Pod Save America - “Stop the 2024 Steal.”

Episode Date: May 27, 2021

A grand jury is convened to decide Donald Trump’s fate as he mulls another run for president, Marjorie Taylor Greene compares vaccine and mask requirements to the Holocaust, Republican legislatures in swing states are laying the groundwork to overturn the results of the next election they lose. Then, The Atlantic’s Clint Smith talks to Tommy Vietor about his new book, How the Word is Passed.For a closed-captioned version of this episode, please visit crooked.com/podsaveamerica. For a transcript of this episode, please email [e-mail] and include the name of the podcast.

Welcome to Pod Save America. I'm Jon Favreau. I'm Dan Pfeiffer. On today's pod, a grand jury has been convened to decide Donald Trump's fate. A Republican member of Congress compares vaccine and mask requirements to the Holocaust. And Republican legislatures in red and purple states are laying the groundwork to overturn the results of the next election that they lose. Then Atlantic writer, member of the Crooked Media family, Clint Smith, talks to Tommy about his new book, How the Word is Passed. But first, don't miss this week's America Dissected, where Abdul talks to Professor Ibram Kendi about how to root out systemic racism in the American healthcare system.

Great episode. Check it out. All right. It's always fun to kick off the show with some good news. So here it is. The criminal investigation into Donald Trump got a lot more serious this week as The Washington Post reported that Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance has convened a special grand jury that is expected to decide whether to indict the former president, his children or his business on potential fraud charges. Vance has already brought in a mafia prosecutor, Mark Pomerantz, who's been deposing witnesses like Michael Cohen, Eric Trump, and Trump Organization CFO Allen Weisselberg. Trump responded to the news by getting angry on his blog and announcing that he'll be starting up his rallies again in June. Indeed, Dan. Indeed. Is this it? Did we finally get him? Have we gotten him?

Better late than never, but Mulder time is here. We got him. Send out the resistance tweets. He's going to be frogmarshed out of somewhere, and we're all going to be there to witness it. Oh, man. What was it? The, um, what was the Louise Mensch thing about the, uh, the Supreme court? The impeachment Eagle has landed the impeachment Eagle. Yeah. The Marshall, the Marshall of the Supreme court's going to go get them. Um, what do you think of this news? How serious is it? It's, it's certainly more serious than anything Trump dealt with before this.

From January 2017 to January 2021, he essentially had de facto criminal immunity. As a sitting president, the Department of Justice opinion was such that he could not be indicted, which is why he is the unindicted co-conspirator in the Michael Cohen case back in 2017 instead of the indicted co-conspirator. And he had essentially de facto immunity from the Republican Party because the Republican Party, with impeachment being the constitutionally designated mechanism for trying presidential crimes in a Republican Party that believes that crimes are not crimes when committed by a Republican, he was sort of free to escape accountability.

All of that immunity is now gone. We should, I think, pump the brakes a little bit in our celebration. We know that from all of the legal end, as we look at this, the Vance investigation has reached a new level. A grand jury has been convened. The hiring of this mafia attorney is a sign from, I think, Pripa Hara and Dan Goldman's mothers have suggested that it means that he's moving closer to charges. We just don't know what those charges are. You think that's right? You think bringing in a mafia prosecutor means they might have something on them?

Well, that's the thing. We don't know if it's Trump. That's the important thing. Well, that is the big thing. Yes. This is an investigation into the Trump organization, their finances. They have access to his tax returns on the important thing. Right. Well, that is the big thing. Yes. This is an investigation into the Trump organization, their finances. They have access to his tax returns and other financial records. Is it Trump himself?

Is it someone who works there? Is it another member of his family? Is it the company itself? There are all kinds of different ways this could take. But it is undoubtedly a huge legal morass and a challenge for our blogging former president. Yeah, I think on the side of the ledger, there's like why it's a big deal. And then there's like pump the brakes on the big deal side of the ledger. The case has been going on for quite a while.

Vance has Trump's tax returns. Remember, he won that case at the Supreme Court. So he does have all the tax returns. Remember, he won that case at the Supreme Court. So he does have all the tax returns. When New York Attorney General Letitia James joined the criminal investigation as well and said that her investigation was moving from civil to criminal, that was a sign. And usually you don't convene a grand jury not to bring charges. It is it seems clear, at least a lot of the legal experts who've looked at this say this. It is it seems clear, at least a lot of the legal experts who've looked at this say this. It seems clear that Vance believes he has a criminal case to bring against somebody.

Now, is that somebody Donald Trump or is that somebody like a couple of accountants in the in the Trump organization? That we don't know, though, again, if you're Letitia James and you're putting out a statement, not even leaking, you're putting out a statement that this is a criminal investigation and then you're Cyrus Vance and clearly your side leaked to the Washington Post that you have convened a grand jury. I don't know that you would do that if the ultimate criminal charges are against a few accountants. But again, we don't know. Now, on the pump the brake side, one thing about this special grand jury is the panel sits for three days a week for six months. And a jury like this may hear other cases. They may be used to subpoena witnesses or evidence. They may be used to hear testimony and then they may ultimately be used to decide potential charges. But it could be a long time and they could be hearing some other matters. The other

thing that Daniel Goldman, who you mentioned, he's the former prosecutor who was the Democratic counsel during the first impeachment trial. Remember those days? He said on CNN that fraud cases are hard and they're hard because Trump could try to use advice of counsel defense. In other words, my lawyer told me this was legal. So how was I supposed to know? I got the best legal advice I could, even though it might not be legal. And because Trump doesn't use email, he may not have put a lot of his crimes in writing, which is always tough when you don't put your crimes in writing. Check Twitter, people. There's archives. All those tweets are archived. I know he's. Yeah, well, now all of his crimes are probably on his on his blog, which is just very popular. So for what it's worth, and it may not be worth much of anything, an anonymous Trump advisor told Politico that the investigation has created, quote,

a cloud of nerves because it's targeting CFO Allen Weisselberg, who knows all the numbers, knows where all the bodies are buried. So just for fun, let's imagine that Trump himself is indicted. Just for fun. does that stop him from running for president because business insider interviewed nine legal scholars who said nothing in the constitution would prevent another white house run and they even believe he could serve a second term as president from motherfucking prison when they when i like, yeah, nothing will stop him from running, I was like, I guess that makes sense.

Serving as president from prison? Are you serious? John, as it turns out, there are some holes in our system, some unanticipated circumstances for which the founders did not anticipate. Yes. I would say that's the theme of today's episode. Now, would it be good for the country or good for democracy if Donald Trump ran for president from prison? No. Would it be briefly funny? Yes. would you accept this toll call from an inmate at the Lompoc Correctional Facility so Trump could call into Fox and Friends? Can you imagine him and Sean Hannity

touching hands on the glass at the prison? I mean, look, it seems unlikely that Trump runs from prison, partly because these kind of cases take a long time. Fraud cases take a long time. So by the time we get through, you know, this could still be in court. But we should keep in mind that this is not something too far-fetched, running while on trial under investigation. Bibi Netanyahu has run for re-election three times while on trial for corruption. So this has happened before. Now, obviously, Israel's system is a bit different than ours, but you could totally see him being under indictment and running for president.

He's going to use it to whip up his base. He's already started saying, oh, the only reason they're after, he's trying to politicize the investigation. The only reason these Democrats are after me is because I'm leading in polls in the Republican primary. That's what he, you have to look on his blog for this stuff because he's not tweeting anymore. I looked the other day, by the way, I looked the other day because I don't pay much attention to what Trump says anymore.

And it's actually, people have done a pretty good job not tweeting it. You look on that fucking blog, he's blogging like 10 times a day. It's all the same shit that he usually does the other day he was just tweeting crazy joe scarborough and his blood-curdling psycho wife question mark mika are going crazy because their ratings have tanked and it was like no time has passed since it's 2020 it's like the same shit anyway. Yeah. So I think he'll use this probably to whip up his base.

