactly
(13:37):
how that works.
Speaker 4 (13:39):
Well, I you know, in the book I use this
term from a friend of mine, Anthea Butler, who this
great slim book that I recommend called White Evangelical Racism.
And you know, Anthea Butler is a is a sort
of a deep historian of churches and whack churches in America.
But this is you don't have to be an academic
to read this book, and she's got this phrase like
(14:01):
the promise of whiteness and the problem, and it's astonishing
that we're still wrestling with this, given how all the
promise of whiteness is.
Speaker 1 (14:09):
Eric, I've just been listening to a book about Gary,
Indiana and.
Speaker 4 (14:12):
The ways in which the factory bosses and so on
so to split Serb immigrants and black migrants, who at
first had such solidarity that you'd have black workers speaking
Serbian and Serbs learning English from black workers. But the
promise of whiteness was they could extend it to the Serbs. Right, Hey, Serbs,
(14:37):
we had you as outsiders, but you know what, we're
going to make you insiders and you can keep expanding
that promise of whiteness. And I think that's one of
the insights that Trump had. So when you go to
a Trump rally and it opens again and again and
again with a black or brown preacher, usually far to
the right, and this is an important point. It inoculates
the mostly white crowd, well, I'm not a racist. Look here,
(15:00):
I am enjoying what this this black or brown preacher
has to say. But then to go further than that, right,
understand that one that's doing the work of inoculation. Two
it is making trump ism and fascism I think safe
for a certain number of people of color. And I
(15:21):
think if we understand it as having a gravitational force,
of course it is fascism. White supremacy is a insidious
enough disease. I think in my understanding that it can
be carried by that, so that you get down to
a rally in Sunrise, Florida, very blue area, and I
don't even know if the crowd was mostly white. There's
a Cuban American, sure, like everyone's like, okay, I get that.
(15:44):
But then there's a Venezuelan Americans and the Nicaraguan Americans
waving Nicaraguen and Venezuelan flags. There's also folks waving Pride flags.
Fascism has a gravity that can pull people in. It says,
I can make you part of this movement. And once
you're part of this movement, you know, and then we
also like rope in the liberal lave of color blindness,
(16:06):
and suddenly the numbers start eroding.
Speaker 2 (16:10):
Jeff, because I know this is such an important and
hard point to appreciate for a lot of people. I mean,
they're stuck on the notion that white supremacy cannot be
passed on to people of color. You have this really
brilliant passage, and I'm just going to read a portion
of it. You said that to a color blind crowd.
Quote unquote. The implicit equation is one of themselves with
(16:33):
the formerly enslaved. Black becomes white, white becomes the oppressed.
Just as white people took the land from indigenous people
and then named themselves they're victims, so too, has whiteness
always been a means of claiming the suffering it inflicts
on others as its own. And I think that goes
a long way to not only telling us why this
movement has appeal, why fifty percent more black men voted
(16:56):
for Trump in twenty twenty than voted in twenty sixteen,
and why we all need to be concerned about the
growing possibility that a browning of America will not save
us from fascism.
Speaker 3 (17:06):
Yeah, and people can see this, but Jeff is nodding
along to his own words like yeah, pretty good.
Speaker 4 (17:14):
No, No, you embarrassed me.
Speaker 1 (17:17):
I'm like saying, like, well cool, because what you do
is like I'm.
Speaker 4 (17:20):
Like blah blah blah, blah blah blah, and like, you know,
you wrote it in like a few sentences there, and
like it's a little bit like this is this is
a tribute to editors, right, Like then what I said
was the first draft, what Khalil read was what you know,
someone like Ben or another editor much improved.
Speaker 3 (17:36):
I mean, so Trump was on CNN in this town hall,
and so more people witnessed what you're describing pretty recently,
and I know you must think about this a lot.
You said that, like, people like us need to understand
the symbols of trump Ism and the depth of belief
in it. But as we saw on CNN, there's also
like this this danger of giving him a platform and
(17:59):
everyone's seeing it and like we can repeat the mistakes
of twenty fifteen and twenty sixteen again. And so how
do you think about that? I mean, you you talk
about this all the time you've written this book. Do
you sometimes wrestle with this idea that you're like, by
regaling us with stories about Trump, you're also you know,
letting him speak more, your giving voice to it.
Speaker 4 (18:20):
Yeah, I mean, like that's the platform question, right, But
I'll say I think the CNN town hall, I thought
it was obscene.
Speaker 1 (18:26):
I mean, and that's not how you do it. That's
part of the old politics.
Speaker 4 (18:29):
One they want the ratings right, but two then they're
going to answer with the liberal response, we're going to
fact check him live. Well, what is the point of
fact checking? There is no point. I mean, that's not
how you do it. I would hope that what I'm
doing here. First of all, you know, I don't have
three million viewers, and I think actually that does matter.
This is a book. But also instead of sort of
(18:50):
trying to fact check him, the more important thing is
to show, I think, how he's constructing this story, what
the pieces are, not to say it's just theater, but
to really pay attention to it as theeter, and say,
what are the elements of production here, what are the
elements we can see the myth in the making.
Speaker 3 (19:09):
So, Jeff, we're going to take a quick break, and
when we come back, we're going to talk about your
work essentially since the twenty twenty election and explore this
idea of whether we are in a civil war right now.
We'll be right back after the break.
Speaker 2 (19:38):
We're back with Jeff Charlotte, author of The Undertow Scenes
from a slow civil War. Oh, Jeff, this is really
so important, I think what you've done, and the media
attention to this work, I think is partly driven by
this very provocative subtitle that encapsulates a lot of the
reporting that first appeared in Vanity Fair and that you
continue to write about, which is this whole idea that
(20:00):
we might actually be in a civil war. And so
you're kind of like a Detouqueville traveling the country right now,
looking at what's happening on the ground. And so look,
give us your understanding, your evidence that we might be
already in a civil war.
Speaker 3 (20:18):
Take us on your journeys a little.
Speaker 1 (20:20):
Bit, Okay, sure.
Speaker 4 (20:21):
So the big part of the book, the Undertow is
January sixth, twenty twenty one. We see this young white woman,
Ashley Babbitt, an insurrectionist, and she's killed, and the cop
who kills her as a black man. So right away
we know what's going to happen. It's going to be
a lynching story. She's made into a martinmoth. So I
decide to go out to California to a rally for
(20:42):
Ashley Babbitt, and I go to a rally and there's
a brawl between Proud Boys and Antifa, And someone says,
you really want to understand why Ashley Babbitt died. Come
to my church. And it's a little megachurch in Yuba City, California.
There's no crosses in this church, but the pulpit is
made of swords. And they explain that as saying, we
are now in a time of war. Theology Tuesday night
(21:02):
is new militia recruit night and this is not this
is a suburban church is it just regular folks?
Speaker 1 (21:08):
You know?
Speaker 4 (21:09):
And they are armed, they are ready for They pastor
talks openly with joy about the executions to come. There's
people around you who have already succeeded in their imagination,
you know, the slow civil war that I imagine, imagine,
believe is happening right now, it's not coming. People say
could there be violence? And always stunts me, what do
(21:31):
you mean? Could there be violence? There's always is already
He's already violence and there's always been violence, right, but
there's violence on top of violence. Now it is, you know,
what has been a simmer is coming to perhaps a
slow boil. They have already accepted the idea of civil
war when that was back in the spring of twenty
one when I started noticing some historians using civil war
(21:53):
talk right and clearly, you know, like how in a way,
slow moving especially historians can be right, like they're like, yeah,
let's not jump to conclusions.
Speaker 1 (22:03):
But so they're saying that.
Speaker 2 (22:04):
Well, when January sixth happened, not only was I convey
that this was possible, but I recalled that on the
inauguration of Lincoln in March. It was only a month
later that the South, that South Carolina fired on Fort Sumter.
So the proximity of January sixth to the inauguration of
Joe Biden felt eerily familiar, Like these people were doing
(22:27):
a preemptive warfare essentially, and they essentially were so yeah,
not hiberbally at this point.
Speaker 1 (22:33):
Preemptive that's a good phrase.
