Factually! with Adam Conover - The Right is Wrong About Latin America with Greg Grandin

Episode Date: June 25, 2025

Trump has long expressed racism and vitriol toward immigrants, particularly those from Latin America. As he deploys the National Guard to Los Angeles to quash pro-immigrant protesters, it’s important to remember that Latin America is still part of the Americas. To understand how we arrived at a moment where the right holds such a bitter and hateful view of our neighbors to the south, we need to look back at history, and at how the U.S. developed alongside the nations of Latin America. This week, Adam sits down with Pulitzer Prize winning Yale historian Greg Grandin, author of America, América: A New History of the New World, to discuss how we arrived at this critical moment and what hope we have for the future. Find Greg's book at factuallypod.com/books--SUPPORT THE SHOW ON PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/adamconoverSEE ADAM ON TOUR: https://www.adamconover.net/tourdates/SUBSCRIBE to and RATE Factually! on:» Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/factually-with-adam-conover/id1463460577» Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/0fK8WJw4ffMc2NWydBlDyJAbout Headgum: Headgum is an LA & NY-based podcast network creating premium podcasts with the funniest, most engaging voices in comedy to achieve one goal: Making our audience and ourselves laugh. Listen to our shows at https://www.headgum.com.» SUBSCRIBE to Headgum: https://www.youtube.com/c/HeadGum?sub_confirmation=1» FOLLOW us on Twitter: http://twitter.com/headgum» FOLLOW us on Instagram: https://instagram.com/headgum/» FOLLOW us on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@headgum» Advertise on Factually! via Gumball.fmSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This is a HeadGum Podcast. Hello and welcome to Factually, I'm Adam Conover. Thank you so much for joining me on the show again. As I speak to you, we're in the middle of a violent and racist anti-immigration campaign led by the White House and the president who resides within it. This hatred of immigrants is an excuse for the administration to employ nakedly authoritarian tactics. Just the other weekend, Trump called in thousands of National Guard members to my city of Los

Angeles to violently suppress protests against these immigration raids, which were hurting and injuring innocent people. It is a really frightening time in America. But you know, immigration becoming a flashpoint isn't really a surprise, because for years Trump has talked about immigrants, and particularly those from Latin America, in horrendous terms. He called Mexicans rapists, Venezuelans all gang members, accused Haitians of eating dogs. He's done everything possible to declare that these people, who are our literal neighbors, both geographically and in our own communities, as impossibly foreign, separate, dangerous to us.

It's bizarre. He has a vision of the United States that is somehow magically divorced from the rest of the hemisphere, as though we're a special place that needs to be protected from everyone else who lives here. But, you know, I hate to break it to Trump. America has been part of the Americas, well, forever. It's not just that nearly one in five Americans is of Hispanic or Latino descent, although that's important, the United States' history is permanently intertwined

with that of every other country in this hemisphere and vice versa. You know, the history that we learn about in school tends to focus on how America has interacted with England and Europe, even China, but the US became the country it is today through its constant and continued interaction with the rest of the Americas to our South.

And if we want to understand this profoundly dangerous and troubling moment, we need to look back and examine that history to see how we are interlinked and to look at how our countries have influenced and affected each other reciprocally. Now we have an incredible historian on the show today to talk to us about this, to dive into the history in deep detail. And I want to remind you that if you want to support this show and conversations

just like this that we bring you, that educate you, enlighten you and surprise you, please support us on Patreon. Head to patreon.com slash Adam Conover. Five bucks a month gets you every episode of the show ad free. We also have a community book club. We got a lot of other wonderful community features. We would love to have you. And of course, if you want to come see me on the road,

head to adamconover.net for all my tickets and tour dates. And now let's get to this week's episode. I am so thrilled to have this guest on the show. He is a Pulitzer Prize winning professor of history at Yale and his most recent book is America, America, a New History of the New World. I know you're gonna find this interview fascinating. Please welcome Greg Grandin.

Greg, thank you so much for being on the show. Thanks for having me. We're at a really weird moment with the United States' relation to the rest of the world, but especially to Latin America, to the countries of the world, but especially to Latin America, to the countries to our South, where President Trump is declaring anybody from this region of the world persona non grata,

a disgusting alien who needs to be removed, and also creating these strange relationships with countries like El Salvador, where we're imprisoning people on their soil. You have just written a wonderful book about America's relationship with South America. How do you view this moment in history? Well, I think it's a continuation of a long history.

The book that I just wrote, America, Medica, is a 500 year history that looks at, first the British Empire and then the Spanish empire relations and then independent Latin America and the United States. And, you know, Trump in many ways is a kind of resurrection, an open resurrection of a kind of conqueror vision of the new world, of a kind of a very arrogant rough handling of Latin America, which Latin America stands in as a kind of resource for the United States. I mean, think of how they just turned El Salvador into a kind of devil's island, right?

I mean, a place in which the excess of the United States gets cast off onto. And in many ways, Trump is kind of resurrecting that relationship. On the other hand, he's also building ties with what might be considered a kind of Pan-American MAGA movement. He's got close allies in countries like Peru and Ecuador and El Salvador and Argentina. And on the other hand, Latin America is also pushing back. Latin America in some ways has returned to its historical role as a kind of check on the United States.

Now, if you just think back just a couple of decades to George W. Bush's administration, not that long ago, but long ago. Honestly, I feel like we really memory hold George W. Bush's administration. I know, ago, but long ago. Honestly, I feel like we really memory hold George W. Bush's administration. I know, I know, I know. I lived through it, it was a big time in my life, and I'm like, oh yeah, that guy.

That guy, oh, the global war on terror, oh right, oh, rendition. Yeah. Global rendition, which is not really that different. The difference is, the difference with Trump and the people that came before is that Trump is willing to kind of openly talk about it and celebrate it. Whereas the Bush administration,

I mean, they talked about it and they tried to legalize it, but they were torturing people. They created a global torture and disappearance network. But they tried to hide it. Now, Latin America during that period, when Chavez was president of Venezuela, when Lula was president of Brazil, the Kirchner's were in charge of Argentina, and Vomirales was. There was a very outsized left in Latin America that stood up to the Bush administration's

attempt to kind of conscript them into the global war on terror. And they were quite effective. Every continent in the world participated in Bush's global rendition program. Even Sweden allowed the CIA flights to take off from there in which they went off and carried captives to third world countries where it'd be tortured, except Latin America. Latin America absolutely refused to participate because they had it, they had experience with that in the cold war. So now jump forward and, you know, and, and Latin America really under Bush put out a very forceful opposition to the, the, just the very principles of the, of

the war on terror, jump forward 20 years to Trump, and there's still a left in power in some countries, but it's much weaker. And it doesn't, and they're still trying to oppose here and there when they can. There's Claudia Scheinbaum in Mexico, there's Gustavo Petro in Colombia, there's Lula in Brazil,

but they're not quite as dominant as they were 20 years ago. And the reason why they aren't have the reason why they're not as strong rhetorically strong is because over the last 20 years, a kind of kind of Trumpism has infected Latin American politics, the kind of culture wars that Trump represents. And so Trump is coming to power. Now Trump himself winds up often sabotaging the potential of building a Pan-American Trumpism, right? So in his orders of, in his recent declaration of who can enter the country, he banned Venezuelans and Cubans.