Also somewhat alarmingly, and I kind of hate myself for saying this, but George Conway made an interesting point on Twitter, which is, which is that if he were indicted, but not yet convicted at the time of the 2024 presidential election, winning the election could be used as a way to keep him out of jail. I'm telling you, I have been saying this for a while now, not making any predictions, but literally every single incentive for Trump points towards run again in 2024. And Quinnipiac had a poll out this week. 66% of Republicans want Trump to

run again. Only 30 percent don't. And then 85 percent of Republicans want a presidential candidate who mostly agrees with Trump. Mentioned that rallies are starting up again in June. Politico reports that he's working on his own version of a contract with America with Newt Gingrich, bringing back Newt Gingrich from the 90s to do another contract with America with Newt Gingrich bringing back Newt Gingrich from the 90s to do another contract with America so it certainly seems like before I thought okay the only thing that will stop him from running

is an indictment I stand corrected now I do not think the indictment will stop him from running at all I don't know I actually at this point don't know what will stop him from running again you got anything? I got nothing from running at all. I don't know. I actually, at this point, don't know what will stop him from running again. You got anything? I got nothing.

I got nothing. Do you think it'll be the speech that Paul Ryan's giving today about Trumpism? Is that what he's doing? I know you're on the Paul. I know that you're our Paul Ryan. Trust me, Paul Ryan doesn't poke up his beady little head

without someone getting my mentions. So yeah, he's giving a speech today about trying to steer the party away from Trump. He mentions Trump's name once in the speech, and the only time he mentions it is to compliment him for the strong economy he built prior to the pandemic. Look, nothing leads me to believe that Donald Trump would not run for office again. Nothing leads me to believe that Donald Trump would not easily win a Republican nomination again from every piece of polling, public opinion, the way the party is, the incentives in the party. And then we have an extremely polarized country where Joe Biden essentially only won the last election by about 40,000 votes because of the Electoral College, not 7 million in the popular, which is what people think. So we're right back to being a few tens of thousands of votes away from Donald Trump becoming president again in 2024. That is

what's been running through my head for the last several months. Not only will he win a primary, the Republican Party will cancel the primary if he runs. Yeah, who's going to, yeah, who, who, who the fuck's going to run against Donald Trump in the primary? Larry Hogan? You think they're going to hold the South Carolina primary so Larry Hogan can be in a debate? No, they're going to run against Donald Trump in the primary. Larry Hogan? You think they're going to hold the South Carolina primary so Larry Hogan can be in a debate? No, they're going to cancel it. Good stuff. Good stuff. All right.

Let's talk about one of the many mini-Trumps who are still wielding power in Washington, Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene. Why is this grade A dipshit in the news again, you may ask? Well, during a television interview, she was complaining about vaccine and mask requirements and landed on really what was the most perfect, unimpeachable, historical analogy you could imagine. Here's a clip. You know, we can look back at a time in history where people were told to wear a gold star and they were definitely treated like second

class citizens, so much so that they were put in trains and taken to gas chambers in Nazi Germany. And this is exactly the type of abuse that Nancy Pelosi is talking about. That's right, Dan. Requiring members of Congress to take precautions so that they don't infect others with the deadly disease is, quote, exactly like killing six million Jews. It's just impossible to find a difference. Of course, following the backlash from some clearly misguided critics, Green quickly issued a clarifying statement. Let's hear it. I said nothing wrong. And I think any any rational Jewish person didn't like what happened in Nazi Germany. And any rational Jewish person doesn't like what's happening with overbearing mask mandates and overbearing vaccine policies. But wait, but wait, there's more.

You didn't think there was more, but there's more. Just in case anyone in the world was still confused after those first two statements, she tweeted, quote, vaccinated employees get a vaccination logo, just like the Nazis forced Jewish people to wear a gold star. So there you go. Now, since House Republicans just held a caucus-wide vote to strip Liz Cheney of her leadership post for the mere crime of criticizing Donald Trump,

you can only imagine what Kevin McCarthy did to Greene. Right, Dan? What happened? She's out of Congress, right? She's not out of Congress. No, she's not out of Congress. But she is. She was the target of a sternly worded statement released by Kevin McCarthy.

After five days, after five days, he released a statement. Well, there's one lesson we've learned from the Trump era. It's that the best way to put a stop towards authoritarian lunacy is with tweets. And so if Kevin McCarthy has tweeted, then this problem is solved. Just like Jeff Flake tweets, stop Trump in his tracks. In fact, the statement went on to accuse Democrats of anti-Semitism. All of this, by the way, against the backdrop of a rise in anti-Semitism and anti-Semitic attacks all over the country that we have seen over the last several weeks. This is where Marjorie Taylor

Greene stepped in to say all this. I guess the question is, what else could McCarthy do about it if McCarthy wasn't the House minority leader and someone sane was? Well, he could join with Nancy Pelosi to kick her out of Congress. This is a safe Republican seat. They would lose nothing. Marjorie Taylor Greene won by a lot, and a Republican will win that seat again. He could say that he is going to support – he could go out and recruit a primary challenger and support that primary challenger and starve her of funding and attention and party support. But he is not going to do that. He has not done that because he lives in fear of angering Trump or the Trumpist base or any of those things. He has power. He doesn't know how to – but he is choosing not to use it because he is weak and

stupid. Green responded to McCarthy's sternly worded statement by quote tweeting a tweet that called the minority leader a moron and a feckless word that rhymes with bunt um what does her reaction tell you about how she sees her role in the party well she recognizes that she is more powerful than kevin mccarthy yeah and she doesn't need kevin mccarthy she was well also you know my first reaction was like why don't they strip her of all her uh committee assignments like they did to steve king when he said a bunch of racist shit a couple years ago. And then I realized, oh, they did strip her of her committee assignments because the Democrats voted to do so after her last kerfuffle, let's call it. And only 11 House Republicans voted

with the Democrats to remove her from committee. So she's already lost her committee assignments. So I guess all there is is just expelling her or a primary challenge. And she doesn't fear either of those things, right? I mean, she totally doesn't. And Democrats are not trying to expel her either, which is notable. They could. They absolutely could do that. They could bring that motion to the floor and force Republicans to vote against it.

Though I think the one argument for why Democrats probably haven't done it yet is they can't expel her with a simple majority, which they have. They have to expel her with a two-thirds majority, which, of course, they don't have. But you could – like, yes. You could make them vote on it. Yeah, you can make them vote on it. And I don't even – I'm not overly worked up about the fact that they haven't done it. There's a lot of things to do.

A vote you're definitely going to lose to force Republicans to vote on that is probably maybe not the best use of time. But it is an option and could best use of time, but it is an option and could be part of a political strategy. But we should be clear is that she could be beaten in a primary. She absolutely could if people tried. And the party put their weight behind one person. They went out and recruited someone who obviously is going to be a Trumpist. They'll be Q adjacent, not Q. Q adjacent. Yeah, they'd be Q adjacent, not. Q curious.

Yeah, they would be Q adjacent, not Q anon. They would be more dog whistle, less bullhorn, but they would still be a Trumpist mega net negative for American democracy, but it would be something different. And they could do that. And it's sort of sitting right there for them to do. And we get a pretty easy political move on their part, but they are sort of exist in fear of the base. And the base doesn't even really mean the voters. It means Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, Dan Bongino, the people on Fox News and Facebook. If you're at the DCCC right now, what do you do about Greene? Do you ignore her? Do you elevate her? Do you use Republicans' refusal to expel her as a way to brand the party as extremist? I think this is a tough question, and we don't really know enough

about what the political environment is going to look like in 2022. I think definitely you try to drive some new cycles here, maybe even run some ads about it just to continue to – you want to put them on the defensive for, I think there are two questions. One, we should recognize that in an era of negative polarization in a deeply divided country, Democratic attacks and outrage about Marjorie Taylor Greene only strengthens her within the party. In February, or whatever that was, when she was kicked from her committee assignments, and that was a period of a couple of weeks where there was news story after news story about her anti-Semitic beliefs or racist beliefs, completely unhinged behavior, harassing victims of gun violence. Her approval rating in the Republican Party went up 11 points. At that time, in that same morning consult poll, her name ID was as high as Kevin McCarthy's.