Speaker 4 (22:35):
There's a way in which I think so much of
the arming up, and that was you know, then I
started going to more churches. In every church I went to,
you know, you would ask civil war, and people dance
was always yes. It was just whether it's happening right
now or it's coming, or whether it's something you look
forward to or something you regretfully accept. I mean, you
(22:56):
know the fact that like, look, if you've got more
and more, like the state of Florida, where you've got
people who really think that the books in their schools
are teaching white kids to hate themselves and teaching what
you understand as dramatic perversion. From their perspective, they're in
(23:16):
the slow civil war too, and we're the ones waging
the assault. I'm not like saying both sides, but I
think and there's casualties.
Speaker 1 (23:24):
Look, every pregnant person who's dying for lack of reproductive
rights is casualty.
Speaker 4 (23:28):
We as journalists know that, Like we hear a case here,
a case there, we know there's one hundred for every
one of those. I think the wave of queer and
trans kids suicides, not all of them, but a lot
of them are casualties. These mass shootings, those are casualties.
Speaker 3 (23:43):
I want to push back up against this a little
bit to both of you, because you said, Khalil that
you don't think this is hyperbole, and I don't know,
but I think about the language of civil war being
being alarmist language, either purposefully so, and I think about
like what's to gain by using that language and also
what's lost by using that kind of alarmist language, and
(24:06):
I have no doubt, I mean, in my opinion onion
that the drum beat of what's been going on the
extreme right has shifted the center right word like the
things that we accept is okay that even centrist Dems
are like, yeah, yeah, I'm going to settle for that,
Like we're living through that right now. But that to
me is different than say a civil war, which there
(24:27):
are If we don't have North and South, we at
least have like sides, and there's some like sense we
don't to connect the dots of every sort of you know,
semi connected act of violence and say this is evidence.
Seems like it could be a little bit loose and
so so yeah, I'm throwing that back on you, both
of you, like, is what's the value or and whether
(24:49):
what's the danger of using that kind of language.
Speaker 2 (24:52):
I mean, for me as a historian in this conversation,
I mean, the context of our actual civil war is
the context of people who try to work through these
issues politically. An entire political party was born in the
early days of dissolution, meaning the Republican Party, because the
(25:13):
prior Whig Party couldn't work out its differences on this
question of expansion over slavery. The fact that the people
who were combatants and in our civil war had gone
to college together, had led together in political state houses
and the US Capitol, reminds me, at least as a historian,
(25:33):
that the line between normal and war is very thin.
And the thing that I think makes the future more
precarious than the prior Trump administration is that now trump
Ism has metastasized, and whatever governors we imagined in terms
of normalcy, amongst most elected officials, people like Mike Pence,
(25:57):
who was not too far away from being the victim
of a lynch mob on January sixth, like Mitch McConnell,
and like much of the Republican leadership, have accepted trump
Ism as a political base of the Republican Party and
seemed to have no capacity to reverse course from that.
So the again brothers in arms on different sides of
(26:20):
this equation led to nearly a million people dying in
this country. And I'm not convinced that what we think
of is normal today or is not something beyond the
pale isn't a reality for us all to come to
terms with. So when you say hyperbole, I say, we
need an appropriate early warning system. And I think that's
where Jeff's work is really helpful.
Speaker 1 (26:40):
Yeah, thank you for the historical context.
Speaker 4 (26:42):
And that makes me think in terms of.
Speaker 1 (26:46):
The sort of the nearness of people.
Speaker 4 (26:48):
The other objection that I often hear is like, you know,
either you had this north and the South whatever, and
now we're all mixed up. And you know that the
central trip of the book begins in Sacramento, California, where
I mean a young LATINX couple actually who are pretty
full Trump fascists, and they are leaving California. So we're
(27:10):
talking about, you know, these sort of blue supposedly blue areas.
They are sifting themselves out. They're moving inland. They said,
they wouldn't say exactly sure where maybe Oklahoma, looking for
red territory. And so there's a little bit of on
the one hand, this sort of centrifuging out of people
sorting themselves out. And of course I just met the
(27:31):
other day some folks who have moved from Texas to
sconnecting New York. They need to get out of Texas,
trans folks. I have friends who have moved out of
Wisconsin because they do not feel safe there. There's that,
and I think the advantage, the advantage of the alarm
(27:51):
is to sort of say, hey, look this is what
we're messing around.
Speaker 3 (27:54):
With, all right, Jeff, this is powerful stuff and despairing
in some ways. That your book became a New York
Times bestseller is wonderful for you, but a little bit
problematic that this is where we have.
Speaker 2 (28:05):
To know that's good, that's good. We wanted to be
a best seller.
Speaker 5 (28:09):
I have to say, there was like some hope. I'm like,
what if I call it slow civil war?
Speaker 4 (28:13):
But man, a year and a half from now and
this comes out he thinks of just so mellowed out
that people like, oh, give me a break, and instead
it's like, you know you do NPR and like can
I use the F word fascism? And they're like, oh yes, yes, please,
we better talk about that. And that's that's not good.
Better that the book be remaindered.
Speaker 3 (28:34):
So when we come back from a short break, we're
going to talk about the future. We'll be right back.
Speaker 2 (28:52):
Welcome back to some of my best friends are We're
talking to Jeff Charlotte today about his really powerful and
despairing and to some degree hopeful. Surprisingly enough, study about
a slow civil war. And why do I say hopeful.
It's hopeful because, Jeff, you opened with this surprising tribute
(29:13):
to Harry Belafonte. You talk about a man whose artistry
was his activism and who could never separate those two things,
and someone who just passed away this spring, just a
couple of weeks before the recording of this interview. I
have to say I was moved.
Speaker 1 (29:33):
Ninety six.
Speaker 2 (29:34):
I was moved by what you said about Harry Belafonte,
not just because I think people don't really appreciate the
life of this giant, but also because I knew Harry Belafonte.
I was at the Schomberg Center in some of the
last productive years of his life before he sort of
retreated from public life. I got to know him and
(29:54):
his wife, Pam. I've been in his apartment, and Harry
never mister B as we call him, never stopped moving
chess pieces on a board. He was always thinking about
where people needed to be on the battlefield racial justice
and social justice in this country. And I had just
taken a job at Harvard's twenty sixteen, and he sits
(30:16):
down with me in his apartment and he says, I
need you to take over Sankofa, which is an organization
that he started that Dina Belafonte's dart is leaving now.
It's a cultural organization committed to sort of building the
cultural muscle and infrastructure of social justice warriors and of
the left more generally. And while we're in the middle
(30:37):
of this conversation, I'm like, oh shit, like I just
got this job at Harvard. I can't turn mister B down,
Like what is happening right now? That was one of
the hardest knows I ever had to give to somebody,
to turn mister be down for an opportunity to help
be part of his legacy.
Speaker 3 (30:53):
But oh boy, what a guy, what a.
Speaker 2 (30:56):
Person, what a human being? And tell us, like, why
do you tell us about Harry Belafonte in this book?
What is the message about the future you are trying
to impart from someone who just left us.
Speaker 4 (31:09):
I wanted to start the book, which I was writing
partly because I have a fourteen year old non binary
trans kid who is despairing and I was looking for
some hope, but not cheap grace. And I thought, Okay,
that's what mister B is. And I think about all
these tributes since he died.
Speaker 1 (31:29):
And I've done.
Speaker 5 (31:30):
There's someone who wrote about him.
Speaker 4 (31:31):
You do some interviews and so on, and there's a
certain kind of folks who's sort of really surprised to
hear that he was angry.
Speaker 5 (31:39):
Right, I'm like, oh, yeah, that guy was angry all
his days.
Speaker 2 (31:43):
Yeah, he cursed a lot, he did not miss words.
Speaker 4 (31:47):
Yeah, they want him to be a sweet old man.
And the hope is that anger In that line he
says that I think is really powerful. It says where
your anger comes from doesn't matter as much as what
you do with it.
Speaker 1 (31:57):
Now.
Speaker 4 (31:58):
It matters where it comes from, but not as much
as what you do with it. And that transformation. The
other thing that you said is that the culture is
his art and his activism are one and the same.