Right. Which, you know, this is such a reversal from a traditional kind of cold war strategy of courting anti-communists in Latin America, particularly Cubans. Right. And so Trump is, Trump being Trump, he seems to undercut his own ability of being,

of like, of stabilizing what could be a Pan-American Trumpism or MAGA internationalism. But we do see its most brutal expression where we started with El Salvador, the idea that we're gonna use that country as a kind of devil's island. Yeah.

Why has Trumpism taken over Latin America? I mean, is it a result of Trump or is it other forces that are sort of, you know, is it the same forces that gave us Trump are bringing that same culture we're there? Well, I would say that the traditional right couldn't respond effectively to the post-Cold War revival of the Latin American left.

This is one of the things that I talk about in the book is the persistence of the social democratic ideal in Latin America. That despite the violence of the Cold War, despite the horrors and terrors and disappearances and massacres and wars and all the coups that Washington sponsored, as soon as voters were allowed to vote their preference again, right?

As soon as the dictatorships gave way to democracy, when the Berlin Wall fell, they started voting in leftists. And these were leftists that were very creative, they were very imaginative, they represented all different traditions of the Latin American left. They were liberation theologians, they were feminists, they were trade unionists, they were populists, they were peronists, and that was the leftists that came around the

time of the Bush administration. And traditional conservatives couldn't win elections against them. You know, traditional conservatives meaning law and order conservatives, patrician conservatives, patria familia conservatives,ia conservatives, conservatives that were businessman conservatives. So in a lot of ways in reaction to a dominant left, they started making ties with groups in the United States like the Atlas Foundation Libertarians or the NRA. I mean, one marker of this turn is in 2004, Brazil was about to have a referendum

banning guns and that was overwhelmingly popular. At 80% they were going to have a poll and we were going to out, you know, nationwide control because, and, um, the NRA spent millions of dollars influencing that poll. Really? Yeah. The American NRA obviously millions of dollars influencing that poll. Really? The American NRA, obviously. Yeah, yeah, the NRA has a foreign policy.

Wow. And so, and the poll, the vote lost. Everybody thought it was gonna win, and it lost. And now, and now in the Bolsonaro clan, you know, the kind of Brazil's version of Trump, very Trumpy in all its aspects and its conspiracy theories and its over the top culture war politics. Bolsonaro talks about the Second Amendment

as if the Second Amendment is in the Brazilian Constitution. He does, he does. He talks about the sacred right and the sacred command. Second Amendment in the Brazilian Constitution has nothing to do with guns. It has to do with, I don't. I don't know if you know what it is. I don't, can't remember what it is.

Maybe that's their one about soldiers not being caught in your house. He doesn't say anything about guns, but that's the way, that's the way. And religious groups, you know, a lot of those, you know, kind of Reconstructionist and Pentecostal and very conservative religious groups, Christian Zionists have made ties with Latin American Protestants to weaken the Catholic Church. The Catholic Church itself is, of course, split between conservatives and liberals, and Francis represented the more progressive wing

of the Catholic Church. So there's lots of ways in which ties and networks were being built over the last 20 years to prevent, to as a way of creating a new right, a new cultural right. So a lot of the culture, see Latin America, Latin America didn't have a culture war, right? The politics of left versus right was mostly about economics and class.

And now it has a culture war. Now they hate Judith Butler, you know, they don't like Judith Butler just like, now they talk about Judith Butler, they talk about grooming, they talk about that. Yeah, they talk about anchor babies. You know, I mean, Latin America has birthright citizenship, just like the United States.

Trump is completely wrong when he says that we're the only country in the world. It's a new world thing. Every country in Latin America has birthright citizenship. And for the most part, it's holding, but there is a rising movement against it. And now you hear the word anchor babies, you hear the word, you know,

but translated into Spanish and Portuguese. Yeah. And so you do see this kind of magnification of Latin American politics. That said, it's important to stress that the left in Latin America is still strong. Like the majority of citizens, the majority of people in Latin America out of 460 million people, 400 million of them live under countries governed by people who identify as left or social democrats.

And so the social democratic tradition is very strong and one of the arguments of the book is the importance of Latin America in defeating fascism during World War II, which the book works up to, but then also just the vision of why that Latin Americans thought they were fighting not just against fascism, but they were fighting for social democracy, a vision of democracy that entailed social rights. And one of the main tensions of the book is a United States culture, political culture, that fetishizes individual rights, negative rights, you know, a constitution that only mandates a virtuous state as standing down, as allowing the greatest amount of liberty for individual room to believe,

to act, to assemble, to own guns, if that's your interpretation. Whereas in Latin America, they have a legal tradition that incorporates negative rights or political rights or individual rights, but deeply ingrained, and it goes back to the conquest is what the argument is, is the idea of social rights or economic rights that a virtuous state also stands up and captures surplus value and redistributes it in the form of social rights, in the form of education, in the form of healthcare, right? And in the form of living a dignified,

you know, old age and the right to form unions. So every Latin American constitution, and this is so deeply ingrained, even during the, even during the worst of the Cold War violence, constitutions in Latin America continued to define the state as obligated to provide education and provide healthcare, provided dignified retirement. And that tension between social rights, which I argue are actually invented in Latin America, and individual rights, which the United States is the last industrialized country to cling to individual rights, right? There's no fetish of individual rights in France or in Germany. I mean, they ride a war with Great Britain, they believe in social rights. What is it about the United States that has led it to be so committed? And that commitment to individual rights is one of the And that commitment to individual rights is one of the things that bind the right together,

the different constituencies of the right in different ways. And yeah, the argument of the book is the importance of confronting extremism with the robust platform of social democracy. You say that the belief in social democracy goes back to the conquest in Latin America. I'd love to go back to that time

and just talk about what makes the social history of Latin America so different from the social history of the United States. I feel like it must be rooted in that time of European conquest and the ways it went differently in the United States, and I'm gonna say Canada and Latin America, right? Yeah, you know, I mean, they didn't call it

social democracy at the time, or social rights, obviously, but the book, you know, the Spanish colonial project, the conquest happens 100 years before the Puritans arrived in North Atlantic, and it's driven by an expanding Spanish state that understands itself as the agent of world Catholicism, and Catholicism understands itself as a universal religion, as a religion that bears all the world's history and all the world's wisdom. And then all of a sudden they discover that there's millions of people living in a part of the world