So we are definitely strengthening her. Now, I don't think it's our job to police who has power in the Republican Party, but it's just worth knowing that for Republicans to walk away from if we try to brand them that way? So let's say you're Mike Garcia in California, which will be probably the most endangered Republican in the country. And your opponent is saying you are a Marjorie Taylor Greene Republican and that he just stands up on debate stage and disagrees with everything she said. It's sort of an easy out for them. Well, it's to me, it's like exactly what Republicans tried to do to Biden and a lot of Democratic candidates in 2020, which I don't think works very well when you're a voter. It's it's it's assuming that voters aren't smart enough to see the person that they're voting for in their district as different than the person that they're trying to be associated with.

Right. And like Mike Garcia, who's in a very competitive district in just north of Los Angeles here, is not going to be like Marjorie Taylor Greene in any way. He's still a Republican. He's going to vote with the Republicans. He's going to, you know, have a horrible record, all that kind of stuff. But he's not going to seem nuts like she is. And voters are going to get that, right? Like if you just try to say that Mike Garcia is a Marjorie Taylor Greene clone or that Mike Garcia's main sin is that he didn't vote to expel Marjorie Taylor Greene, is that going to be enough to win? I don't know. I think Marjorie Taylor has to be seen as a piece of a larger story about how the whole Republican Party is extreme, has lost its way, is radical, and is a danger to the country. I think you have to tell that larger story. And she's a piece of that story, but she's not the whole story. Yeah, that is, we talked about this a little bit last week, but that is one of the forks in the road for Democratic-Messian 2022 is, is the story we are telling about the Republican

Party that they are an extreme party, they cannot be trusted with governing, and that could be represented by Trump, it could be represented by Marjorie Taylor Greene, any, frankly, any member of almost any Republican member of Congress, or is it a different story about their sort of the plutocracy, the corporate tax cuts, cutting Medicare? That's – we don't know the answer to that. Data will determine it. The state of the economy will determine it. But that is a question. But I think simply saying they're the party of Q.

You see a lot of people, even some members of Congress, like the QOP. I don't think that works. people, even some members of Congress, like the QOP. I don't think that works. But using her as one data point in a larger story about a party that cannot be trusted with governance to undermine the natural inclination for divided government among a disturbingly large segment of the population is, I think, a viable strategy. Yes. I think that talking about Republicans as extremist partisans who refuse to join together with Democrats to do anything good for the country at all and only want Republicans in power and only care about power and don't care about any of you, don't care about voters, don't care about doing anything good for the country, is probably an

argument that might fuse both, you know, they're bad at governing and they're plutocrats and also they're extreme. Like, I kind of think you probably have to meld the two at some point. But I don't have a lot of hope that just saying this is the party of Marjorie Taylor Greene and this is the party of Q is going to get it done. All right. We want to end, as we often do, by sounding the alarm about the potential end of democracy in our time. We've talked before about the new voter suppression laws in states like Georgia and Texas, the OAN finance cyber ninja audit in Arizona, and the gerrymandering that could soon help Republicans take back the House and tighten their grip on state legislatures. Few more developments to add to this list over the last several weeks. In Missouri, Republican leaders announced that they will simply ignore a ballot measure passed

by voters to expand Medicaid. In Mississippi, Republican leaders and judges struck down a ballot measure passed by voters to legalize medical marijuana. In Arizona, the Republican legislature has passed a lot of strip power from the state's top election official, Democratic Secretary of State Katie Hobbs, and give power to the Republican attorney general instead. And we now have Republican candidates who tried to overturn the last election running to be the top election officials, to be the secretary of state in Georgia, Arizona, Nevada, and Michigan. So Perry Bacon at the Washington Post had an outstanding column this week titled American Democracy is in Even Worse Shape Than You Think, where he outlines four main threats to American democracy. The Republican Party's extremism, polarization that keeps the electorate

closely divided, the weakness of nonpartisan institutions like the media and business, and Democratic moderates like Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, who don't seem to grasp the magnitude of the threat that we face. Perry ends by saying that he hopes he's overly alarmed, but doesn't think he is. What do you think? I don't think he's alarmed enough. Yeah, I'm pretty fucking alarmed. If you just watch what's happening all across this country, it is a very clear indication of a minority party that knows it has no path to majority status in this country, rigging

elections at every level to set the stage for minority rule in this country. All the evidence is there. And the only place where people aren't really fully getting the evidence is in Washington, D.C., where we're still continuing to have good faith negotiations with Shelley Moore Capito and people like Joe Manchin, Kyrsten Sinema are hanging on to anachronistic legislative loopholes pretending that this is some different era. We always say worry, don't panic. I'm not saying panic, but I think we should worry a lot fucking more because it is all right before our eyes. We have a narrow window to do something about it. And it's pretty clear that that window is closing very quickly.

We've talked a lot about the voter suppression legislation that's happening in these states, and we're obviously quite worried about that. Ron Brownstein has a piece in The Atlantic today where he talked to a bunch of White House officials about whether they're worried enough about what's happening in the states. And, you know, they made the argument that obviously they want H.R. 1 to pass and that the voter suppression they believe is dangerous and antithetical to democracy, and they're worried about it. But they think their argument is basically with enough money and organization, you can we can get our voters out and we can sort of get around some of these voter suppression laws in 2022. And then again in 2024, when Biden's on the ticket again, presumably. they said that what they're more worried about and don't really have a plan for is this strategy by Republicans to put all the pieces in place so that they can successfully overturn the next election

that they lose. And just to lay out how this happens, right, like this is now we're past all the voter suppression stuff. We got around it. We won not only the popular vote, but we won the Electoral College vote. So all that needs to happen here for them to overturn the next election is you have a fairly close election in a few swing states, just like last time. Doesn't even have to be too close. Maybe just a difference of like one percent between the candidates. a difference of like 1% between the candidates. Trump cries fraud or whoever Republican it is. And if Trumpy Republicans are election officials or in charge of state legislatures, which they are in charge of a lot of state legislatures in red and purple states, and now they're running to be secretaries of state

in those states, then they just refuse to certify the election or they send their own slate of delegates. Then if we lose in 2022 because we have a fucking gerrymandered house and it was impossible for Democrats to win, we have a Republican House. And if we have a Republican Senate, they all they have to do is refuse to certify enough states to give either candidate 270 electoral votes. If they refuse to certify the states, the Constitution says that if Congress doesn't certify a majority winner, the Republican House picks the president. And that's that.

Now, what has to happen is not just Republicans win in 2022 and take control of the House and the Senate. They would also have to once again maintain control of the House and the Senate in the 2024 election, if we're talking about stealing the presidency, because, of course, you'd have the new Congress then. But if the Republicans keep the House in 2024 and they keep the Senate in 2024 and they win those two things, they will have everything in place they need to constitutionally steal the presidency. And like it doesn't seem like like we're talking a lot about voter suppression, too. It does not seem like anyone has a plan for this, that anyone is alarmed enough about this. What do you think? No, people are not alarmed enough about it. We've mentioned this before, but the great

asymmetry in American politics is that Republicans view political power as an end in and of itself, and Democrats view it as a means to an end. And this is what is happening across the country, which is Republicans using the power they have to put in place laws to allow them to hold on political power. And in Washington, they are relying on the filibuster and the willful naivete of Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema to prevent Democrats from doing anything about these threats to democracy. And it is happening before us. And we are going pretty, as a party, going pretty quietly into the night here. And I get it from the perspective of the Biden White House and maybe even Senate Democrats. It may be that there's not a single fucking thing they can do to make Joe Manchin step up

and save democracy. And when you're president, there is a limit to how much time you have presidential communication to serve a zero-sum game. And you want to talk about the things you can do or the things you have done. And so yelling about something that cannot be fixed doesn't seem particularly appealing on a daily basis in the White House messaging meeting. I have been there. You have been there. We know that. But I will say this. We need to raise the alarm. There are disturbing signs of complacency in our party. We saw it in the special election in Texas. We're seeing some early signs among volunteers and activists in Virginia. And I get it. It is fucking exhausting that after four years of Trump, one pandemic,

two impeachments, that we are 150 days into the Biden administration and the country is still in a five alarm fucking fire. That is tiring. But that is where we are. Joe Biden's victory stopped the spread of the fire, but it is still burning. And we have to do more. We have to raise the alarm because I have to be honest with you. I do not believe that simply passing a popular agenda is enough to win the next election. I don't either. You and I talked, what, last episode about that poll that J.D. Scholten did with rural voters and like, you know, 60 something percent of them didn't even know that the rebate checks were associated with Joe Biden and the Democratic Party.