So to those of us urging us to see culture
as somehow a separate issue, not for this guy in
ninety six years in the struggle who transformed American.
Speaker 3 (32:17):
Life, Jeff Hope, but not cheap grace is a beautiful line.
Maybe I'm being more of the e or in this
conversation again, but he's dead, he died, and you're you're
you're talking about a kind of activism that is a
thing of the past, literally like he's he's a relic,
and you know, so I worry about that of like
(32:39):
whether this continues. And so then the question is, how
do you see sort of the Belafontes today doing this work,
Like who is carrying on that legacy that we're supposed
to see this work still happening? Where do we see
the resistance? Where do we see the fighting? Where do
we see the protest?
Speaker 5 (32:57):
I mean partly, isn't it what this show is supposed
to be?
Speaker 4 (33:03):
Right here?
Speaker 3 (33:04):
Kid, right here? That that's what we're looking for? A
ding ding ding you are now you are now one
of our best.
Speaker 4 (33:12):
Well actually, like let's think about this like cultural historians
and always astonishes me. I don't know if historians are
doing it, but I'm in an English department and there's
nobody paying attention to podcasting as a text of our times,
which is astonishing to me because it seems really relevant
and there's a lot of challenge, you know, and we
could each little podcast, we could say, oh, is that
really making the difference?
Speaker 5 (33:35):
No?
Speaker 4 (33:35):
And each fundraiser mister b did whatever, Did that really
make the difference?
Speaker 5 (33:39):
No?
Speaker 4 (33:40):
In fact he was defeated. Right, that's part of the
hope not cheap grace. And that's why it ends with
this other line that I always knew the last line
of the book was going to be this line from
this guy, Lee Hayes, a songwriter who was broken by
the Red Scare.
Speaker 1 (33:53):
And he says, from the nineteen fifties.
Speaker 4 (33:55):
Nineteen fifties, and you know, people know HI from me
if I had a hammer like the American Songbook. He's
Pete Seeger's songwriting partner, and he's got this line, for
a while, it was possible not to be scared even
And he's describing seemed very much like one that mister
b endured of being chased through.
Speaker 1 (34:13):
For mister b it's being chased by the clan.
Speaker 5 (34:15):
Through the Mississippi Nightsissippi. For Lee, it's being chased in Arkansas.
Speaker 4 (34:21):
He's in a car with union organizers and gun thugs
are on their tail, and they're singing hymns, and he says,
for while, it was possible not to be scared even then.
Let me put this in the context of an activist
named Suzanne Farr, who I met some years ago, a
very sweet, old white Southern grandmotherly lady. She had built
(34:41):
a lesbian separatist commune in rural Arkansas, I believe it was.
And then these these these his head women start showing up,
running from their violent partners and said, will you take
us in? So they took them in, and then the
partners come with their guns, and Suzanne and her comrades
stand the ground, and I was with Suzanne and a
(35:04):
younger activist, and the younger activist says, oh, that's so
wonderful you built us.
Speaker 5 (35:10):
And Suzanne's sweet old grandmother puts her hand on the
younger activist's hand and says, oh, honey, noah, no fucking
safe spaces.
Speaker 1 (35:19):
But there might be these safe moments.
Speaker 4 (35:21):
Right for a while, it was possible not to be scared,
even like, where is that work happening? It's not happening
so much in a space as in moments. Maybe the
moment is a podcast, maybe the moment is there. But
you're right, I can't point to anyone. I mean, Harry,
I think ninety six years he ran the good race,
Like who is the next mister b. We don't know.
(35:42):
We'll know after they have lived their ninety six years.
I'm like, God, damn that person. We didn't realize all
that they were doing. They are there among us. That
doesn't mean we win, but it means we could.
Speaker 3 (35:55):
Yeah, we need to expand those moments. We need to
expand those moments so that they become our reality.
Speaker 2 (36:02):
Jeff Charlotte, it was amazing to have you on today.
You've shared a lot with us that we all need
to pay attention to. Go folks, go out there. Continue
to keep this book on the bestseller list for the
New York Times. Jeff Charlotte, The Undertow. We're just grateful
for what you've done and what you'll continue to write about.
Speaker 3 (36:21):
And Jeff, we've been on this journey alongside one another
for twenty years. Let's keep it going another twenty all right,
take care, Thank you.
Speaker 2 (36:37):
Oh man, this was a really powerful conversation with Jeff
ben And I don't know, there's something that stuck out
to me at the top of the conversation when Jeff
described this book The Undertow in terms of like a
social movement on the right. I mean, often we hear
the words populism, but this notion that it could be
(37:00):
a social movement, you know, it doesn't hit our ears
the same way that we often think about social movements
as always being about the expansion of democracy, justice, truth,
And because where he's.
Speaker 3 (37:11):
Thinking about social movements on the left, you mean, like, yeah,
and that's right, he's talking about it on the right
of this this rising tide, that it's organized. Yeah, that's right.
Speaker 2 (37:20):
And the extent to which he's right makes perfect sense
when we look at the grassroots mobilization down to local
school boards fighting for misinformation and censorship, and like, when
he talks about fascism as a mass movement, it reminded
me of this essay that Tony Morrison wrote in nineteen
(37:41):
ninety five.
Speaker 3 (37:41):
Get Literary. I love it. I love it Getting Literary.
Speaker 2 (37:44):
Yeah, it's a really powerful quote, and I think it
speaks to this moment so clearly. She said, fascism can
only reproduce the environment that supports its own health, fear, denial,
and an atmosphere in which its victims have lost the
will to fight.
Speaker 3 (37:58):
Okay, break it down.
Speaker 2 (38:00):
Well, I just think that what Jeff is telling us
in this book is that the other side is mobilizing
to fucking fight, like that's what they're doing. And he
talked about casualties already, you know, even including victims of
reproductive injustice and talking about of course the proliferation of
guns on the right and the mass killings.
Speaker 3 (38:21):
And his own child, like his fear for his own
child who is non binary. Yeah, that's right.
Speaker 2 (38:26):
And so I think as we move forward in this moment,
I think part of the challenge on the left is
to meet the challenge of a social movement, which is
to say that a lot more people have to be
mobilized to stand up for the democracy that they claim
to believe in.
Speaker 3 (38:43):
Yeah, yeah, that's interesting. I mean because then it's also
why to give a bigger platform to these issues is
because we have to figure out how to confront them.
We have to organize, we have to have a social
movement that matches in some ways what's actually going on.
We have to know the other side much more, much better.
Speaker 2 (39:02):
That's right, And I mean then thinking about like how
do you do that? I mean, part of it, even
having this conversation about Harry Belafonte, is also about the
power of culture to mobilize people, meaning that the symbols,
the sound, the music, then stories we tell are all
part of the infrastructure that you need to build a
(39:24):
social movement. And the right is clearly mobilized to do that.
The Left seems to be still trying to figure this out.
Speaker 3 (39:31):
Yeah, yeah, I mean, you know, you talk about bringing
a knife or a pen to a gunfight, and you
know that's part of what's so scary about this is
that the proliferation of guns, of bringing automatic weapons just
holding them on the street. I don't think the answer
is to respond with the same. You know, we have
(39:54):
this disease of guns in this country, and certainly, like
what he is witnessing by travel the country is seeing
the sort of cult the religion of guns. Yeah. I mean,
there's a way we have to confront that. And what
you're describing I don't think is like, you know, matching
weapons to weapons, which is not a slow sive a war,
but a fast one. But there is some deeper kind
(40:18):
of organizing and even cultural movement which has to happen.
Speaker 2 (40:22):
Yes, And when Tony Morrison says the victims have lost
the will to fight, listen, the world is a violent place.
There are one hundred and ninety three countries in the world.
Conflict happens. There's a war in Russia and Ukraine. The
Ukrainians didn't sit around and wait to have a debate
when bomb started dropping and when violence occurred, and so
(40:43):
I just think we have to be really honest about
what's happening in this country, and we have to use
all the tools at our disposal, including culture, including the
right to self defense, including the right to stand up
for truth and justice wherever it is necessary, in all
the places that is required because the other side is
not playing games.