that they didn't even know about. There was no denial that the Americas were populated. It was just a question of what was the nature of the people. And so the book goes into these debates among Catholic theologians and priests and jurists and a small minority of them that basically create the terms, the moral revulsion and backlash towards the violence of the conquest and the extreme suffering of the conquest and the way the conquistadors set themselves on native Americans with extreme ferocity and bloodlust created a kind of moral revolution within Catholicism

equal to the Reformation, which takes place outside of Catholicism. That's a break. But within Catholicism, there is this people like Francisco Vitoria, Dominican, and Bartolomé de las Casas, who's on the front lines and he's watching the violence. And out of this debate comes some political terms and ideas that challenge the very legitimacy of the conquest. The idea that all humanity is one, that we all share a single lineage, that the people of the conquest. The idea that all humanity is one, that we all share a single lineage, that the people of the Americas are not animals or subhuman, that they narrow the terms of war, of what is a just war, to very small margin. And they argue against slavery in all of its forms. Now, this doesn't actually, obviously ameliorate the conquest. The conquest goes on. But it does

create this debate or this new, this embryo of political social democratic modernity within the Catholic Church. And the Spanish Empire itself, they, even though it understands itself as universal, it recognizes the difference of Native Americans and it organizes itself around difference. And Native Americans and African American slaves become the center of the Spanish American imperial project, right? They're extracting the wealth that creates the first universal currency. They're extracting the silver from Potosi in Bolivia and that creates the world's first universal currency and that begins to bind the world together. But Native Americans and African Americans are also the center of the

moral vision of what the empire is. And so there's no, in other words, there's no denial or grappling with the nature. Whereas if we jump ahead to North America, right? Epidemics had already wiped out most of the North Atlantic indigenous population around Plymouth, around Cape Cod, around Massachusetts. So the Mayflower arrives and they're like, look, look, where is everybody? They left us these houses. Yeah, the myth of an empty continent.

The myth of an empty continent, the myth of evasion. And this is explicit. There's one document that I discuss in the book. The Virginia Company in 1608, they have a meeting, they call a meeting and they say, should we issue some document to explain what we want to do in America, how to justify it. They have a multi-day debate and all they're doing is talking about Spain and the Spanish

debates. And they're like, look, the Spanish Dominicans have been arguing this for a century and they can't justify conquest, so maybe it's better we don't say anything. So evasion is built in, evasion and denial is built in to baked into the British, the Anglo settlement project right from the beginning. And then they arrive in an area that they imagine as being empty. And I don't want to downplay the role that Native Americans played both as early slaves, but then also as in the fur trade. But Native Americans were pushed to the margins, right? They were like shadow players in the wings

of Puritan imagination. Intense solipsism of Puritan theology in which they're arguing a predestination and is this a sign of God's displeasure? Am I saved? Am I not saved? Indians had nothing to do with that, except they were, you know, any more than a wolf attacked it.

But in Spanish America, Native Americans were central to the whole moral project. So two things happened with this. And one, by the time you get to the independence movements in the United States, the people who led the independence movements have no problem with the Anglo settlement and conquest. They think that they did nothing wrong, which was a discovered country. John Adams famously said, you know, America was settled, not discovered, you know, everything was fine. Spanish American independence leaders understood their break from Spain as an atonement for the conquest. Wow.

As they, and this is where the sociality comes in, and this is where the social rights comes in, and this is where the idea that there's no such thing as an individual without society. The critique of those early Dominicans were that it was not Native Americans who were dehumanized. It was the Spanish conquerors who had dehumanized themselves by breaking free of all moral authority and landing on Native Americans as if they were tigers, as if they were wolves, as if they were animals, right? Stripped of society, human beings are nothing but animal. So this notion that there's no such thing as an individual without society, without kind of a larger transcendent value was present very much both in the early critique of the conquest, but then also during the independence movements.

So all of those in Latin America, all of the early independence constitutions said, as we talked about earlier, yes, we have individual rights and right to print and a right to believe and a right to this and a right to that, but there is no individuality without society. And individualism is conditioned on by what a good society is. And that is what I argue is the beginning of social rights. Right? Where is, so if you look at the first Latin America, Spanish American constitution in Venezuela in 1812,

the word social appears nine times, the word society appears 13 times. You look at the US constitution, neither of those words appear at all, right? There's no sense at all that the general good entails anything other than the accumulated sum of individual interests, whereas Spanish Americans believed in some kind of transcendent value that was higher than the individual right. This episode is brought to you by Alma.

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Prices and participation may vary. Valid for item of equal or lesser value. I think what you're really showing here is why it's part of why the the United States has honestly hated Latin America on some level for so long. I mean, part of it. And tell me if you think this is correct. Like part of it has always seemed to me that it's about what happened to that indigenous population in the United States. And I think to a lesser extent Canada, it was a sort of a disappearing or rendering invisible. There's nobody here, we're just taking over. Oh, there's some people, yeah, we'll just,

we'll push them to some reservations. Native Americans weren't made citizens until 1924. In Latin America, independence constitutions immediately said there's nothing but citizens. Mexico in 1814, anybody born in Mexico is a Mexican. It was the first instance of what we call birthright citizenship. It was in the first Mexican Constitution in 1814.

And now don't get me wrong, racism continued and a racial hierarchy organized around racial identity and continued, it was easier to defeat the Spanish troops than it was to dismantle the social system they left in place. But the idea at least that everybody within a given nation was a member of that nation was very distinct than what happened in the United States.

So much so that James Madison in 1926 says, you know, we have the, and he uses the phrase, red man at the border and black man in a bosom. He said, no problem presents itself to the United States more than this, like what to do with these two groups of people. Maybe we should look at Latin America, particularly Peru and Mexico,

because they seem to have constituted nations that included Native Americans and free people of color. And maybe we should look at them. But of course, there was another current within the United States, John Calhoun, who said, we have nothing to learn from, we have nothing to learn from Spanish America. Their fatal error was to raise up the black man to people of color as equals to the whites. And that's why they can't establish. And I think when you look at in the political culture of the United States, why are all the nations

to our South dangerous, dirty, filthy, full of brown people we don't like, it's because they made their indigenous populations like true citizens and created a blended society, whereas the United States maintained the fiction of a white society. Just like what happened to those indigenous populations is like really foundational to both nations

and it made, or sorry, both groups of nations. So it made those nations of the South like a different type of society. And then add on top of that, that sort of commitment to social democracy is a completely different ideology than is present in the United States. Because the individual rights,

fetishism of the United States is predicated on the belief that the unleashing of individual ambition and letting people pursue their interests is what will create a virtuous society. And the way you do that is that you restrain the state as much as possible. Now people like Simon Bolivar and other independence leaders, they like the United States. They would have liked to have it, but they looked at Spanish America and they looked at three centuries of an empire

that organized itself on difference and in which a small group of landed people owned all of the wealth and all of the land. And they realized that they understood that they weren't gonna to create a virtuous society by unleashing individual ambition and restraining the state. They needed an activist state in order to equalize things and create citizens. And then eventually this transforms into, social rights and social democracy. The Mexican Revolution in

1910, their constitution in 1910, 1917 was the world's first constitution that included social rights before Weimar, before India, before France. It was, it would, they guaranteed the right to education, the right to healthcare, the right to join a union. And they also had a clause in there of the right to the state to confiscate and redistribute property, which was a really big deal. But that was the world's first social democratic constitution. And is that part of the root of, you know,

the United States seeing these governments as illegitimate, as interfering with them, as sort of looking at Latin America as this unruly place that we have to manage is essentially they're communists in the American imagination. And it's also the way, it's also, I think, the way social rights become racialized and individual rights, right? Social rights become understood as black.