A third of them thought the stimulus checks they got were from the Republican Party. So the Biden strategy here and the Democratic strategy is we will pass all this legislation, mostly through reconciliation because we can't get rid of the filibuster. It will improve people's lives. They will say, thank you for the shots in arms. Thank you for the checks. Thank you for the better economy. I will now vote for Democrats. It may be that that may be the best of a bunch of bad options as a strategy from the Biden administration. But I would at least try to

go down fighting here. Right. And again, like I'm like, I don't I don't think yelling at people to do what they don't have the power to do is all that productive. And people should know, like, the White House does not have the power to force Joe Manchin to do what they want. They don't. It is unlikely that Joe Manchin succumbs to political pressure because it is highly likely that Joe Manchin doesn't run again after his term is up. So it's like you have a senator who he might be in his last term. He's in deep red West Virginia. He's immune to all kinds of political pressure. You're right.

I'm sure the Biden people are immensely frustrated every single day. I'm sure the Senate Democrats are immensely frustrated every day. We know that because they tweet about this all the time, all of our Senate Democrats friends. But at some point, I do think they have to try a little harder to figure out what Joe Manchin wants. How do we reach him? What can we do? I mean, and it's hard. Like, so as we're recording this, Joe Manchin has basically decided that he will not do anything to break the Republican filibuster of a bipartisan commission investigating the people who tried to destroy our government and attack our government on January 6th. And the reason he said he won't do that is because he doesn't want to destroy our country. He doesn't want to destroy our country by breaking the partisan filibuster of a bipartisan commission into the people who tried to destroy our country that's where joe manchin is

and then a reporter asked him again will you ever change your mind and today he said quote i don't think i'll ever change i'm not separating our country okay i don't know what you all don't understand about this you ask the same question every day and it's wrong that's enough so like what do you do about that i i don't know what do you do about that? I don't know. What do you do about that? Scream into the void to avoid having your head explode. We got that covered. Yeah, that's right. We rage pod, you rage listen.

We have volunteered for that. We are screaming into the void. Look, and so on one hand, it's so weird. I find myself, I am frustrated by Biden and the White House and the Senate Democrats. On the other hand, I am very sympathetic to their plight, right? And like, it is unconscionable to me that the entire country and the project of democracy could be held hostage by Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema. I mean, it's just, it fucking boggles the mind, but it feels like that's where we are.

Yeah, I mean, that is most certainly where we are. I think it is incumbent upon everyone, President Biden, Senate Democrats, everyone else to use the platform they have to raise the fucking alarm. Because there is very scary things happening here. There were two officials who helped stand in the way of a stolen election in 2020, the Secretary of State of Georgia and Secretary of State of Arizona, one a Republican, one a Democrat. Neither of those people are going to have power to do that same thing in 2024 because Republicans took that power away from them. When we talk about gerrymandering, we talk about states where Republicans could gain seats to steal the house.

We say Texas, controlled by Republicans, Florida, controlled by Republicans. Georgia, controlled by Republicans. We also say North Carolina. And you may say, that's weird. Didn't we just reelect Governor Cooper, a Democrat? Yes, we did. But in 2016, after Governor Cooper won, the veto-proof Republican majority of the legislature took all of his powers away, including the role he was going to play in redistricting. The Republicans have set up a system where it is heads Republicans win, tails Democrats lose. And we have to scream about it because it is scary. Screaming about it is not going to solve the problem, but we have to wake everyone up to the threat. It is a surreal time to live in because in some ways things feel almost normal for the first time again. People are vaccinated, they're traveling,

they're going to restaurants, schools are reopening, all of those things. But while that's happening and the Biden administration is rightfully celebrating that normalcy that they have helped bring about through sheer effort and competence and having a plan and bringing experts into government, believing in science, all of those things, democracy itself is at the gravest threat it has been at any point in the history of this country. And it's happening right before our eyes. You can't have a two-party system where one party is trying to destroy democracy and the other party is trying to cut an infrastructure deal with Shelley Moore Capito. Like that is – and look, I understand why they're having those negotiations.

If we lived in a world where there were 51 senators and Joe Manchin's vote was not decisive. Everything they would probably pass by reconciliation. They're trying to get things done. But simply getting things done is not going to be enough. So you have two options here. You can either try to get people to overcome the tremendous obstacles being put in place in this election out of gratitude for all the things you've done, or you can try to stop all those anti-democratic things. That may not be an option. Or you can raise an alarm and let people understand that the stakes in this election are so much bigger than whether you're going to get to pass

a second infrastructure bill or any of those things. It is something much bigger than that. And we have to raise the stakes. And that is not going to happen simply by talking about popular things. And I think it's somewhat depressing as someone who works in politics and as a Democrat when you say doing good things that people like is not enough to win elections. But there is a shit- Yeah, no, that's very depressing. But there's a shit ton of evidence that that is a fact. Like look at Florida in 2020. The ballot initiative to raise the minimum wage to $15 outperform the candidate supporting raising the minimum wage to $15 by 13 points. It is about something more than just doing popular stuff.

Doing popular stuff, as you said last week, is table stakes. We absolutely should do that. Doing popular stuff is better than doing unpopular stuff. Enacting a popular agenda is better than failing to enact a popular agenda. But that is not going to be enough to overcome the hurdles being put in place here. They are historic. It is not just. And particularly by the, and we say popular stuff, particularly popular stuff that revolves around people's economic interests, right? We have had this theory now for decades.

It comes from the left primarily that, you know, that if you just do really popular stuff and help people's material conditions, that they will suddenly have a revelation and not vote Republican and vote Democrat. And there is not a lot of evidence that people vote out of their own economic interests. A lot of Democrats who are well off and well educated don't vote out of their economic interests when they when they vote for tax increases or support tax increases. So why would we think a lot of Republican voters who are poorer and working class would do that? Right. Like it's still a good thing to do because it's important to pass legislation that improves people's material conditions. I'm all for it. I'm glad that Joe Biden is doing it. He should do more. But we shouldn't think that that's going to take care of the politics, especially in a country that is polarized specifically along cultural lines and lines of geography. Now, I keep trying to think of like, OK, what are some tangible things we could do here? Like, how do you solve this problem instead

of just yelling about it? I do think it is probably time to separate out the anti-gerrymandering provision of H.R.1 and have a standalone bill to try to pass nonpartisan redistricting? Because I think the most important provision in HR1 is the anti-gerrymandering provision, the provision that would take partisan redistricting away from all of these Republican states and make sure there's nonpartisan or independent commissions doing redistricting in all 50 states. I think if we could pass that, that would probably do more than almost anything else to protect democracy in 2022 and 2024, because it would give us a fighting chance of keeping the House right now. And right now, I don't know that we have a good chance to keep the House, particularly if we don't prevent Republican gerrymandering and redistricting, because I think they're going to be able to pick up a whole bunch of states just by drawing new maps. just by drawing new maps.

So I, and also, by the way, the anti-gerrymandering provision in HR1, we have pulled this, everyone's pulled this, is the single most popular provision of the bill. So put it on the floor. You have a bill that would have redistricting be bipartisan, nonpartisan, independent, should be right up fucking Joe Manchin's alley, Kyrsten Sinema's alley.

We want to take the politics out of redistricting so no party has an advantage. Put it on the floor. Fight for that. I also think, by the way, that Congress should look into passing a law. Democrats at least should introduce a law that addresses the certification issue ahead of 2024. Amend the Electoral Count Act of 1887, which says that the House and Senate can submit objections and try to fix the fucking problem. It won't pass with Republican votes, Republicans, but at least put up a fight for it. Yeah, this is one of those cases where fighting and losing is better than not fighting at all.