Speaker 3 (41:03):
I'm hearing you by any means necessary, And I just
want to say I'm glad if we're not on the
front lines, I'm glad we're on the second lines together.
So I love you, rel love you too.
Speaker 2 (41:22):
Some of My Best Friends Are is a production of
Pushkin Industries. The show is written and hosted by me Khalil,
Jabon Muhammad and my best friend Ben Austin.
Speaker 3 (41:31):
It's produced by Lucy Sullivan. Our associate producer is Rachel Yang.
It's edited by Sarah Nix with help from Keishel Williams.
Our engineer is Amanda ka Wang, and our managing producer
is Constanza Guyardo.
Speaker 2 (41:46):
At Pushkin, Thanks Salitol, Molad, Julia Barton, Heather Faine, Carly Migliori,
John schnarz Retta Cone, and Jacob Weisberg.
Speaker 3 (41:56):
Our theme song Little Lily is by fellow Chicagoan the
brilliant Avery R. Young from his album Tubman. You definitely
want to check out his music at his website, Averyaryung
dot com.
Speaker 2 (42:07):
You can find Pushkin on all all social platforms at
pushkin pods and you can sign up for our newsletter
at pushkin dot fm. To find more Pushkin podcasts, listen
on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you.
Speaker 3 (42:21):
Like to listen. And if you like our show, please
give us a five star rating and a review and listen.
Even if you don't like it, give it a five
star rating and a review, and please tell all of
your best friends about it. Thank you.
Speaker 5 (42:38):
You
Push it.
Speaker 2 (00:25):
I'm Khalil Jbron Muhammad.
Speaker 3 (00:26):
I'm Ben Austen. We're two best friends, one black, one white.
Speaker 2 (00:31):
I'm a historian and I'm a journalist. And this is
some of my best friends.
Speaker 3 (00:36):
Are some of my best friends? Are you know? On
the other side. In this show, we wrestle with the
challenges and the absurdities of a deeply divided and unequal country.
And today's episode, Khalil, we go deep, deep, deep into
those divides. Yeah, that's right.
Speaker 2 (00:56):
We're talking about trump Ism, We're talking about populism, we're
talking about the far right Christian nationalists. We have on
our show.
Speaker 1 (01:04):
Jeff Charlotte.
Speaker 2 (01:05):
He's a professor at Dartmouth College and the author of
the New York Times best selling book The Undertow Seems
from a Slow Civil War.
Speaker 3 (01:12):
Yeah, yeah, this book is really powerful. Jeff's new books
starts with his reporting way back in twenty fifteen. He's
at Trump rallies and it continues throughout the Trump presidency.
And this is the first part of the book. And
he's talking with people at these rallies, the real diehard
Trump supporters, and he's capturing for readers the depth of
(01:34):
their belief and Jeff is seeing Trump really through the
lens of religion. He's seeing Trump as a kind of
religious leader.
Speaker 2 (01:41):
And this book continues after the events of January sixth,
twenty twenty one. He travels the country to explore divides everywhere, guns, militia,
state legislative banning of books, and overturning of reproductive rights.
Jeff really believes that we are in a slow civil war.
He calls it as he sees it.
Speaker 3 (01:58):
That's right. He thinks it's already begun. All right, let's
do it. Let's get into this, all right, Jeff Charlotte, Jeff,
thank you for being on some of my best friends.
Are I spent a long time coming.
Speaker 1 (02:20):
Thanks Ben, Thanks good to be with you both today.
Speaker 2 (02:23):
Yeah, Jeff, it's great to meet you.
Speaker 3 (02:25):
Jeff Khalil is just meeting you right now, But you
and I have known each other. I was trying to
do the math. I think it's twenty years.
Speaker 4 (02:33):
Really that long. So, yeah, we met via Harper's magazine.
Speaker 3 (02:37):
Yeah, yeah, you were doing your first piece for the magazine,
Jesus plus Nothing, which becomes Your which was.
Speaker 4 (02:43):
The start of my Yeah, twenty years. So I've been
going around thinking about this book. I've been reporting on
right wing movements for twenty years since that story. That
story was in sort of the turn in that direction.
Speaker 3 (02:53):
So that magazine story that we worked on together, you
as writer, me as a lowly fact checker, became your book,
The Family, and it also became a docu series. And
I'll just sort of say, like you've always been interested
in religion and power. This is sort of something that
has been much of your professional life's work. And I
would say that the difference between that work back then
(03:15):
and what you've been doing more recently is that you
were looking at elites. You were looking at at least
people who were approximate to power, and during the Trump
era you've looked more like the people who are the masses,
who are not necessarily in power, but how they've been
sort of controlled or sort of what they're thinking is yeah.
Speaker 4 (03:38):
And I think the pivot point really is Trump's descent
on the Golden Escalator in twenty fifteen. And here he's
bringing down a fascist esthetic. He doesn't have a movement yet,
and the question to me is will he build the movement?
So the question that becomes more interesting for me is
one of reception rather than one of the production of
(04:00):
the narrative, and that kind of pivots me toward will
this movement form? Will I watch a social movement? Because
the right has social movements too, Will I watch a
social movement in real time? And unfortunately, yes.
Speaker 2 (04:12):
No, that's really fascinating because I know in many ways
the book you've written is written for us, the undertow
scenes from a civil war. And by us, I mean
like people who still believe in facts, who still care
about expertise, and people who read books. But you know,
tell us, like, what do we need to understand about
(04:34):
what you call the Trumpet scene to help us understand
what is happening in our country from all of these
Trump rallies that you've attended over the past several years.
Speaker 4 (04:45):
That's the first thing that we need to understand that
this is an age of Trump in the same way
that I think a lot of scholars will sort of
date the age Reaganism not from nineteen eighty to eighty eight,
but from nineteen eighty really perhaps to twenty sixteen, such
that Reagan defines a kind of a vernacular in which
American politics takes place. Whether you're a Democrat or Republican,
(05:08):
and I I think the Trump is scene is he is.
He has given his language to the age. And I
think that's the first thing, is that we live in
the age of Trump. And so these debates is whether
Trump is finished or not, they're really missing the point.
Speaker 1 (05:24):
I think of this preacher in.
Speaker 4 (05:25):
Omaha, Nebraska, pastor Hank Cuneman, and he's a prophet in
he or so he says, and he says Trump is
coming back, whether the man himself or his spirit in
the flesh of another.
Speaker 1 (05:36):
And I think that's the first thing.
Speaker 4 (05:37):
And the second thing is just to pay attention to
that seemingly crazy you know, Trump is coming back spirit
in the flesh of another. Seemingly crazy narrative, right, But
it's not crazy. It's also imaginative. And I think we
have to contend with the fascist movement that did arise
in response to that fascist aesthetic. It is fascism is
(05:58):
a form of imagination. And where we get stuck on saying,
but what are our policies? It's not about that. It
is a utopian movement. They understand that their vision as
utopin and that brings with it so much momentum and energy.
And I'm not saying like it's unstoppable. I definitely don't
believe inevitability, but I think as a country, both left
(06:21):
and liberals are still trying to resist it in terms
of an older politics.
Speaker 2 (06:27):
I have a follow up question, Jeff, because this is
one of the things that I would not have seen
but for your reporting about this and the amount of
time you spend up close at these rallies. But essentially
give the anatomy of a Trump speech, and you wrap
that anatomy around the sort of familiar tropes of evangelicalism
(06:50):
in say the career of Billy Graham. But you give
this anatomy where you say, there's the call, there's the snake,
and there's the bullet and maybe just sketch very quickly
to our listeners what exactly you mean by those three
elements of a Trump rally speech.
Speaker 4 (07:06):
So this is maybe the most upsetting thing I say
to a lot of non Trumpers, is I think Trump
is one of the two best orders I've ever heard,
and the other being Barack Obama. You know, radically different style,
but in terms of the ability to work a crowd
and own a crowd, and part of the way Trump
does it is through a kind of awful comedy, but
(07:27):
it is comedy. He does sketch comedy, he does voices
and so on. And it so distresses me that our
colleagues in the press and really don't pay attention to
this because they call it just theater. Right, Well, there's
no such thing as just theater. There's theater, and it's powerful.