And that's why Barack Obama, the most cautious, you know, cautious Democrat you can imagine, who offered only the mildest policy reform, he might as well have been either from Zimbabwe or Finland, right? And like as if he was putting forth a robust version of social rights, but of course he wasn't.

But they treated him either as a European social Democrat or some Zimbabwean, as some guy about to seize land and distribute it to his father. But part of that belief is racialized, partially because he's a black man. I think that's ultimately, the hatred of him was rooted in this notion that even though he didn't put forward social rights, he believed in public policy,

he believed kind of in reform, but that, you know, and yeah, and in Latin America, social rights are racialized because, you know, it was about trying to equalize a deeply racialized society and break up concentrated wealth. And I think that's to some degree, that's where the racialization, you know, there's a funny story where Puerto Rico is,

you know, obviously a colony of the United States. And it has been since 1898, since the war of 1898. And in 1954, they decide that, you know, there's enough of a political consensus know, there's enough of a political consensus that they're going to draft a Commonwealth constitution, like any state constitution. And it's mostly like the US Constitution, except that there's a couple of clauses in it that guarantees education and health care. They send the Constitution to the US Senate, and this is in 1954, the US Senate freaked out. They said, I don't know what to do.

They thought, this was Latin America's back door through Puerto Rico, right? And they basically struck those two clauses and sent the Constitution back and said, here, you could approve this one. Why did they have oversight over that? Well, it's Puerto Rico, it's a colony. It's not a state, right?

A state would be able to determine its own. I guess, but Puerto Rico's an informal colony. You know, because the Congress had jurisdiction over Puerto Rico, and they had ultimately the last say over what constitution they would, but that gives you an example of how sharp the divide is, right, between this, between between a political culture that that insists that democracy is defined by both political rights and social rights.

And in fact, you need social rights if you want to make political rights real. Yes, that was the other thing is, is the history of voting in Latin America, the movement for voting. A lot of reformers in the 19th century weren't that big on suffrage because they thought that suffrage would just give landowners more power. That any given landowner would now be able to cast the hundred votes of their sharecroppers. So they pushed for social rights in order to make political rights a reality.

And so they understood that democracy entailed not just social rights and political rights, but that political rights depended on an expansion of social rights. In the United States, democracy is largely understood in individual, as political rights, as individual rights, the right to vote, the right to assemble and whatnot. And not to get too far afield, but there was an ideological project to try to align Latin

America with the United States. Neoliberalism, the Washington Consensus, after the Cold War, the United States, neoliberalism wasn't just an economic program of austerity and balanced budgets and removing protection and open markets. It was also trying to get Latin America to accept the definition of democracy that was strictly individual rights. And that didn't work. Most Latin Americans still think democracy entails some form of healthcare. And even conservatives, well, not the new breed of-

Not Malayan them. Yeah, not the MAGA conservatives, but yeah. So how did this, sort of these fundamental differences between the United States and Latin America, how does it affect American foreign policy towards Latin America for, you know, I don't know, tell me about the Monroe Doctrine and how that's changed over time.

I know there's so much history to cover in like an hour podcast, but like, there's such an interesting fundamental difference in political philosophy that you've outlined. I'm just curious, how's this affect? Well, it continues, that difference continues. So, you know, Latin America, so the United States comes into being in 1776

on the east coast of a continent that it's found as, imagine as empty or empty enough. I mean, it's not empty, obviously, there's Spain, there'll eventually be Mexico, there's the Creeks, there's the Cherokees, there's Native Americans across the whole thing, but they don't imagine it as a continent that's, in which there exists

true European sovereignty or white man sovereignty anywhere, west of the Mississippi. And they imagine that it will eventually be become part of the new nation. And it does, they're right. And in that process, the United States rehabilitates the doctrine of conquest, legitimates it.

The Supreme Court says the doctrine of conquest is valid when they invade Mexico, they invoke the doctrine of conquest legitimates it. The Supreme Court says the doctrine of conquest is valid when they invade Mexico, they invoke the doctrine of conquest when they're fighting various indigenous groups, they're affirming the doctrine of conquest. The US teaches the doctrine of conquest as a legitimate piece of international law well into the 1920s in Latin America. And that doctrine is just what? If you invade a place, you're allowed to.

Yeah, yeah, you're allowed to invade it and you're allowed to keep what you got. Okay, a pretty simple doctrine. It's an old Roman law doctrine. There was the law of war. For whatever reason that you, for whatever reason you're waging war, if you take that land, it's yours.

Latin America comes into being a generation later, mostly in the wars of independence started in 1810, but by the 1820s, Latin America is mostly independent except for Cuba and Puerto Rico. And they realized that they need a new international law in order to justify themselves because each nation both legitimated and threatened the other. They legitimated the other in the sense that there were seven republics at first, and any given republic,

the fact that they broke from Spain and established their sovereignty and declared themselves a republic, meant that another nation could do the same thing. So it's the legitimate, but under the old rules of law, what was going to stop Argentina doing what the United States doing and say, you know, we want the Pacific too. What's going to stop us? We'll just go take Chile or Chile with one, the Atlantic. So they came up with, one, they renounced the doctrine of conquest. They said that it is no longer a legitimate doctrine

in the international law, it can't be. They insisted on the absolute sovereignty on individual nations and the legitimacy of borders that were inherited from the colonial state. And then they looked at the United States, and they looked at what the United States was doing and moving across the Western, the Northern continent like a whirly gig, you know, taking land,

waging war in Mexico. And all of that critique that had previously been applied to Spain, they now apply to the United States. They had, you know, the independence leaders and the second generation that came after them had at their ready a whole moral and intellectual apparatus in which to understand what the United States is doing. So this tension between the United States, which is insisting on the legitimacy of conquest and Latin America, which is saying that we have to abolish conquest. In other words,

Latin America comes into being on a continent that's already filled up, that there's no more space left. They come into being already what is effectively a League of Nations or a United Nation. And all of the legal principles and philosophies that they developed to learn how to live with each other. Rejection of aggressive war rejection of the doctrine of conquest the recognition of national sovereignty. The more importantly the project presumption that that that international politics should be organized. that international politics should be organized on the assumption of cooperation and shared interest rather than competition and dominance. All of those principles are what go into the United Nations.