And there should like there should be an entire plan to make Joe Manchin uncomfortable with his decision to allow democracy to to swirl down. Yes. So put up his version of the John Lewis Voting Rights Act, but his expanded version that he, I think, kind of accidentally proposed to expand preclearance to all 50 states. Put that on the floor. Make Republicans filibuster that. Make him answer a bunch of questions

about why he thinks that's okay. Do it with the election. Like, I think it's really interesting to have an anti-election subversion legislative agenda, including the one you just talked about. For the purposes of being constructive here, there are things that all of us can also do, right? As we wait for Joe Manchin to figure out the fucking clues here. One of them is, let's do everything we can to hold the house,

right? And that which includes, we don't know what the map is exactly yet, but we do know some of the states where it's going to matter. So you can support the Democratic Party in those states. In the Senate, we know we have to reelect Raphael Warnock and Mark Kelly. You can contribute to their campaigns now. You can volunteer for their campaigns now. We know our best pickup opportunities are in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Florida, and North Carolina. I want to throw in, and we have to protect Maggie Hassan in New Hampshire and Catherine Cortez Masto in Nevada because they they are they are the two most endangered Democratic incumbents. If we protect Hassan and Cortez Masto and we reelect Warnock and Kelly,

we will hold the Senate. And even if Republicans win the House through gerrymandering, they will not be able to steal the 2024 election if Democrats hold on to the Senate. So that to me is like the most optimistic scenario is to hold the Senate. I still think I don't want anyone to like give up on the House either. It's going to be an uphill climb after if Republicans are allowed to gerrymander this, but it's not impossible. And I want everyone to work as hard as they fucking can to hold on the House. And you should work like democracies at stake because it will be. And then there are some other things to do here as well. So the other one is we can

expand our Senate majority. We can hold this in. We can also expand it by winning in any of those four states I mentioned. There are going to be primaries in those states, but you could support, become a supporter of the Democratic Party in that state. Ben Wickler from Wisconsin has been pushing people to become monthly donors. They can begin organizing to beat Ron Johnson now while we figure out who the candidates can be. You do a similar thing in Pennsylvania, Florida, et cetera. We can actually invest in secretary of state races, which could matter a lot, right? And some of these really matter, like Jocelyn Benson in Michigan is up for reelection. There's going to be a huge effort to defeat the Republicans. We're going to pour a ton of money into those. Katie Hobbs in Arizona

is up for reelection. We have a chance to win the secretary of state in Georgia. There's going to be an open secretary of state race in Nevada. And we also have to relight governors. That's a huge part of this. Big time. I was going to say that. Huge. So imagine if Tony Evers and Gretchen Whitmer, who are going to be quite at risk in the 2022

election, lose. Republicans will then control the entire government in those two states, which will give them the opportunity to steal the election, give them the opportunity to put in place Georgia and Texas-style voter suppression in those states. We have a chance to win the governorship of Georgia and Arizona, which would be a huge deal. Stacey Abrams' word of run, as has been rumored. Stacey Abrams now number one bestselling fiction author. Stacey Abrams, among other things, just rubbing her tremendous talent in her face. Emily's been reading her book. She loves it. rubbing her tremendous talent in her face.

Emily's been reading her book. She loves it. Yeah, I mean, it's just like, what did you do? Took the Senate, helped Biden to the White House, and then I just took two weeks and wrote a legal thriller that went to the top of the bestseller list. But if she runs for governor- Don't forget Pennsylvania, too, by the way. We gotta keep the Democratic governorship

in Pennsylvania, too. That's the other one. Yeah, that is an open seat. There is a lot that can be done that we can do with our time and our resources at the state level that isn't just tweeting at Joe Manchin. We should keep tweeting at Joe Manchin. I know I'm going to do it. I can't help myself.

But there are some constructive things to do. I wrote a bunch of these up in MessageBox a few weeks ago if people want to check it out. I will retweet it out after this pod goes up. But there are some constructive ways to channel our fear about authoritarianism and our anger at Joe Manchin that I think can be constructive and are legitimate, helps build a bulwark against this tide that could potentially save democracy if a handful of Senate Democrats won't let us do it. Sound the alarm. Get to work. Those are the two do-outs from this episode.

All right. When we come back, Clint Smith talks to Tommy about his new book, How the Word Has Passed. I am so excited to welcome back to the show, Clint Smith. He's a staff writer at The Atlantic. He's a poet and he's the author of the beautiful new book, How the show, Clint Smith. He's a staff writer at The Atlantic. He's a poet, and he's the author of the beautiful new book, How the Word Has Passed. Clint, thanks so much for joining us today. So good to be back on crooked territory. Yeah, exactly. So I'm holding up the book. The book, you take the reader on this remarkable journey to several places across the United States and to one stop in Africa. And these places all have deep ties to slavery. And I just wanted to start by just telling listeners that when you pick up this book and start reading, it will be obvious to you that

the book was written by a poet. This is not dry nonfiction. It is written in this way that you allow the reader to almost inhabit your mind and your body and your experience as you go to these places. And you kind of can feel the emotional connection to them. And it's just a beautiful book. And so just congratulations to you on such a job well done. I was DMing you. I picked it up. And like the next day, I was halfway done.

And I just can't recommend it enough. So, again, amazing work. I appreciate that so much. Yeah. No, part of what I wanted to do was, you know, I've spent the last several years engaged in a sort of deep dive in the historiography of slavery and have read these remarkable books like, you know, Annette Gordon-Ree's The Hemings as a Monticello and Diana Ramey Berry's The Price for Their Pound of Flesh, Leslie Harris and Ira Berlin's Slavery in New York, David Blight's amazing biography of Frederick Douglass, Prophet of Freedom, and dozens and dozens more. And part of what I was thinking about, and I'm really glad to hear you say that

it felt this way, was like, what would it mean to take the best of this history that has been so transformative for me in terms of allowing me to more effectively and honestly understand the history and landscape of this country and to add a sort of emotional texture and human texture and sensory detail. Who are the people responsible for curating and talking about this land? What does it feel like not only to read about a slave cabin, but to stand inside of one? What does it mean not only to read about the enslaved people, but to stand inside of one? What does it mean not only to read about the enslaved people who lived in Monticello, but to walk on the same land and sit under the same trees and think about what it means that you're looking at a building and

touching a structure that were built by enslaved hands? The experience for me was added a sort of texture and dynamism to this history that I wanted to do my best to convey to the reader. Yeah. I thought about doing the NPR thing where I like read you a passage, but I just, I realized like, I don't have that arrow in my quiver. I don't know how to do that. So I'll leave that, I'll leave that to them, but it's beautiful. And you look, a clear lesson from

the book is what you were just talking about. I mean, we have to confront and learn from our history, especially the legacy of slavery in the United States and how it impacts basically everything around us. And there are times I imagine, well, I know that that process is painful. And one location that I found personally sort of painful to read about was Angola Prison. And I wanted to maybe start there with a two-part question for you. I mean, one, what was just the emotional impact of this journey on you? Because a lot of these places were, I don't know, for lack of a better word, evil. for lack of a better word, evil. And then can you tell listeners a bit about Angola Prison and what its existence says about the links between slavery and mass incarceration today? For sure. So for context, Angola Prison is the largest maximum security prison in the country. It is 18,000 acres wide, bigger than the island of Manhattan. It is a place where 75% of the people held there

are Black men. Over 70% of them are serving life sentences, many for things that they did as children. And it is built on top of a forward plantation. And what I tell folks is that if you were to go to Germany and you had the largest maximum security prison in Germany, and it was built on top of a former concentration camp in which the people held there were disproportionately Jewish, that place would so rightfully and clearly be a global emblem of anti-Semitism. It'll be abhorrent. It'll be disgusting. We would never allow a place like that to exist, and we never should. And if they did, people would be protesting outside of it every day, and they'd be completely right to do so because it would run counter to all of our moral and ethical sensibilities. But here in the US, we have the largest maximum security prison in the country,

in which the vast majority of people held there are Black men serving life sentences who go out into fields that were once a plantation every day and work for virtually no pay while someone watches them on horseback with a gun over their shoulder. And so part of what I'm thinking about when I go to a place like Angola is like, what are the ways that white supremacy and the history of white supremacy not only enacts physical violence against people's bodies, but also collectively numbs us to certain types of violences that in another global context would be wildly and so clearly unacceptable? And what does it mean that that place has a museum that doesn't mention the word slavery at all? What does it mean that that museum that

again is attached to a prison has a gift shop where they sell paraphernalia of that prison, coffee mugs and shot glasses and sweatshirts that are almost, you know, there's one that says, there's one mug that has the silhouette of a watchtower and Angola. And you can see the sort of small silhouette of the man or the guard holding a gun. And above and below the mug, it says, Angola, a gated community. And so it's not only that they are not confronting this history, but almost making a mockery of the conditions that thousands of people continue to live in today. And so, you know, I could have written a whole book, honestly, about my experience at Angola, which is just a wild, unsettling and haunting place.