The call is one that was one he used in
twenty sixteen, and he would sort of enact the calls
(07:51):
he was going to make as president of bringing back
the industrial base, and how quickly the chieftains of industry
would bow to his will, right and sometimes that.
Speaker 3 (07:59):
He was making that they didn't have to have any
truth to them. But I just like Grandio's promises.
Speaker 4 (08:04):
It wasn't even a promise. He was in enacting it.
So you saw it happen, all right, So great the
companies are I just heard him. I just heard the
guy on the phone. Well you didn't hear it.
Speaker 3 (08:12):
But he's a good performer, all right, all right, So
that's the first part of his speech. You call it
the call, So, Jeff, what's the snake?
Speaker 1 (08:18):
That the snake was?
Speaker 4 (08:19):
He would take an old song by actually a black
ceil rights activist and sort of perform it as this
poem about a woman who picks up a snake and
the snake bites her, and he would do voices, you know,
he do the voice of the snake, and he.
Speaker 1 (08:33):
Do the voice of the woman. Why did you bite me?
Speaker 4 (08:35):
And you know, the snake, silly woman, you took me in.
You knew that's what I was. And to him that
represented the undocumented person.
Speaker 2 (08:42):
The crisis at the border that we call it now,
which all of this criminalizing, racist language about immigrants and
the rapes and the murderers and this sort of thing.
That's where the that's where that snake metaphor shows up.
And now the bullet, the last part of the speech,
which you say is about the neef of violence, like
to protect or defend the people against those who Trump
defines as traders. You give us this crazy story, this
(09:04):
example in the book about Trump talking about a mass
execution in the Philippine.
Speaker 1 (09:10):
The bullet is just straight murder.
Speaker 4 (09:12):
And I was actually just thinking of the bullet to dig,
which is a fictional history which he presents as real.
It's general black Jack pershing and the Philippines and this
Muslim rebellion and This never happened, by the way, but
you know, just obviously, they capture fifty Muslim rebels and
(09:32):
they dip fifty bullets into pigs.
Speaker 1 (09:36):
Blood, and the whole thing is acting.
Speaker 4 (09:39):
He demonstrates, he's swirling the bullets and the blood he's
holding up. He tells the story, and he shoots forty
nine of them, and he minds shooting them, and the
crowd is cheering, leaves one man alive to go and
tell the tale, and then he does a story again.
The whole thing boom boom, boom, and the crowd cheers louder.
(10:00):
And anything Trump says about policy after that is missing
the point. It doesn't matter. He knows that that's the
power of a really scary order. And it's not a
you know, people say he's not fascist because he doesn't
talk like Hitler and Mussolini.
Speaker 1 (10:14):
No, he talks like Trump. It is a different style, that's.
Speaker 3 (10:18):
Right, Jeff. You know, as you know, I'm in Chicago,
and so we have a kind of version of Trump's
the bullet speech here where he's like, you know, Chicago
is this hell hole, and I spoke to this tough cop,
I spoke to this great cop, and it changes in
every version he tells. But it's this idea of just
like oppressive policing, they could solve the crime problem in
Chicago if we just let him, they could solve it
in a minute or a day. It's this idea of
(10:39):
like hyper violence and justified in some form.
Speaker 1 (10:44):
Yeah, that's just so interesting.
Speaker 4 (10:45):
I hadn't thought of that as like the Chicago as
one of his one of his sketches actually, And I
wonder how many of those city sketches he's had, because
I've also heard him do one for Philadelphia. You know,
I've never I've never been to a Chicago rally. Of
course I could watch them. It would be interesting to
sort of see like the urban studies of trump Ism,
to go through when he's near different cities, and what
(11:06):
stories he tells.
Speaker 3 (11:06):
About actually that Chicago story that he is not just
you know, at Chicago rallies, and in fact it's across
the nation because Chicago, like Philadelphia, is a stand in
for like black city. You know, it invokes all the
sort of like racist and they're not even like you know,
dog whistles. They're just like explicit and so you know,
tough on crime rhetoric. That he's able to extol. It
(11:29):
just works wherever he is, because Chicago has this meaning
of like violent place, gun crimes black people.
Speaker 4 (11:37):
Well, let me ask you both a question. That's that's
something I've been thinking about. Is there actually any place
now in the rhetoric for the term dog whistle or
is it simply misleading us?
Speaker 2 (11:46):
I think I think you're right.
Speaker 3 (11:47):
Absolutely.
Speaker 2 (11:48):
I mean, the explicit nature of the conversation today about
saving the country in whatever context it is right now,
it's the recent immigration changes by the Biden administration and
the wall to wall coverage of people at the border,
and the way in which the Biden administration is just
(12:10):
unleashing people who don't belong here. Now, I'm not using
the language in which it's articulated, but all you have
to do is add the filter of racist trumpst white
supremacists on top of that, and that's what we're hearing.
So I think the notion of dog whistle as a
term of art these days is as anachronistic as even
(12:31):
a so called culture war, which we still are using
to define like what should we be saying about the
truth of our history or not.
Speaker 3 (12:41):
To normalize is something that's extreme. Yeah, it puts it out.
Speaker 4 (12:44):
If here's the normal flow of things and here's this
other thing that intrudes dog whistle or culture war, when
that is the center.
Speaker 2 (12:51):
I would even say on the cultural point that it
minimizes it, like it's not that important. Like there's real
politics and then there's these culture wars, and the culture
wars are the bait and switch from the actual real
thing that we're trying to get to. So to me,
that's the heart of the matter at this point. For example,
we just saw Maricio Garcia kill people in Texas. I
(13:13):
believe he killed eight people and was self identified with
white supremacist and Nazi culture. You actually, unlike most Americans,
have seen up close what the appeals are are within
these right wing fascist movements that support Trump two people
of color like, so help help more people understand exactly
(13:37):
how that works.
Speaker 4 (13:39):
Well, I you know, in the book I use this
term from a friend of mine, Anthea Butler, who this
great slim book that I recommend called White Evangelical Racism.
And you know, Anthea Butler is a is a sort
of a deep historian of churches and whack churches in America.
But this is you don't have to be an academic
to read this book, and she's got this phrase like
(14:01):
the promise of whiteness and the problem, and it's astonishing
that we're still wrestling with this, given how all the
promise of whiteness is.
Speaker 1 (14:09):
Eric, I've just been listening to a book about Gary,
Indiana and.
Speaker 4 (14:12):
The ways in which the factory bosses and so on
so to split Serb immigrants and black migrants, who at
first had such solidarity that you'd have black workers speaking
Serbian and Serbs learning English from black workers. But the
promise of whiteness was they could extend it to the Serbs. Right, Hey, Serbs,
(14:37):
we had you as outsiders, but you know what, we're
going to make you insiders and you can keep expanding
that promise of whiteness. And I think that's one of
the insights that Trump had. So when you go to
a Trump rally and it opens again and again and
again with a black or brown preacher, usually far to
the right, and this is an important point. It inoculates
the mostly white crowd, well, I'm not a racist. Look here,
(15:00):
I am enjoying what this this black or brown preacher
has to say. But then to go further than that, right,
understand that one that's doing the work of inoculation. Two
it is making trump ism and fascism I think safe
for a certain number of people of color. And I
(15:21):
think if we understand it as having a gravitational force,
of course it is fascism. White supremacy is a insidious
enough disease. I think in my understanding that it can
be carried by that, so that you get down to
a rally in Sunrise, Florida, very blue area, and I
don't even know if the crowd was mostly white. There's
a Cuban American, sure, like everyone's like, okay, I get that.
(15:44):
But then there's a Venezuelan Americans and the Nicaraguan Americans
waving Nicaraguen and Venezuelan flags. There's also folks waving Pride flags.
Fascism has a gravity that can pull people in. It says,
I can make you part of this movement. And once
you're part of this movement, you know, and then we
also like rope in the liberal lave of color blindness,
(16:06):
and suddenly the numbers start eroding.