It's all, first the League of Nations, but then that's not very effective, but the United Nations. All of the principles that are present in the 1820 and eighteen thirty eighteen forties in latin america get worked out in latin america both among themselves and keeping an eye on the united states as the united states is taking mexico and taking spain and taking florida and taking cuba and taking pico. you go, all of those principles of what becomes the rules-based order or liberal internationalism or whatever you want to call it that gets put into place at the United Nations come from Latin America. This Latin America comes into being already a league of nations. Europe was a collection of monarchies

and empires and expanding. It was warring and killing each other. Warring, they were sending their gunboats to India, to Portugal, they were setting up the world, the international slave system. The United States comes into being a set of bounded nations with no presumption of imperial ambitions. It is modernity, it's the modern nation system.

And I apologize for my ignorance. Have there been wars between Latin American countries? Yeah, this is the difference between the ideal and the real. And you know, and, but there were devastating wars between Chile and Bolivia, between Paraguay and Brazil in the 19th century. But all of those wars, their settlement was negotiated by affirming the principles of non-aggression and national sovereignty. you know, they so and and except for one devastating war early in the 20th century where

Dutch Royal Shell backed Paraguay and and standard back Bolivia because they thought there was oil in the Chaco which is this hellish crash land and there's no oil there was no oil. Oh my god. But but and they they used all kind of remnants from World War I, all the munitions and planes that were used in World War I in Europe were sold to Paraguay and Bolivia. And they had this horrible war called the Chaco War. Except for that war, Latin America is the most peaceful continent in the world.

All of the bloodletting was internal, directed at social movements, directed at the left, directed at, you know, directed at guerrilla movements or union movements. And even today, even today, Latin America has more environmental activists die in Latin, are killed in Latin America than any other place in the world. Wow. But they don't stop. They keep organized. They stand unbowed. And this is what's remarkable about Latin America, right? Like they don't, you know, and it's still, there's still no

interstate war in Latin America. There's no nuclear arms race. Brazil's vice president famously said, Brazil has no enemies. Can you imagine that in the world that we live in today? Yeah. That, you know, that the Vice President of Brazil, Brazil has no enemies. JD Vance has a lot of enemies. Yeah, but when you think about that, that's true. Brazil has no enemies.

Colombia has no enemies. Like none of these countries have enemies. They've learned how to create a, you know, to the degree that, but it's not not violent. The violent is internal, right? And the inability to create political stability and the violence directed at the left and social organizing.

["Darkest Night"] How has the United States viewed Latin America? I mean, I especially think about the piece that I know best is the United States has meddled in the governments and the democracies of these countries for years. Why has the United States taken that license? Oh yeah, we can do whatever we want down there. Yeah, between 1898 and 1992,

the United States conducted 41 successful regime changes. Wow. There's, I'm not, there's a couple of ones that, There's less than 41 countries, so it means every country more than once, they have done a regime change.

There was the famous coup in Guatemala in 1954 that the CIA carried out, but then it did another one in 1963 when the left came back. You know, before the Cold War, it largely intervened because of economic interests, you know, to collect debt or to open up a country for certain corporations. The United Fruit Company was heavy-handed in Central America and the Caribbean. You know, it took Panama. Panama was a province of Colombia. The United States, you know, separated it from Colombia and supported that country's

freedom movement, you know, and then dug a canal through it. And then during the Cold War, most of the interventions were done under the ages of anti-communism, but also to just ensure stability for the most part, make sure no country broke away from the United States' sphere of influence. It strikes me that when Trump says, oh, we're gonna take back the Panama Canal and the people of Panama say no fucking way. But when he said that, my first reaction was like, this is a very new, strange thing

for an American president to say, to like, we're gonna reclaim part of another country. But when you tell me that history, that the United States basically is responsible for the foundation of the country in the first place, it's like Trump knows something about the United States' historic relationship to these countries

that just more recent presidents have either forgotten or not really exploited. It's almost like Trump is this kind of creature assembled from different periods and histories of the past and he somehow embodies it. Theodore Roosevelt was president when the United States seized or helped Panama achieve its independence from Colombia and they built the canal, started building canal. When Woodrow Wilson was president, and there's a lot in the book on Woodrow Wilson,

because he was very instrumental, he understood that Pan-Americanism would be a model for his League of Nations, but he tried to establish better relations with Latin America. He apologized to Columbia, and he offered to pay them $25 million in compensation. The Roosevelt went crazy. The Roosevelt went on a tour of America, United States, writing one op-ed after another saying, if we have anything to apologize for,

we should just give Panama back. Wow. Panama back. And then, and you know, and he said, you know, we, you know, that we have nothing to apologize for, we have nothing to regret. And, and so Wilson was probably the first US president to apologize for a US action in Latin America, and then subsequently, Bill Clinton apologized for Guatemala in 54, Colin Powell will kind of apologize for Chile in 73. So. I mean, I'm curious about what would bring Bill Clinton to apologize for something that happened in the 50s,

like why bother at all? Because the Civil War that broke out after the CIA's overthrow in 54 finally ended in 96. Jesus Christ. And I'm not somebody who carries a lot of water for the Clinton administration, but they were very good at declassifying a lot of documents to help the Truth Commission in Guatemala.

And so I think as part of that process, Clinton apologized. Declassified a bunch of documents and read them and were like, oh shit, this was really bad. Yeah. Okay, I do. Well that's the thing about Latin America is even the most audant, unapologetic defender

of the projection of US power in the world, acknowledges that the United States may be acted unhelpfully in Latin America. It's almost like the United States is geopolitical confessional. It's like, forgive me father, for I have overthrown. It's the one spot where we can take

a little responsibility. We take responsibility. Yes, yes, of course. But of course it's always turned around in some weird way. So Wilson, Wilson educates himself on the United States' policy in Latin America. This is, you know, in 1912. This is before a lot of the worst stuff happened. But you know, Texas and Cuba and Puerto Rico and Columbia and Panama.

And he comes and he uses that. He says, you know, Latin America has taught us contrition. Latin America in their criticisms of us have humbled us. And that humility now makes us capable And that humility now makes us capable and to assume the role of world leader, because we will now act not in our interests, but our ideals, because we've been humbled by Latin America. We've been chastised, we've been taught. And so it's an interesting little kind of ideological jujitsu that he does there.

And I think he believed it. He's like, you know, he's like, Latin America has every right to criticize us. We've been arrogant. We've been, we've been, we've been, we've been, we've been aggressive. We've been interventionist, but we've been, but, but they've, they've, but their criticisms have chastened us and we are now a humble nation and we are now ready to assume our role as world leader. I'm familiar with that mode when you fucked up

and you get called out and then you're like, I have learned, I have learned my lesson, I have, yes, and I am better for it and thank you so much. But how long did that last? How long did that pose last for the United States? It didn't last, yeah. You know, Wilson, you know, he basically caved around the League of Nations.

