Pod Save America - “The dog whistle is now a bullhorn.”

Episode Date: August 17, 2017

Trump’s press conference goes off the rails as he defends the ‘fine people’ who were chanting Nazi slogans in Charlottesville, and the world reacts to the madness. Then Jon and Dan talk to VICE News Tonight correspondent Elle Reeve about her Charlottesville reporting, as well as the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Lecia Brooks about the rise of white supremacist extremism. 

Welcome to Pod Save America. I'm Jon Favreau. I'm Dan Pfeiffer. On today's show, we will be joined by Vice News Tonight correspondent Ellie Reeve. She is still in Charlottesville. She's been there since Friday covering the events. She has an outstanding Vice special on what's been going on in Charlottesville that everyone should watch. It's been viewed more than 23 million times on Facebook right now, so everyone go check it out if you haven't seen it. We're also going to be talking about the rise of extremism and white supremacy with Leisha Brooks of the Southern Poverty Law Center. So,

big show today. Before we begin, we're going on tour, Dan. Pod Tours America. I know. I'm excited. Yeah, it's going to be very exciting. If you guys go to crooked.com slash tour and enter the code crooked for the pre-sale, we have tickets on sale now for all of the events we'll be doing in October, November, and December. In October, November, and December, we've got events in Madison, Ann Arbor, Cleveland, Chicago, Philly, D.C., Richmond, Santa Barbara, Sacramento, and Oakland. The first response from a lot of people is like, why aren't you going to this city? Why aren't you going to this city? We're going to a lot of cities. In 2018, if your city's not on the list this time around for the next three months, it's probably going to be on the list in 2018. Should you just apologize to boston now yeah we had you know what and the original draft of the

schedule boston was in december but we had to change it up a little bit just for scheduling because because it was boston in december that that might have been one of the reasons yeah well we had some people traveling for the holidays and it was just a lot but we are getting to boston so just for all the boston people so everyone it's a crooked.com slash tour again code is crooked and then i think general sales go on sale friday general ticket sales are friday so also check out tommy's pod save the world this week he talks to former secretary of homeland security janet napolitano about her efforts to combat right-wing extremists when she was uh homeland security secretary in the obama administration he's also joined by deputy ci director david cohen anna marie cox

is talking to jane coaston and tom nichols on with friends like these which drops tomorrow so um big week for crooked media pods also happy birthday to John Lovett today. Oh, really? Yeah, he's not even coming into the office. He's coming into the studio to tape the ads. We already did them. So probably because he's sleeping late because it's his birthday and he deserves it.

So it's Lovett's birthday today. Happy birthday, Lovett. Yeah. Lovett and I had a blast at Alphalance, San Francisco on Friday. He said that you two and holly uh really had some fun yeah we went out to mexican afterwards we got to try delicious barbecue from some friends of the pod at south paul barbecue i mean amazing like we benefited greatly from tribe called quest

bailing at the last minute so it really i heard about that the number one act uh at that time well good job good job there okay enough talking about fun stuff. Now we have to talk about daily reality that is politics. So this morning, Trump is tweeting about how we can never replace the beauty of Confederate monuments, which, you know, if you were just waking up after a week of sleep, you might say, how did we get here? What? So let's begin with Trump's infrastructure press conference on Tuesday, which went slightly off the rails and led Glenn Thresh and Maggie Haberman of the New York Times to pen the following lead. President Trump buoyed the white nationalist movement on Tuesday as no

president has done in generations, equating activists protesting racism with the neo-Nazis and white supremacists who rampaged in charlottesville virginia over the weekend dan did you watch this press conference live and what was your reaction i did um first i want to say we criticize you know both sides journalism where people sort of soft pedal things. And kudos to the New York Times for calling this exactly what it is and making the point that there is no other side

to the white supremacy argument and not treating it as if it's a debate over infrastructure policy. It's a moral issue. And like that was a powerful lead. And there were many ways to soft pedal that and try to treat it as a this side versus that side or he said she said and they did that right they perfectly met the awful moment i thought in uh with that story i did watch it and it was just he's just there he's

in trump tower lobby he's surrounded by the wife of his arch enemy, Mitch McConnell. Notice globalist cuck, Gary Cohn. Steve Mnookin. Other globalist cuck, Steve Mnookin. And he's just talking about infrastructure, which is something presidents do a lot. And every word, once he started talking about this issue, it got crazier. Like, you thought, it was like, oh, that's a terrible thing. He didn't really want to say what he said on Monday, so he went back to a Saturday statement,

which is offensive and horrendous, but not super surprising. And then he went so much further than that. And you couldn't believe it as it was happening. I mean, I expected, as the press conference began, that the more questions he took, the angrier he'd get, and the greater the chance he'd say something really stupid and repugnant. I did not expect it to be quite so stupid and repugnant. At first, he's like, I'm just going to reread the Saturday statement, and then he seems to get a little angrier, and then the reporters keep pressing him, and then at one point you see him just sort of lose it and think fuck this i'm going to say whatever i want to say it's important to start by pointing out that very little of what trump said about charlottesville