Speaker 2 (16:10):
Jeff, because I know this is such an important and
hard point to appreciate for a lot of people. I mean,
they're stuck on the notion that white supremacy cannot be
passed on to people of color. You have this really
brilliant passage, and I'm just going to read a portion
of it. You said that to a color blind crowd.
Quote unquote. The implicit equation is one of themselves with
(16:33):
the formerly enslaved. Black becomes white, white becomes the oppressed.
Just as white people took the land from indigenous people
and then named themselves they're victims, so too, has whiteness
always been a means of claiming the suffering it inflicts
on others as its own. And I think that goes
a long way to not only telling us why this
movement has appeal, why fifty percent more black men voted
(16:56):
for Trump in twenty twenty than voted in twenty sixteen,
and why we all need to be concerned about the
growing possibility that a browning of America will not save
us from fascism.
Speaker 3 (17:06):
Yeah, and people can see this, but Jeff is nodding
along to his own words like yeah, pretty good.
Speaker 4 (17:14):
No, No, you embarrassed me.
Speaker 1 (17:17):
I'm like saying, like, well cool, because what you do
is like I'm.
Speaker 4 (17:20):
Like blah blah blah, blah blah blah, and like, you know,
you wrote it in like a few sentences there, and
like it's a little bit like this is this is
a tribute to editors, right, Like then what I said
was the first draft, what Khalil read was what you know,
someone like Ben or another editor much improved.
Speaker 3 (17:36):
I mean, so Trump was on CNN in this town hall,
and so more people witnessed what you're describing pretty recently,
and I know you must think about this a lot.
You said that, like, people like us need to understand
the symbols of trump Ism and the depth of belief
in it. But as we saw on CNN, there's also
like this this danger of giving him a platform and
(17:59):
everyone's seeing it and like we can repeat the mistakes
of twenty fifteen and twenty sixteen again. And so how
do you think about that? I mean, you you talk
about this all the time you've written this book. Do
you sometimes wrestle with this idea that you're like, by
regaling us with stories about Trump, you're also you know,
letting him speak more, your giving voice to it.
Speaker 4 (18:20):
Yeah, I mean, like that's the platform question, right, But
I'll say I think the CNN town hall, I thought
it was obscene.
Speaker 1 (18:26):
I mean, and that's not how you do it. That's
part of the old politics.
Speaker 4 (18:29):
One they want the ratings right, but two then they're
going to answer with the liberal response, we're going to
fact check him live. Well, what is the point of
fact checking? There is no point. I mean, that's not
how you do it. I would hope that what I'm
doing here. First of all, you know, I don't have
three million viewers, and I think actually that does matter.
This is a book. But also instead of sort of
(18:50):
trying to fact check him, the more important thing is
to show, I think, how he's constructing this story, what
the pieces are, not to say it's just theater, but
to really pay attention to it as theeter, and say,
what are the elements of production here, what are the
elements we can see the myth in the making.
Speaker 3 (19:09):
So, Jeff, we're going to take a quick break, and
when we come back, we're going to talk about your
work essentially since the twenty twenty election and explore this
idea of whether we are in a civil war right now.
We'll be right back after the break.
Speaker 2 (19:38):
We're back with Jeff Charlotte, author of The Undertow Scenes
from a slow civil War. Oh, Jeff, this is really
so important, I think what you've done, and the media
attention to this work, I think is partly driven by
this very provocative subtitle that encapsulates a lot of the
reporting that first appeared in Vanity Fair and that you
continue to write about, which is this whole idea that
(20:00):
we might actually be in a civil war. And so
you're kind of like a Detouqueville traveling the country right now,
looking at what's happening on the ground. And so look,
give us your understanding, your evidence that we might be
already in a civil war.
Speaker 3 (20:18):
Take us on your journeys a little.
Speaker 1 (20:20):
Bit, Okay, sure.
Speaker 4 (20:21):
So the big part of the book, the Undertow is
January sixth, twenty twenty one. We see this young white woman,
Ashley Babbitt, an insurrectionist, and she's killed, and the cop
who kills her as a black man. So right away
we know what's going to happen. It's going to be
a lynching story. She's made into a martinmoth. So I
decide to go out to California to a rally for
(20:42):
Ashley Babbitt, and I go to a rally and there's
a brawl between Proud Boys and Antifa, And someone says,
you really want to understand why Ashley Babbitt died. Come
to my church. And it's a little megachurch in Yuba City, California.
There's no crosses in this church, but the pulpit is
made of swords. And they explain that as saying, we
are now in a time of war. Theology Tuesday night
(21:02):
is new militia recruit night and this is not this
is a suburban church is it just regular folks?
Speaker 1 (21:08):
You know?
Speaker 4 (21:09):
And they are armed, they are ready for They pastor
talks openly with joy about the executions to come. There's
people around you who have already succeeded in their imagination,
you know, the slow civil war that I imagine, imagine,
believe is happening right now, it's not coming. People say
could there be violence? And always stunts me, what do
(21:31):
you mean? Could there be violence? There's always is already
He's already violence and there's always been violence, right, but
there's violence on top of violence. Now it is, you know,
what has been a simmer is coming to perhaps a
slow boil. They have already accepted the idea of civil
war when that was back in the spring of twenty
one when I started noticing some historians using civil war
(21:53):
talk right and clearly, you know, like how in a way,
slow moving especially historians can be right, like they're like, yeah,
let's not jump to conclusions.
Speaker 1 (22:03):
But so they're saying that.
Speaker 2 (22:04):
Well, when January sixth happened, not only was I convey
that this was possible, but I recalled that on the
inauguration of Lincoln in March. It was only a month
later that the South, that South Carolina fired on Fort Sumter.
So the proximity of January sixth to the inauguration of
Joe Biden felt eerily familiar, Like these people were doing
(22:27):
a preemptive warfare essentially, and they essentially were so yeah,
not hiberbally at this point.
Speaker 1 (22:33):
Preemptive that's a good phrase.
Speaker 4 (22:35):
There's a way in which I think so much of
the arming up, and that was you know, then I
started going to more churches. In every church I went to,
you know, you would ask civil war, and people dance
was always yes. It was just whether it's happening right
now or it's coming, or whether it's something you look
forward to or something you regretfully accept. I mean, you
(22:56):
know the fact that like, look, if you've got more
and more, like the state of Florida, where you've got
people who really think that the books in their schools
are teaching white kids to hate themselves and teaching what
you understand as dramatic perversion. From their perspective, they're in
(23:16):
the slow civil war too, and we're the ones waging
the assault. I'm not like saying both sides, but I
think and there's casualties.
Speaker 1 (23:24):
Look, every pregnant person who's dying for lack of reproductive
rights is casualty.
Speaker 4 (23:28):
We as journalists know that, Like we hear a case here,
a case there, we know there's one hundred for every
one of those. I think the wave of queer and
trans kids suicides, not all of them, but a lot
of them are casualties. These mass shootings, those are casualties.
Speaker 3 (23:43):
I want to push back up against this a little
bit to both of you, because you said, Khalil that
you don't think this is hyperbole, and I don't know,
but I think about the language of civil war being
being alarmist language, either purposefully so, and I think about
like what's to gain by using that language and also
what's lost by using that kind of alarmist language, and
(24:06):
I have no doubt, I mean, in my opinion onion
that the drum beat of what's been going on the
extreme right has shifted the center right word like the
things that we accept is okay that even centrist Dems
are like, yeah, yeah, I'm going to settle for that,
Like we're living through that right now. But that to
me is different than say a civil war, which there
(24:27):
are If we don't have North and South, we at
least have like sides, and there's some like sense we
don't to connect the dots of every sort of you know,
semi connected act of violence and say this is evidence.
Seems like it could be a little bit loose and
so so yeah, I'm throwing that back on you, both
of you, like, is what's the value or and whether
(24:49):
what's the danger of using that kind of language.
Speaker 2 (24:52):
I mean, for me as a historian in this conversation,
I mean, the context of our actual civil war is
the context of people who try to work through these
issues politically. An entire political party was born in the
early days of dissolution, meaning the Republican Party, because the
(25:13):
prior Whig Party couldn't work out its differences on this
question of expansion over slavery. The fact that the people
who were combatants and in our civil war had gone
to college together, had led together in political state houses
and the US Capitol, reminds me, at least as a historian,
(25:33):
that the line between normal and war is very thin.