You know, his first vision of the League of Nations was actually quite progressive. And it was a vision of decolonization and national sovereignty. But there was no way that Great Britain and France or nationalists, nationalists in the United States were, you know, insisted that Wilson affirm the Monroe Doctrine within the League of Nations in its most interventionist form. And so Wilson kind of caved.

So what emerged from the League of Nations, the shape of the League of Nations, the final shape of it was one that affirmed European hegemony and domination. And so the Monroe Doctrine is the idea that the United States is just able to do whatever the fuck it wants in Latin America, right? Pretty much, no, but it's a little complicated. It's kind of like the same thing. So the Monroe Doctrine, James Monroe,

it has to issue a doctrine to this Latin America's getting its independence. It's clear that they're going to win. It's clear that Spain is going to lose. So James Monroe issues it. I mean, it's not a doctrine. He issues, he has five paragraphs in a long State of the Union address that's not even contiguous paragraphs. And one of them, Latin Americans, Spanish Americans like, one of the paragraphs says the United States is not gonna allow, there is no part of the Americas

that is eligible for reconquest. So Spanish Americans see this as analogous to their rejection of the doctrine of conquest. They like that. They see it as- You're saying Europeans stay the hell out. Hands off. They see it as an affirmation of their rejection

of the doctrine of conquest, an anti-colonial principle. They like that. There's a couple of paragraphs down where the United States says we're gonna see any interference in any part of the new world as affecting us, and we will have the right to intervene. Now, that part of the Monroe Doctrine

stays quiet for a while, but the United States doesn't have a lot of power. It's not until the 1840s and 1850s that it gets revived. The Monroe Doctrine becomes a kind of universal warrant for the United States to act at will wherever it sees it's, and then it becomes much more of a doctrine of mandatory power or informal empire. And of course, that's when it becomes criticized by Latin America, that's when it becomes. And then different presidents add corollaries.

Theodore Roosevelt added a famous corollary that the United States is the policeman of the Western hemisphere. So that's when the Monroe Doctrine becomes what we think of it as now. As it is now. It's just a fascinating idea that there's something called the Monroe Doctrine

that future presidents might say, yes, we must uphold the Monroe Doctrine. When this is just an idea that James Monroe said once, it's not a treaty, it's not a amendment to the Constitution, it's not a law, it's just an idea of this is our, it's akin to manifest destiny. It's just, hey, here's what we think, and then everyone else just has to agree

or disagree with this, because it's something a president said once and some other presidents agree to. It's sort of a bizarre way to make policy. It's, well, other countries have laws, or I don't know, and we have doctrines. And it wasn't even called a doctrine at first. It wasn't even called a doctrine until the British

started meddling in Central America in the 1850s. And the Europeans kind of made fun of the pretentiousness of it when it did become a doctrine. But Wilson, well, to go back to Wilson, Wilson, when he was trying to push forward a more progressive vision of the League of Nations, he tried to revive that element of the Monroe Doctrine that was anti-colonial.

And it provoked a backlash in the United States among nationalists. We want the Monroe Doctrine pure as it was. There is a kind of fetish of the Monroe Doctrine akin to the fetish of the Constitution, that there's an original intent. And that original intent grants the United States mandatory powers within the Americans. The original intent of James Monroe.

Yeah, the original intent of James Monroe. Now, you know, other Latin, during the League of Nations, Japan was happy. Japan said, yeah, put the Monroe Doctrine in there because we want our own Monroe Doctrine for Asia. And then, you know, Hitler's theorists, Carl Schmitt said, you know, all the, all Germany is doing and sent in the Middle Europe is exercising its own version of the Monroe Doctrine. Great Britain said what it did in Africa was basically a version of the Monroe Doctrine. So for other European empires,

it became a kind of symbol of informal empire, mandatory power. Yeah, I mean, it doesn't seem like there's many high-minded ideals here. It's just, hey, we are powerful, and we have the ability to protect our interests by meddling in other countries' affairs, and so we shall. Like, what is even the doctrine

other than we do what the fuck we want? I don't get it. Well, except for that one little bit where that could be read as anti-colonial. Right. Wilson even said, Wilson has this great line, for that one little bit where that could be read as anti-colonial. Wilson even said, Wilson has this great line, as he comes back from Paris and he's trying to sell the League of Nations and he says, I must admit every time I read the Monroe Doctrine

I have trouble understanding what it means. I have trouble pinning down what it actually is. And the thing when nobody, within that State of the Union address, Madison, aside from those five paragraphs that people kind of bunch together and say is the Monroe Doctrine, the whole State of the Union address is just this,

just this ode to expansion and conquest and Westwood expansion. So if you re, if you, if you situate the Monroe Doctrine in relationship to that, it's part of that large argument that the United States is sovereignty is based on a revival of the doctrine of conquest, whereas Latin America's sovereignty was based

on a rejection of the doctrine of conquest. And so how do the Latin American nations view the United States as, because on the one hand, okay, maybe they're protecting us from colonialism. On the other hand, it's this massive powerful country that's constantly getting involved in ways it maybe shouldn't. And that is seemingly a different sort of nation.

It's a white nation founded on individual liberty rather than what you described. Well, you know, in the 19th century, there was a William Walker, a Tennessee mercenary, seizes Nicaragua, declares himself president, and reestablishes slavery after slavery. Nicaragua had abolished slavery 20 years earlier, and he reestablishes slavery.

That's the beginning of Latin America. That's the beginning of Latin America. That's the beginning of Latin American nationalism, nationalists distinguishing themselves as Latin versus Saxon America. Latin America is spiritual, it's diaphanous, it's humanist, Saxon America is conquering, it's utilitarian, it's materialist. And so this tension between,

there are two Americas emerge in the 1850s and it goes on and it's deeply rooted. I mean, Los Tigres del Norte, a Norteño band that's popular among undocumented migrants in Northern Mexico. They have a great song called, and it was released on September 11, 2001, coincidentally enough, Somos Mas Americanos.

We are more American. So there's a contest over the very idea of America. That said, Roosevelt, FDR, in 1933, in the midst of the depression, in the midst of this retraction of US power, capitulates to the United States and renounces the doctrine of conquest, renounces the right of intervention, and agrees to recognize the absolute sovereignty of all nations no matter what their size, internal and external, and domestic and foreign affairs. This creates enormous goodwill. This goes back to your question about how do they see us. And it's enormously consequential, right? From 1933 up until the Cold War, there is a convergence.