And to the other part of your question, I mean, it is hard to, in some ways, to think about this history all the time and to confront the structures and the places and the land that brings back the memories of, you know, in the case and the places and the land that brings back the memories of, in the case of a place like a plantation, that was a torture site, which was an intergenerational site of torture. But the thing I also tell folks is that this book at times was certainly hard to write, but it was also profoundly emancipatory and really liberating, right? Because the more you learn about the history of this country, the less this country can lie to you

about why it is the way it is. The sort of myth of meritocracy dissolves. You begin to more fully understand that the reason one community looks one way and another community looks another way is not because of the people in those communities, but it is because of a history of things that have been done to those communities, generation after generation after generation. And I think that certainly doesn't end with slavery, but slavery being something that existed in this country for 250 years and has only not existed for around 150. So the idea that this institution that existed for a century longer than it hasn't would have no impact on what the contemporary landscape of inequality looks like is both morally and intellectually disingenuous.

And part of what I wanted the reader to do was not only feel like a physical proximity to these places and a sort of sensory proximity, but also like a temporal proximity, right? Like there are people alive today who had relationships with, who were raised by, who loved people who were born into slavery. The woman who opened the National Museum of African American History and Culture in 2016 alongside the Obama family, who rang the bell to sort of signal the opening of this museum, was the daughter of an enslaved person. Not the granddaughter or the great- great granddaughter, but like the granddaughter of someone who had been born into slavery. And so, you know, we talk about slavery, like it was this thing in the Jurassic era, like it was dinosaurs and the Flintstones

and slavery, you know, like, but, but this history in the scope of human history, slavery was just yesterday. And I really want the reader to feel the closeness of our society. And to your point that every part of our social, economic, and political infrastructure is informed by or built out of that system. Yeah. And Jim Crow is even more recently. And to your point about the need to confront this history, I mean, your book, countless other scholars have just thoroughly documented the fact that the Civil War was about slavery. You can quote from the vice president of the Confederacy. You can quote from senators at the time. You do quote from Confederate declarations of secession.

It's not debatable, but there has been this concerted effort to reframe the Civil War and the Confederacy as being about sovereignty or heritage, not hate, right? That's like the tagline. And it's part of this whole curriculum of lies about the institution of slavery itself. I'd add into that that like most slave masters were good, caring people, right? And that people were happy during that time, right? And so you visit the cemetery for Confederate veterans that I think really epitomizes the lost cause propaganda. I was hoping you could explain a bit about the history of the lost cause and how successful you think that propaganda effort has or has not been. Yeah. I mean, the lost cause is wild. And what's

as wild is the way that we see sort of contemporary parallels to it. So you mentioned Alexander Stevens, the vice president of the Confederacy. So, you know, he wrote in his infamous cornerstone speech, in essence that, that slavery is the cornerstone upon which this new nation will be built. And it is founded on the belief that the, that the African and that black people are inherently inferior to white people.

And he said this and it was well quoted and well documented in newspapers across the country. After the Civil War, after the war ended in 1865, Alexander Stevens was like, I never said that. What are you talking about? And everybody's like, wait, we were there. It was in the paper.

Everybody knows that. You say he's like, no, no, no. I don't know what you're talking about. I never said anything like that. And it is this sort of 19th century iteration of gaslighting where we are being where people were like told that this thing that they saw and this thing that they knew was not true. examples. But I think that the playbook is one that is centuries in the making. And the Lost Cause is generally this idea that the United Daughters of the Confederacy, people who were Confederate widows and mothers and daughters, that they created alongside the Sons of Confederate veterans and other organizations, but largely the United Daughters of the Confederacy, created an effort to say that, one, to your point, the Civil War wasn't about slavery. In any way, slavery wasn't even that bad. It was a benevolent institution that Senator John Calhoun of South Carolina would say was a positive good for both Black and white

people alike. Ulrich B. Phillips is this historian who sort of propagated lost cause mythology throughout the early 20th century, which a lot of people don't realize was like the predominant narrative around slavery until the civil rights movement, is this idea that like plantations were civilizing institution, that Black people were better off here

after having been stolen and separated from their families than they were in Africa. And it wasn't until the civil rights movement that that narrative began to shift and that scholars came and began to center the origins of inequality between Black and white people in America in slavery in ways that hadn't been done before. And I see a lot of parallels to what's, you know, the way that Black Lives Matter as a social movement has shifted the discourse around how we think about the history of race and racism today. You know, like, I don't know that we would be,

that the conversation around the pandemic would have been happened or framed in the way that it was had activists and organizers not been doing what they had been doing for the past several years, which allowed us to understand and frame, not in every place, but in more places, the pandemic is something that was shaping or that the pandemic was shaped by and the people being disproportionately impacted by the pandemic was something that was shaped by systemic and historical factors rather than personal decisions or personal failures. Right, right. Yeah, no, I couldn't help but draw the parallel between the lost cause and the big lie and the 2020 election lie. And just kind of wonder, like, is this a human thing? Or are we Americans just more susceptible to believing these disinformation campaigns? And

it also made me wonder if, you know, if you think that the, you know, really angry fight we're seeing from conservatives about the 1619 project in critical race theory. Is that just the latest iteration of the lost cause? Or do you think this is something new? How do you think about that? I mean, I think that for me, part of what we see happening is a recognition from a large portion of this country. One that like, I mean, they, they peddled in fear, right? And so like fear and like, you know, the fear that, you know, someone like Mickey Haley would say is like, they want to teach your child that they are racist and that they're inherently racist, which is not what critical race theory is and not what these teachers and

educators throughout the country who are doing remarkable work are trying to do. But there's a recognition that if people understand that the institution of slavery, alongside Native genocide, alongside the way that multiple groups of immigrant communities were treated when they were first brought to this country, if people understand that history, they will begin to look around and understand, again, like I said, that the reason one community looks one way and another community looks another way is not because of the people or the decisions in that community that are made in the community, but it's what has been done to that community. And that undermines the entire narrative of this country. It undermines the idea that you can have anything you want if you work hard enough. And that hard work is the single most important thing, because you can have two young people who work equally as hard, but who grow up in a fundamentally different set of circumstances based on nothing that they have done in their lifetime, based on historical factors that shaped what their communities look like and what their families communities look like long before they were even born. And they can work equally as hard as one another. But that hard work bears fruit in fundamentally different ways because of the capital or lack

thereof, or the resources or lack thereof, or the safety or lack thereof. And as we said, every part of our economic, social, and political infrastructure is born out of this institution that existed longer than the country existed, right? Like slavery existed for years before centuries, more than a century before the United States even became the United States. And so we cannot understand this country without understanding the way it was shaped by slavery. And once you understand the way that it is shaped by slavery and racism and Jim Crow and slave codes and black codes and continues to be shaped by mass incarceration and housing discrimination, then it undermines

the story that one has told themselves about themselves in this country and why they do or don't have the things that they do. Yeah. I mean, speaking of stories, we tell ourselves about ourselves. I mean, I grew up in Massachusetts, which obviously has had enormous problems with racism, segregation over the years. book takes us on a tour of New York that I think shows how wrong that sentiment is. Can you tell us a bit about that tour you took through Manhattan and slavery's roots in the Northern States? Yeah. So I went on a tour led by a woman, Damaris Obie, in Manhattan, who does a history of slavery and the Underground Railroad in New York. And I wanted to make sure that I was not centering the book only on states and cities in the South, because to your point, it was saturated in the South, given the reliance of the South on slavery's economic and social realities. But