And the thing that I think makes the future more
precarious than the prior Trump administration is that now trump
Ism has metastasized, and whatever governors we imagined in terms
of normalcy, amongst most elected officials, people like Mike Pence,
(25:57):
who was not too far away from being the victim
of a lynch mob on January sixth, like Mitch McConnell,
and like much of the Republican leadership, have accepted trump
Ism as a political base of the Republican Party and
seemed to have no capacity to reverse course from that.
So the again brothers in arms on different sides of
(26:20):
this equation led to nearly a million people dying in
this country. And I'm not convinced that what we think
of is normal today or is not something beyond the
pale isn't a reality for us all to come to
terms with. So when you say hyperbole, I say, we
need an appropriate early warning system. And I think that's
where Jeff's work is really helpful.
Speaker 1 (26:40):
Yeah, thank you for the historical context.
Speaker 4 (26:42):
And that makes me think in terms of.
Speaker 1 (26:46):
The sort of the nearness of people.
Speaker 4 (26:48):
The other objection that I often hear is like, you know,
either you had this north and the South whatever, and
now we're all mixed up. And you know that the
central trip of the book begins in Sacramento, California, where
I mean a young LATINX couple actually who are pretty
full Trump fascists, and they are leaving California. So we're
(27:10):
talking about, you know, these sort of blue supposedly blue areas.
They are sifting themselves out. They're moving inland. They said,
they wouldn't say exactly sure where maybe Oklahoma, looking for
red territory. And so there's a little bit of on
the one hand, this sort of centrifuging out of people
sorting themselves out. And of course I just met the
(27:31):
other day some folks who have moved from Texas to
sconnecting New York. They need to get out of Texas,
trans folks. I have friends who have moved out of
Wisconsin because they do not feel safe there. There's that,
and I think the advantage, the advantage of the alarm
(27:51):
is to sort of say, hey, look this is what
we're messing around.
Speaker 3 (27:54):
With, all right, Jeff, this is powerful stuff and despairing
in some ways. That your book became a New York
Times bestseller is wonderful for you, but a little bit
problematic that this is where we have.
Speaker 2 (28:05):
To know that's good, that's good. We wanted to be
a best seller.
Speaker 5 (28:09):
I have to say, there was like some hope. I'm like,
what if I call it slow civil war?
Speaker 4 (28:13):
But man, a year and a half from now and
this comes out he thinks of just so mellowed out
that people like, oh, give me a break, and instead
it's like, you know you do NPR and like can
I use the F word fascism? And they're like, oh yes, yes, please,
we better talk about that. And that's that's not good.
Better that the book be remaindered.
Speaker 3 (28:34):
So when we come back from a short break, we're
going to talk about the future. We'll be right back.
Speaker 2 (28:52):
Welcome back to some of my best friends are We're
talking to Jeff Charlotte today about his really powerful and
despairing and to some degree hopeful. Surprisingly enough, study about
a slow civil war. And why do I say hopeful.
It's hopeful because, Jeff, you opened with this surprising tribute
(29:13):
to Harry Belafonte. You talk about a man whose artistry
was his activism and who could never separate those two things,
and someone who just passed away this spring, just a
couple of weeks before the recording of this interview. I
have to say I was moved.
Speaker 1 (29:33):
Ninety six.
Speaker 2 (29:34):
I was moved by what you said about Harry Belafonte,
not just because I think people don't really appreciate the
life of this giant, but also because I knew Harry Belafonte.
I was at the Schomberg Center in some of the
last productive years of his life before he sort of
retreated from public life. I got to know him and
(29:54):
his wife, Pam. I've been in his apartment, and Harry
never mister B as we call him, never stopped moving
chess pieces on a board. He was always thinking about
where people needed to be on the battlefield racial justice
and social justice in this country. And I had just
taken a job at Harvard's twenty sixteen, and he sits
(30:16):
down with me in his apartment and he says, I
need you to take over Sankofa, which is an organization
that he started that Dina Belafonte's dart is leaving now.
It's a cultural organization committed to sort of building the
cultural muscle and infrastructure of social justice warriors and of
the left more generally. And while we're in the middle
(30:37):
of this conversation, I'm like, oh shit, like I just
got this job at Harvard. I can't turn mister B down,
Like what is happening right now? That was one of
the hardest knows I ever had to give to somebody,
to turn mister be down for an opportunity to help
be part of his legacy.
Speaker 3 (30:53):
But oh boy, what a guy, what a.
Speaker 2 (30:56):
Person, what a human being? And tell us, like, why
do you tell us about Harry Belafonte in this book?
What is the message about the future you are trying
to impart from someone who just left us.
Speaker 4 (31:09):
I wanted to start the book, which I was writing
partly because I have a fourteen year old non binary
trans kid who is despairing and I was looking for
some hope, but not cheap grace. And I thought, Okay,
that's what mister B is. And I think about all
these tributes since he died.
Speaker 1 (31:29):
And I've done.
Speaker 5 (31:30):
There's someone who wrote about him.
Speaker 4 (31:31):
You do some interviews and so on, and there's a
certain kind of folks who's sort of really surprised to
hear that he was angry.
Speaker 5 (31:39):
Right, I'm like, oh, yeah, that guy was angry all
his days.
Speaker 2 (31:43):
Yeah, he cursed a lot, he did not miss words.
Speaker 4 (31:47):
Yeah, they want him to be a sweet old man.
And the hope is that anger In that line he
says that I think is really powerful. It says where
your anger comes from doesn't matter as much as what
you do with it.
Speaker 1 (31:57):
Now.
Speaker 4 (31:58):
It matters where it comes from, but not as much
as what you do with it. And that transformation. The
other thing that you said is that the culture is
his art and his activism are one and the same.
So to those of us urging us to see culture
as somehow a separate issue, not for this guy in
ninety six years in the struggle who transformed American.
Speaker 3 (32:17):
Life, Jeff Hope, but not cheap grace is a beautiful line.
Maybe I'm being more of the e or in this
conversation again, but he's dead, he died, and you're you're
you're talking about a kind of activism that is a
thing of the past, literally like he's he's a relic,
and you know, so I worry about that of like
(32:39):
whether this continues. And so then the question is, how
do you see sort of the Belafontes today doing this work,
Like who is carrying on that legacy that we're supposed
to see this work still happening? Where do we see
the resistance? Where do we see the fighting? Where do
we see the protest?
Speaker 5 (32:57):
I mean partly, isn't it what this show is supposed
to be?
Speaker 4 (33:03):
Right here?
Speaker 3 (33:04):
Kid, right here? That that's what we're looking for? A
ding ding ding you are now you are now one
of our best.
Speaker 4 (33:12):
Well actually, like let's think about this like cultural historians
and always astonishes me. I don't know if historians are
doing it, but I'm in an English department and there's
nobody paying attention to podcasting as a text of our times,
which is astonishing to me because it seems really relevant
and there's a lot of challenge, you know, and we
could each little podcast, we could say, oh, is that
really making the difference?
Speaker 5 (33:35):
No?
Speaker 4 (33:35):
And each fundraiser mister b did whatever, Did that really
make the difference?
Speaker 5 (33:39):
No?
Speaker 4 (33:40):
In fact he was defeated. Right, that's part of the
hope not cheap grace. And that's why it ends with
this other line that I always knew the last line
of the book was going to be this line from
this guy, Lee Hayes, a songwriter who was broken by
the Red Scare.
Speaker 1 (33:53):
And he says, from the nineteen fifties.
Speaker 4 (33:55):
Nineteen fifties, and you know, people know HI from me
if I had a hammer like the American Songbook. He's
Pete Seeger's songwriting partner, and he's got this line, for
a while, it was possible not to be scared even
And he's describing seemed very much like one that mister
b endured of being chased through.
Speaker 1 (34:13):
For mister b it's being chased by the clan.
Speaker 5 (34:15):
Through the Mississippi Nightsissippi. For Lee, it's being chased in Arkansas.