There is a kind of continental New Deal, right? The left wing of FDR's brain trust see Latin America as a place to expand and create a kind of new way of thinking about foreign policy. We all know the good neighbor policy as a phrase that FDR adopts to talk about Latin America and talk about this new dispensation of treating Latin America with respect. But the good neighbor leagues were also his get out the vote mechanism for his 1936 election in which he was threatened.

I mean, the right was on the rise. The United States was close to, you know, the hard men and the businesses and the paramilitary security forces and the Liberty Leagues. So Roosevelt set up the Good Neighbor Leagues as an alternative to the white supremacy of the Liberty Leagues, the Saxon supremacy. And the Good Neighbor Leagues became the venue

in which Roosevelt was able to express this new kind of ethos. Domestically, it meant an acceptance of pluralism, your Americanism and mine, Roosevelt said. But locally, it was the Good Neighbor Leagues who organized blacks in Chicago in the South, ethnics in the cities, Native Americans on reservation in the Southwest, Chicanos. And it signaled a new kind of cultural pluralism, you know, an alternative to the Saxon supremacy that the Liberty Leagues were pushing.

And Roosevelt loved the phrase good neighbor so much he wanted to patent it. So you had the good neighbor policy, but you also had the good neighbor leagues. And it comes together in this kind of continent, the New Deal. Roosevelt wins that 1936 election with 27 million votes, more votes than any human being ever won ever. And he ran, and he won on

basically a social democratic or social liberal policy. And the first thing that he does when he wins that landslide, I mean, an unbelievable mandate, the very first thing he does, he goes to Buenos Aires. And he starts to build a continental alliance that begins to prepare for World War II. And it's that period from 1933 when the United States does reject the doctrine of conquest and gives up the right intervention up until about 1948, the beginning of the Cold War. There's this enormous goodwill in which Latin America lines up behind that. And Washington, and it tilts towards the left

in Latin America, it allows Codiners in Mexico to expropriate standard oil fields, and it doesn't punish them. And it basically, what them. It allows, you know, and it basically, it basically, what they're worried about, what the geo strategists in Washington are worried about is that Latin America had the potential to become a hemispheric Spanish civil war.

Because Latin America more or less had all the sociological variables as Spain did. Conservative Catholicism, it had, you know, a patrician culture, you know, and they were afraid that Franco, and they were rightly so, would win the war and ally with Hitler and Italy. They were afraid if that happened on an Aladdin-American scale, that, you know that they would lose the Western hemisphere, that the United States would be isolated, that they would be, you know, and so the New Deal tilted to the left in Latin America and supported the left against the right. And it was that period that the United States and

that the United States and Latin America had the closest convergence. Everybody, you know, the Vargas in Brazil and Caudenese and other, you know, they understood themselves as doing the analog of the New Deal. You know, they were expanding labor rights and expanding the welfare system. The combination of FDRs, social democratic policies, and then the global war on fascism, basically,

caused them to become aligned. And you said that Latin America was really important in the defeat of fascism in that period. Yeah, I mean, well, logistically, the United States didn't have to fight one resource, one battle for resources. Latin America provided the oil, provided the minerals, the copper, the iron,

I mean everything. Obscure minerals that even went into the Manhattan Project. Brazil, that bit that butted out, it butts out into Atlantic, became the trampoline, what FDR called the trampoline of the Atlantic in which nonstop cargo flights flew into Northern Africa to supply the supply to get material into into Europe and man into Europe and then just ideologically Roosevelt held up Latin America as what the world should look like when the war was over. A region moving towards social democracy. It was Latin Americans, as I said, they didn't think that they were fighting just against fascism.

They thought they were fighting for social democracy. And I think a lot of people in the world at that time thought that was the case. A lot of them were wrong. It was being fine. At least with the United States leading the way, I think a lot of Americans thought that too, but it was not where we ended up.

Well, let's come back to the present day. We're also seeing this strange alignment again between the populist right movement in the United States and throughout South America. So, that's sort of where we began. Let's end there as well. How do you see that in the context of the history of Latin America and the United States?

Well, I think Latin America's on the knife edge in some ways. I mean, it could go either way. As I mentioned, the majority of countries are ruled by center-left governments, but every election is fought, is fought down to the wire. The early 2000s was a time in which the left had much more rhetorical and electoral hegemony they were winning election after election across the continent now each election is much close close it's tight because the left is the because a lot of different reasons the left of lost a lot of that rhetorical hegemony, while the right has kind of, it's good at this kind of, it's not so much that establishes

hegemony, it establishes kind of a conspiratorial world making, you know, it almost establishes, it substitutes conspiracism for hegemony. Yeah, it's an alternate universe. Yeah, it's an alternate universe. It's an alternate universe. And they're good at spreading that darkness, right? The groomers and the anchor babies and this. So some countries are solid. Look in Mexico, Claudia Scheinbaum, the Jewish granddaughter of communist refugees from Eastern Europe is now sitting in what was the Catholic viceroy's chair. The Catholic viceroy was the most important

Spanish official in the Americas. And she has 85% approval rating. And she's like taking the politics of the country away from the technocrats, away from the neoliberal technocrats. And you know, she's limited, she's constrained by the still violence, the cartels, she can only do so much, but she has enormous, enormous legitimacy.

But then, you know, Lula is, even though, even though in the past, he strode the world stage enormously popular. He's like, oh, you know, he's running neck and neck. And if he runs in 2026 against against Bolsonaro or against somebody's. So it could go either way. I mean, it could go either way. But the the thing is Latin Americans never give up. So when Bolsonaro was president during those four years and he turned Brazil into the sideshow, the way that Trump is turning, turns the United States into this carnival, the world's largest social movement, the landless movement of Brazil grew in size and strength under Bolsonaro. They now administer land the size of Switzerland and Bolivia and Brazil, the enormous social movement. And like I said, Latin America has more environmentalist activists killed than anywhere else in the world.

And yet environmental activists continue to fight, feminists and yet environmental activists continue to fight, you know, feminists and trans rights activists. Like, you know, you would think that after all of the violence, that after all the terror from the horrors of the conquest and the tortures of the Inquisition to the disappearances of the Cold War that Latin Americans would have given up on the idea of democracy, much less social democracy. But they keep fighting for it. And that's the thing about Latin America. Latin America's

nationalism, it's not a toxic nationalism. The predations of neoliberalism turned the Philippines and Hungary and all of these countries and Turkey into really nasty places, angry, bitter, against the global, there's none of that, the left doesn't participate in that kind of anti-global, that kind of conspiratorial globalists, right? It's the Jews, right? They understand capitalism, they understand how it works, they understand imperialism, they understand how it works, and Latin American activists are still the best bearers of, they take the enlightenment at its word. Latin America's like the last region

that takes the enlightenment at its word. Wow, that's an incredibly positive and optimistic view. Do you have an? Accept, accept. Accept. Accept it, you know. Yeah, well give me the accept. Well, Bucali and El Salvador

and have a million Argentina, people are tired of crime, they're tired of violence. You know, they're confused by the disinformation. You know, there's a lot of, you know, they're confused by the disinformation. You know, there's a lot of, you know, the writers as, you know, accept that, you know, the writers made a comeback. But even if they do come back, even in a country like El Salvador, where abortion, which has the worst, the most horrible abortion laws in the world, women with miscarriages go to jail for 30 years. If they can't prove it was a real miscarriage.