it also existed in New York, not just in a way that benefited them financially, which is true, through the banks, through the manufacturing industry, there had to be a place where they sent the cotton from the United States to Europe and elsewhere. But people don't realize that for an extended period of time, New York City was the second largest slave port in the country after Charleston, South Carolina. Or that Fernando Wood, who was the mayor of New York City on the eve of the Civil War, was basically like, hey, y'all, I think we should secede from the union because our interests are thoroughly aligned and entangled with the South. And if we get rid of slavery, then what's going to happen to us? Because New York City's financial circumstances and so many of the financial powerhouses who live there, their wealth was deeply entangled in slavery to the point where the mayor of financial circumstances and so many of the financial powerhouses um who lived there their

wealth was deeply entangled in slavery to the point where the mayor of that city proposed and it ultimately didn't work out this way but proposed that they secede from the union after they saw south carolina secede in 1861 and so it is important that we recognize the sort of the way that culpability is not singularly in the South, right? That like this was a national problem. And the same way that I went to New York, I could have gone to Boston. I could have gone to Connecticut. I could have gone to California. I could have gone to Oregon. And you can write, you know, many scholars have written so many important books on the history of slavery in these different regions across the country. And not only, again, how they benefited from it financially, but how like enslaved people were physically there. Like

enslaved people lived in New York and were taught, you know, if you think about how I was taught, I was made to think that, you know, there was no enslaved person above the Mason-Dixon line, and that New York has always been this bastion of cosmopolitanism and these people who always had their moral sensibilities oriented in the right direction. But there were a lot of slaves and a lot of enslaved folks in New York City and other places in the North, and I think it's important for us to reckon with that. Yeah. And by the way, some of the tour guides in this book are like the heroes. Oh, absolutely. The woman you just mentioned in New York, there were some interactions at Monticello in Virginia

where ordinary people who I imagine aren't getting paid a ton of money are just speaking really hard truths to people who don't want to hear it. And I was, I don't know, I was just kind of inspired by the daily challenge and courage behind those conversations. Yeah, I mean, Damaris Obie in New York, David Thurston at Monticello, Yvonne Holding at the Whitney Plantation. I mean, just so many folks, you know, part of what I wanted this book to do was I wanted it to be like an homage and an ode in some ways to those public historians who don't, you know, they're not getting Pulitzer Prizes. They're not winning National Book Awards. They're not, you know, featured on on The Daily Show or anything else that that can happen to, you know, that still doesn't happen to many historians, to be sure. that can happen to, you know, that still doesn't happen to many historians to be sure, but like their, their work, I think is often taken for granted by, from many people. But the reality is that, I mean, like hundreds of thousands of people go to Monticello every year, or at least did before the pandemic. And I think that, you know, hopefully we'll continue to as we move out

of this, but like, there are more people who go to monticello every year than who read any book about the history of slavery you know right and so like any book or any but you know unless it's like michelle obama's book exactly right unless you're becoming um and and so there's just this really unique opportunity that these places have to tell the story of slavery in a 45 or 60 or 90 minute tour to a group of people who might never open a book about thomas jefferson and his relationship to slavery who might never open a book about the hemmings family who might never have heard of um the hemmings i mean i think about the people that i met when i went to monticello and i met these two women donna and grace who were on my slavery of Monticello tour.

And I went up to them after and started talking to them and they were like, I had no idea that Jefferson owned slaves. I had no idea that Monticello was a plantation. And these are people who like bought plane tickets, got a hotel room, rented cars, bought tickets to come to this place and had no conception of this place as the home of someone who enslaved human beings and it's a sort of microcosm of this like deep failure throughout our country to have a sort of collective understanding of what slavery was and how it shaped our founding and also how it shapes our world today and it was an important reminder for me just personally i I think I can, you know, many of positive America listeners will likely know, you know, Thomas Jefferson known enslaved people. And that's something that we are having more honest conversation about these days, certainly in the last five years, last decade, and more so than before, again,

in part tied to the work of Black Lives Matter um and that sort of broad social movement but it was an important reminder that there are still millions and millions and millions of people across this country who like just literally have no idea um and and that's not to say you know i don't know that like after those two women heard this tour that like their politics began to shift or their understand you know or that it shaped the way that they voted. We, you know, David doesn't have control over that. I don't have control over that. None of us have control over that. But but I think we do need to take seriously the idea that there's just a lot of information that a lot of people don't know. And that some people will continue to move through the world as they would have moved through before once they encountered that information.

But I think others, it has the possibility to change how they understand this country and change how they understand themselves in relationship to this country. And it's not to say that education will get rid of racism, not at all. education will get rid of racism, not at all. But I do think we should not take for granted that because of the sort of residue of the lost cause and the success of that effort, that there are just a lot of people who don't learn a lot about slavery other than your sort of the name Harriet Tubman or the name Frederick Douglass. And there's a real opportunity to, I think, reach folks, whether they go to a plantation or read a book or listen to a podcast or watch a YouTube documentary or whatever, and sort of reach them where they are and not antagonize them for not knowing something,

but to sort of meet them where they are and say, like, this is new information that you should take seriously because this is the story of this country. Yeah. And by the way, it was also very interesting to see some of the parallel conversations that you were a part of in Senegal about accurate information, disinformation, renaming streets the same way we're talking about renaming streets about Confederates there. I'll force readers to buy the book to read more about that, but it was really, truly fascinating part of it. Again, the book is How the Word Has Passed. You mentioned Black Lives Matter. I mean, this is the one-year anniversary of George Floyd's murder. What do you think has changed, and what do you think we've learned about the country's willingness to address or talk about

racial inequities in this country? Yeah. I mean, there was a New York Times piece that I was reading just this morning, I think, that talked about how after George Floyd, there was this sort of skyrocketing of support for Black Lives Matter. And then more recently, among certain groups of people, it is profoundly dropped off. And I can't say- Especially white voters, right? Yeah, specifically white voters. And so I don't know that that necessarily surprises me,

because I think when you have an entire media infrastructure and the infrastructure of an entire political party that is dedicated to misrepresenting and making a caricature of a social movement that is actually just intended to build a more just and equitable world that that is what is going to happen um and but you know and also that not to say that that only impacts conservatives because i think that also trickles into and informs the way that like, you know, even some liberal voters think about these things. But I think it would be wrong to say that things have not changed. I think that there are more people who are cognizant of racism, not just as an interpersonal phenomenon, but as a systemic one, as a historical one, as one that is shaped by policy and not simply people

and like somebody being mean to another person. A thing that I tell people sometimes is like, if you would ask somebody in 2013, what is redlining? They would have said, it's a type of makeup or it's a type of lipstick. And I think the fact that like in our democratic primaries, people are talking about systemic racism. People are talking about reparations. People are talking about the racial wealth gap. And, you know, we can have, you know, we don't have enough time to talk about

like the nature of performative politics and the nature of, you know, whether it's of good faith or not. But I think that it matters, right? Like our discourse has shifted. And I think we have in some spaces, a more sophisticated lexicon with which to name and identify the reality of how racism has shaped this world. And it's something that, I mean, I think I look back at kids who go to the high school that I went to in New Orleans and like the way that they are able to talk about these issues is just like light years

beyond anything that I was able to say or understand when I was 15, 16 years old. And so I think that means something. I think social media plays a huge role in it. I think it gives access to more information to younger people and to more people generally, meets them where they are. Obviously, there are issues with disinformation and misinformation. But I do think that we're in a better place than we were, but that doesn't mean that we're in a good place. And so I think there's still a lot of work to do. And obviously, George Floyd, you know, he did not choose to die. He did not want to be a martyr.