Speaker 4 (34:21):
He's in a car with union organizers and gun thugs
are on their tail, and they're singing hymns, and he says,
for while, it was possible not to be scared even then.
Let me put this in the context of an activist
named Suzanne Farr, who I met some years ago, a
very sweet, old white Southern grandmotherly lady. She had built
(34:41):
a lesbian separatist commune in rural Arkansas, I believe it was.
And then these these these his head women start showing up,
running from their violent partners and said, will you take
us in? So they took them in, and then the
partners come with their guns, and Suzanne and her comrades
stand the ground, and I was with Suzanne and a
(35:04):
younger activist, and the younger activist says, oh, that's so
wonderful you built us.
Speaker 5 (35:10):
And Suzanne's sweet old grandmother puts her hand on the
younger activist's hand and says, oh, honey, noah, no fucking
safe spaces.
Speaker 1 (35:19):
But there might be these safe moments.
Speaker 4 (35:21):
Right for a while, it was possible not to be scared,
even like, where is that work happening? It's not happening
so much in a space as in moments. Maybe the
moment is a podcast, maybe the moment is there. But
you're right, I can't point to anyone. I mean, Harry,
I think ninety six years he ran the good race,
Like who is the next mister b. We don't know.
(35:42):
We'll know after they have lived their ninety six years.
I'm like, God, damn that person. We didn't realize all
that they were doing. They are there among us. That
doesn't mean we win, but it means we could.
Speaker 3 (35:55):
Yeah, we need to expand those moments. We need to
expand those moments so that they become our reality.
Speaker 2 (36:02):
Jeff Charlotte, it was amazing to have you on today.
You've shared a lot with us that we all need
to pay attention to. Go folks, go out there. Continue
to keep this book on the bestseller list for the
New York Times. Jeff Charlotte, The Undertow. We're just grateful
for what you've done and what you'll continue to write about.
Speaker 3 (36:21):
And Jeff, we've been on this journey alongside one another
for twenty years. Let's keep it going another twenty all right,
take care, Thank you.
Speaker 2 (36:37):
Oh man, this was a really powerful conversation with Jeff
ben And I don't know, there's something that stuck out
to me at the top of the conversation when Jeff
described this book The Undertow in terms of like a
social movement on the right. I mean, often we hear
the words populism, but this notion that it could be
(37:00):
a social movement, you know, it doesn't hit our ears
the same way that we often think about social movements
as always being about the expansion of democracy, justice, truth,
And because where he's.
Speaker 3 (37:11):
Thinking about social movements on the left, you mean, like, yeah,
and that's right, he's talking about it on the right
of this this rising tide, that it's organized. Yeah, that's right.
Speaker 2 (37:20):
And the extent to which he's right makes perfect sense
when we look at the grassroots mobilization down to local
school boards fighting for misinformation and censorship, and like, when
he talks about fascism as a mass movement, it reminded
me of this essay that Tony Morrison wrote in nineteen
(37:41):
ninety five.
Speaker 3 (37:41):
Get Literary. I love it. I love it Getting Literary.
Speaker 2 (37:44):
Yeah, it's a really powerful quote, and I think it
speaks to this moment so clearly. She said, fascism can
only reproduce the environment that supports its own health, fear, denial,
and an atmosphere in which its victims have lost the
will to fight.
Speaker 3 (37:58):
Okay, break it down.
Speaker 2 (38:00):
Well, I just think that what Jeff is telling us
in this book is that the other side is mobilizing
to fucking fight, like that's what they're doing. And he
talked about casualties already, you know, even including victims of
reproductive injustice and talking about of course the proliferation of
guns on the right and the mass killings.
Speaker 3 (38:21):
And his own child, like his fear for his own
child who is non binary. Yeah, that's right.
Speaker 2 (38:26):
And so I think as we move forward in this moment,
I think part of the challenge on the left is
to meet the challenge of a social movement, which is
to say that a lot more people have to be
mobilized to stand up for the democracy that they claim
to believe in.
Speaker 3 (38:43):
Yeah, yeah, that's interesting. I mean because then it's also
why to give a bigger platform to these issues is
because we have to figure out how to confront them.
We have to organize, we have to have a social
movement that matches in some ways what's actually going on.
We have to know the other side much more, much better.
Speaker 2 (39:02):
That's right, And I mean then thinking about like how
do you do that? I mean, part of it, even
having this conversation about Harry Belafonte, is also about the
power of culture to mobilize people, meaning that the symbols,
the sound, the music, then stories we tell are all
part of the infrastructure that you need to build a
(39:24):
social movement. And the right is clearly mobilized to do that.
The Left seems to be still trying to figure this out.
Speaker 3 (39:31):
Yeah, yeah, I mean, you know, you talk about bringing
a knife or a pen to a gunfight, and you
know that's part of what's so scary about this is
that the proliferation of guns, of bringing automatic weapons just
holding them on the street. I don't think the answer
is to respond with the same. You know, we have
(39:54):
this disease of guns in this country, and certainly, like
what he is witnessing by travel the country is seeing
the sort of cult the religion of guns. Yeah. I mean,
there's a way we have to confront that. And what
you're describing I don't think is like, you know, matching
weapons to weapons, which is not a slow sive a war,
but a fast one. But there is some deeper kind
(40:18):
of organizing and even cultural movement which has to happen.
Speaker 2 (40:22):
Yes, And when Tony Morrison says the victims have lost
the will to fight, listen, the world is a violent place.
There are one hundred and ninety three countries in the world.
Conflict happens. There's a war in Russia and Ukraine. The
Ukrainians didn't sit around and wait to have a debate
when bomb started dropping and when violence occurred, and so
(40:43):
I just think we have to be really honest about
what's happening in this country, and we have to use
all the tools at our disposal, including culture, including the
right to self defense, including the right to stand up
for truth and justice wherever it is necessary, in all
the places that is required because the other side is
not playing games.
Speaker 3 (41:03):
I'm hearing you by any means necessary, And I just
want to say I'm glad if we're not on the
front lines, I'm glad we're on the second lines together.
So I love you, rel love you too.
Speaker 2 (41:22):
Some of My Best Friends Are is a production of
Pushkin Industries. The show is written and hosted by me Khalil,
Jabon Muhammad and my best friend Ben Austin.
Speaker 3 (41:31):
It's produced by Lucy Sullivan. Our associate producer is Rachel Yang.
It's edited by Sarah Nix with help from Keishel Williams.
Our engineer is Amanda ka Wang, and our managing producer
is Constanza Guyardo.
Speaker 2 (41:46):
At Pushkin, Thanks Salitol, Molad, Julia Barton, Heather Faine, Carly Migliori,
John schnarz Retta Cone, and Jacob Weisberg.
Speaker 3 (41:56):
Our theme song Little Lily is by fellow Chicagoan the
brilliant Avery R. Young from his album Tubman. You definitely
want to check out his music at his website, Averyaryung
dot com.
Speaker 2 (42:07):
You can find Pushkin on all all social platforms at
pushkin pods and you can sign up for our newsletter
at pushkin dot fm. To find more Pushkin podcasts, listen
on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you.
Speaker 3 (42:21):
Like to listen. And if you like our show, please
give us a five star rating and a review and listen.
Even if you don't like it, give it a five
star rating and a review, and please tell all of
your best friends about it. Thank you.
Speaker 5 (42:38):
You
Popular Podcasts
Crime Junkie
Does hearing about a true crime case always leave you scouring the internet for the truth behind the story? Dive into your next mystery with Crime Junkie. Every Monday, join your host Ashley Flowers as she unravels all the details of infamous and underreported true crime cases with her best friend Brit Prawat. From cold cases to missing persons and heroes in our community who seek justice, Crime Junkie is your destination for theories and stories you won’t hear anywhere else. Whether you're a seasoned true crime enthusiast or new to the genre, you'll find yourself on the edge of your seat awaiting a new episode every Monday. If you can never get enough true crime... Congratulations, you’ve found your people. Follow to join a community of Crime Junkies! Crime Junkie is presented by audiochuck Media Company.
24/7 News: The Latest
The latest news in 4 minutes updated every hour, every day.
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.