And there are women fighting to roll back those laws and they're incredibly vulnerable and they're targeted for murder and violence and yet these social movements don't give up. I often make the mistake of asking historians at the end of an interview what you think is gonna happen in the future. And so I won't make the mistake here,

but I do feel like there's optimism from you about the region, despite these slides backwards or slides towards the right. Yeah, long-term optimism, short-term pessimism. Maybe, or maybe. That's a pretty good philosophy for humanity overall, I think. Yeah, it's too early to tell. Isn't that when they ask Zhou Enlai

what he thought about the French Revolution? He said, it's too early to tell. Too early to tell. And I think that's apocryphal. I actually read the whole history of that quote recently because he was talking about something that happened more recently in France, and it's like misrem that quote recently, because he was talking about something that happened more recently in France, and it's like misremembered as being

that he was talking about the French Revolution, but it's too good of a line. It's too good of a line. Yeah. It's too early. And maybe that's true of all of the Americas, right? Well, I can't thank you enough for being here. I could talk to you for hours,

but I think we have to let you get back to your work. The name of the book is America, America. You pronounced it beautifully, say it again. America, America. America, yeah. It's like the Gulf of America. Yes. Oh my God, we didn't even fucking get into that,

the Gulf of America. Give me a take really quickly on the naming of the Gulf of Mexico and the Gulf of America. It's just the culture wars. Trump constantly opening new fronts in the culture war. Who thought the Gulf of America was gonna be the next front in the culture war? But he comes up with this idea thought the Gulf of America was gonna be the next front in the culture war, but it comes up with this idea of the Gulf of Mexico was gonna be the next,

it was called the Gulf of Mexico since the 1500s. So he's brilliant at opening up these new fronts in the culture war. So now it's a contestation over what is America. I mean, we can go into this in depth, right? Whether the United States, people call them, people who live in the United States who call themselves American and, you know,

and other people who call them, you know, the rest of the Latin America calls themselves American. So, who is an American? I, in fact, got in, you know, a little bit of trouble, not trouble, but we had a, I had a video come out years ago about, you know, Christopher Columbus and all that, and just like a very basic debunking of the myths

that we grew up with in America, or in the United States. And I had many, many people from Latin America saying, no, no, we call this America, we call all of it America. And so the way that- Somos mas americanos, we are more American. Yes. Que los hijos de los anglosaxones. Then the sons of the Anglo-S Saxons, we are more American.

What a beautiful line. What a beautiful assertion. And that's a pop music hit. Yeah, Tigre, oh, it was enormously popular. Tigres el Norte, the Tigers of the North. And they're a super group. In LA, I hear about them all the time. Yeah, and that song was released on September 11th, 2001.

Talk about historic, we had historical convergences. Amazing. Yeah. I mean, it's such a fascinating history that we think of, at least white Americans think about, far too little is this relationship and the deep history connecting it. I can't thank you enough for coming on the show

to talk to us about it. People can of course pick up a copy of the book at our special bookshop, factuallypod.com slash books. Where else can folks find your work? Can they find your work online? Well, I gotta say I have a web page, not a very active web page, but greggrandin.com. And I guess you just Google Greg Grandin

and you'll find a lot of stuff. But yeah, the webpage, greggrandin.com will have other books that I've done. Thank you so much for coming on, Greg. It's been wonderful. Thank you. Well, thank you once again to Greg for coming on the show. If you wanna pick up a copy of his book,

you can do so at factuallypod.com slash books. Just a reminder, any book you buy through that link will support not just this show, but your local bookstore as well. Please check it out, FactuallyPod.com, slash books, if you like to read. And I know you do. Also, if you want to support the show directly, you can do so on Patreon, patreon.com slash Adam Khan over five bucks a month gets you every episode of the show ad free for 15 bucks

a month. I will read your name and the credits of the show. This week, I want to thankvaro Eggburger, Tracy, Nicholas Jose Soura, Aaron Harmony Joseph, Rodney Patnam, Greg0692, Marcella Johnson, and Matthew Bertelsen, AKA The Bunkmeister. If you want me to read your name or your silly username on the show, once again, patreon.com slash Adam Conover, we would love to have you.

Of course, if you want to come see me on the road, I'm announcing a brand new bunch of tour dates. Head to AdamConover.net to check them out. I'm headed all across the country. Would love to see you out there. I want to thank my producers, Sam Raubman and Tony Wilson, everybody here at HeadGum for making this show possible. Thank you so much for listening and I'll see you next time on Factually. That was a HeadGum Podcast. Hi there, my name is Allison Williams. If you know who I am at all, it would probably be thanks to my job as an actress on shows like Girls and in movies like Megan. Recently, when I was having a moment of gratitude for my group chat, I thought, I wish everyone

could have these geniuses at their fingertips like I do. Well, now you do. Hi, hi, it's Hope. Hey babe, it's Jamie. Welcome to our podcast, Landlines, where we share our life-sustaining and shame-extinguishing friendship. We have known each other and we've been friends for a very long time. Hope was my first best friend, but it wasn't mutual.

I mean, was this a good story of my life? I asked, I distinctly remember calling her on the phone and asking if but it wasn't mutual. I mean, it wasn't. I asked, I distinctly remember calling her on the phone and asking if she'd sit next to me on the bus, and she said maybe. She didn't say no. She said maybe. Maybe he's meaner. She wasn't sure.

Maybe he was like discerning. When I was pregnant, I started this group chat to prepare and crowdsource, and it's been such a delight to troubleshoot with our friend group. And we just had this thought, should we invite other people into our group chat? I'm a therapist.

I'm a trained early childhood educator. And I'm, well, you know, whatever I am. I guess someone who has the vibe of having it all together. And still, the three of us find it hard to be moms, partners, friends, family members, professional women, and just, you know, adults. The stuff we're talking about,

whatever the recent fight was with our partner, or the parenting concern we have, or a funny thing with our kids, or it's like, what's going on with my body? I feel like I have like a family of squirrels living in my lower abdomen. Like, I feel affirmed, I feel normalized, I feel like I'm not going fucking crazy.

And I had to talk it out with you guys with different perspectives and different identities that you're juggling. Totally. Lifelong friendship has been our lifeline. We sincerely hope our conversation makes you feel less alone in whatever you're going through. So subscribe to Landlines on Spotify, Apple podcasts,

Pocket Casts, or wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes are out now on Headcom. Love you!