He was a father and a son and a friend who we all should wish was still alive today and most certainly whose family wishes he was still alive today. And I think that, you know, even those people who become, whose legacies become bigger than themselves, I think it's always important for us to remind ourselves that they were people, first and foremost. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And I think, you know, obviously, a lot of the debate has focused around how to prevent the next George Floyd from being murdered by the police. how to prevent the next George Floyd from being murdered by the police. And I think, like stepping back a little bit, like there is considerable evidence that throughout the history of the United States,

police forces have been the drivers of state-sanctioned violence against black communities, not the protectors, right? This isn't an issue of bad apples or bad precincts. It's much more foundational than that. And I think clearly that the knowledge of that history informs the defund the police movement. I think it's also a historical fact in this country that people of all races, when they get scared, they are more likely to listen to demagogues and support draconian

terrible policies, right? You can draw a line from Nixon and like law and order to the crime bill in the nineties to like post 9-11 counterterrorism architecture. And so what I'm constantly trying to figure out is, okay, how do I acknowledge both of those truths and then find a way to advance policy ideas that actually deal with the underlying problems? And I'm like struggling with this because you're starting to see more reporting on violent crime going up in 2020. And you're seeing communities that are refunding police forces, then you're seeing reactionary politicians blaming everything on the defund movement. And I'm struggling with the best way to have this conversation so that we don't fall

into these traps. We don't fall into Fox News or make the same mistakes on policy. And I just wonder, do you have thoughts about how to manage that? Yeah, I mean, I think it's important to like look to experts and not soundbites when we think about something like crime. You know, so crime has gone did go up in 2020. And, you know, there are people who will say that that is and who have said that that is the result of the defund the police or the abolish the police movement. the defund the police or the abolish the police movement. But like the crime has gone up in places that have like given more money to police. Right. So this is not, this is not happening simply in places that have like taken funding from the police department and moved it somewhere else.

This is happening across the board and obviously cannot be, yeah, obviously can't be disentangled from the fact that we're living through a global play, you know, in which people have lost their jobs and which kids have been out of school. I mean, I was a high school English teacher for for a few years before I started graduate school and then and writing full time. But like, I can't I can't. Overstate how destabilizing it is for like young for so many of our young people, like not to be physically going to school and every day, how destabilizing it is for like young, for so many of our young people, like not to be physically going to school and every day, how, how destabilizing it is to the routine that, that an entire sort of network of families and communities rely on. Right. And it has been well

reported by journalists and scholars over the course of the past year, how difficult, uh, you know, zoom school has been for so many. And that there are millions of kids who just stopped going to school, right? Because they don't have the infrastructure in their home. They live in intergenerational homes where people, they don't have access to internet or they only have access to one computer

or they have to try to find a job so that they can work to bring in new income so that they're not evicted from their homes. I mean, schools are part of this sort of, as you know, this the threat of eviction, living through the pandemic, having to work these frontline jobs, people getting sick, people trying to prevent their family from getting sick. And so not doing things or not making decisions, not going places and the sort of general sense of desperation that it causes and fear. that it causes and fear, right? I think, you know, so many people don't take seriously that like a lot of the violence that we see,

especially young people engaging in is like born out of fear and born out of a sense, an attempt to protect themselves and keep their bodies safe. You know, you can't talk about gang violence without talking about how these gangs are emerging in

communities where there is little access to any sort of social infrastructure or foundation that would give them the sort of financial stability, the social stability that would be necessary so that people don't feel like they have to join a gang to protect themselves or to find some entry point into a job that doesn't pay them below living wage or all sorts of things. We have to be precise and we have to provide context. And we also have to recognize that like even the best scholars around of criminology like don't have have disagreements about like what specific things like call have causal relationships to crime and this is something we've talked about over the past few years with mass incarceration like there isn't a relationship between incarcerating more people and crime, like going up or down, you know? So it's not a matter of like, if you put more people

in prison, then crime will go down. Or if you put less people are in prison, then crime goes up. The world is complex and society is complex. And the best things we can do are provide people with the things that they need so that they don't feel desperate and that they don't make decisions based in desperation or fear, but instead are making decisions that are shaped and animated by what it means to have all the things that you need to be a person in the world. Yeah. And by the way, that point you made about the challenge of figuring out a causal relationship between events or policies and crime is historically true as well. I mean, when we talk about the drop in crime since seventies or the eighties, no one really knows

exactly what happened or why there's lots of debates, right? Some people say lead paint or lead in gasoline, a whole bunch of other issues. So yeah, I just think it's sort of incumbent upon all of us to sort of constantly try to paint a picture of a better tomorrow where we have solved these problems. We have thought of more creative ways to keep people safe and not just done the same things over and over again because Fox News scared us or whatever. A couple more questions for you. So there's a lot of like joyful moments in the book. One of them is around Juneteenth. It's an incredibly moving visit to Galveston, Texas, where the tradition and the story of Juneteenth begins. You meet these just like, again, it's just these like average, amazing, inspiring people who have kept this

tradition alive. And you have this cathartic experience singing with some of them. Can you give us like a little history of Juneteenth and what it meant for you to be with that group of people in those moments? Yeah. So Juneteenth, for those who might not know, is a holiday that is more popular now than it was a year ago. But that marks the moment and the day that General Granger of the Union Army came to Galveston, Texas, and told the 250,000 enslaved people in Texas that they were free. And he did so through an important proclamation. And this was two years after the Emancipation Proclamation and two months after General Lee surrendered at Appomattox, effectively ending the Civil War.

And so it's this thing that is both, to my mind, something that is worthy of mourning. We should mourn the fact that there are hundreds of thousands of people who were kept in bondage even when bondage was no more, or even after the Civil War, after the Emancipation Proclamation, after the Civil War had ended. And also this moment of celebration, right? Because this thing that had defined our country, again, before it was even a country, had been abolished. And the fact that Juneteenth is not a national holiday, I have a lot of words for it. I'm a dad now, so I try to keep it PG. But I mean, it's abhorrent. The idea that we don't have a moment to celebrate the end of one of the worst things our country has ever done, I think reflects really poorly on us. And one of the things that's

so amazing about this event that I went to in Galveston was that it was, you know, this community of folks who were in this building where, you know, the sort of scholars debate of like have debate about whether where General Granger like made the and symbolism and how sometimes symbolism can be just as powerful as an empirical reality. And so it's in this place called Ashton Villa. And the story goes that he stood on the terrace of Ashton Villa and read this proclamation aloud. And so people, hundreds of people meet inside for Al Edwards prayer breakfast. And Al Edwards is the legislator in, or was, he just recently passed in Texas who made Juneteenth a state holiday in Texas over 40 years ago. And there was this moment where everybody was singing, stood up and started singing the Black National Anthem, lift every voice and sing. And, you know, I grew up in attending a Black church and around Black people and Black ceremonies and communities.

And so I've heard this song, you know, thousands of times, it feels like. But I can't tell you, it was such a moving experience to be standing in that place on that day, surrounded by people who were the descendants of people who had been told that day and made clear by that proclamation that they were no longer enslaved. To stand alongside them, to watch them as they sang these words that were clearly not just words, right? They were not just abstractions. They were not just lyrics. They were something that was tangible. And then, you know, we were talking about proximity that like make us more proximate to what happened both in the physical place that we were standing

on the island where we were, but in that state and in this country as a whole. And I think, you know, art and literature and songs and music have always and continue to have a really amazing way of making us feel that sort of emotional proximity to something that might have happened long before we were even alive. And I felt that in a deep way in that moment and in a way that it stayed with me since then. Well, it was also one of the moments in the book where the writing and the way you set the scene, it really did make me feel like I was either, you know, sitting next to you or like somehow watching you sort of be there in that moment and feel the music. So it's just a truly beautiful moment in an extraordinary book. How the Word is Passed. Everybody should buy it. Buy a copy for your

friends. Buy a copy for your enemies. There you go. Thank you so much. Thank you so much for doing the show. Thank you for this great work. And I really for your enemies um thank you so much thank you so much for doing the show thank you for this great work and uh i really appreciate the conversation thank you so much tommy it's been uh it's been a pleasure thanks to clint for joining us today great interview and everyone have a great weekend we will talk to you next week bye everyone pod save america is a crooked media. The executive producer is Michael Martinez. Our senior producer is Flavia Casas. Our associate producers are Jazzy Marine and Olivia Martinez.

It's mixed and edited by Andrew Chadwick. Kyle Seglin is our sound engineer. Thanks to Tanya Somenator, Katie Long, Roman Papadimitriou, Caroline Rustin, and Justine Howe for production support. And to our digital team, Elijah Cohn, Nar Melkonian, Yale Freed and Milo Kim who film and upload these episodes as videos every week