was true uh he said that that not all of the protesters there were neo-nazis and white supremacists and some were very fine people who were quote innocently protesting and twice he mentioned the torture rally on friday night as evidence of this but like anyone can see from the video footage if you watch the vice video footage that this isn't true you can see the confederate flags and the hitler salutes you can hear hundreds of them chanting the nazi saying blood and soil jews will not replace us you can hear them screaming gay and racial epithets. There was no other group of protesters. And if you're just an ordinary citizen who came to peacefully protest the removal of a statue,

and you're surrounded by a bunch of assholes with guns doing Hitler salutes and screaming Jews will not replace us, you either leave or you're not that innocent. And it's like, and last night, I don't know if you saw the gathering last night in Charlottesville. It was a vigil and a march. When the Nazis and white supremacists didn't show up to that, there was no violence. It was completely peaceful. It's very obvious that there were not innocent people in this protesting these Confederate statues. It was a gathering for Nazis and white supremacists. I mean, it's also important to note that Confederate statue is the excuse. It is not the reason they were there. It was an opportunity to all show up and be racist. Like it was not, this is not some long held belief of theirs. And it's just mind boggling that we are having it that the President of the United States is having a debate about the culpability between two groups when one of them is nazis like it's just so fucking crazy it's hard to possibly fathom like there is no there are no two sides of this like we live in a very polarized country

but you would think the one thing that the overall majority of people including the president states could agree on is that nazis are wrong and the other people are probably right. Full stop. Full stop. I mean, and you have to, so you have to wonder, like, he gets all these facts wrong. He just, you know, comes up with this alternative story of what happened in Charlottesville. Like, where is the president of the United States getting his information from? And then you realize, as Ashley Feinberg of Wired wrote a story about this noted that almost everything he said in his press conference came directly from fox news all i am fucking shocked but it's important because the way that fox talks about this which is not you know so overt that

they're saying no no we we agree with the white supremacists and the neo-nazis it's democrats are using race and identity politics as a wedge issue this is the leftist mobs were just as violent there were some innocent people there on the right just talking you know that high-minded debates about confederate statues right that's how this is filtered through fox and it's not just getting to the president and where he speaks about it in front of the whole country, which is shocking and awful enough. It's also that's what millions and millions of people around the country who watch Fox and other or get their news from other right wing. That's how they're processing what's happened. So it's no wonder they have a distorted view of what happened. And this is not something that happened when Donald Trump decided to get off the celebrity apprentice and run for office. Right. This is the strategy of the Republican Party going back to the age of Richard Nixon. And Roger Ailes, who essentially started Fox News, ran the George H.W. Bush campaign against Michael Dukakis. And George H.W. Bush is a truly decent human being. But he ran a

campaign ad called the Willie Horton ad, which is one of the most racist ads to ever be on television until Donald Trump showed up. And Roger Ailes ran that. And the whole point of it is white people should be scared of non white people. And then he started Fox News. And that has been the argument of the Republican Party and Fox News with Fox News in the charge for decades now the idea that non white people are getting your tax dollars and not working the Reagan idea idea of welfare queens, the idea that there are these undocumented people storming across the border to commit crimes, to be rapists, as Donald Trump called them, to take jobs that hardworking white people want, the idea that there are Muslims in our communities who want to behead us.

This has been the argument they're making. So it's no surprise that this is where we ended up. And they have been sort of riding a tiger for decades now. And this is the inevitable end result of their strategy. It is not surprising at all. What's surprising is that the president of the United States is now part and parcel of that whole strategy in the most overt way possible. In some would say a sloppy way, right? It's not even like there's a wink and a nod anymore.

It's just, it's out there. This is not a dog whistle. This is a bullhorn. It's a bullhorn. Can we talk about the statute debate, though? Because, like, some conservatives await in saying, well, they shouldn't be taken down. It's erasing history. It's a complicated debate.

All that kind of stuff. and down. It's erasing history. It's a complicated debate, all that kind of stuff. Here's the thing I want to talk about, which is statues don't just ask us to remember people. They ask us to celebrate people. That's why you build a statue. We don't build, people have pointed this out online, but we don't build statues of Hitler to memorialize the Holocaust. We don't build statues of Osama bin Laden to memorialize 9-11. We have 300 years of history in this country and we really want statues in our cities that forever memorialize the four years

when a group of white Americans fought against the United States in order to keep black Americans enslaved. That's what we want to put in our public parks. We can't think of any other cities. Like, you could take... It's not about erasing history, you could take those statues and you

can put them in a museum along with the Confederate flag, which is where that all belongs, and then people can learn about that when they go to the museum and they can learn about their history. Putting a statue in a public square in our cities and our parks, that says that we're celebrating something. And the Confederacy

is literally nothing to celebrate. It was a rebellion against the united states america for the purpose of defending the institution of slavery that's what it was and it would be one thing this would be a a more nuanced debate if these were statues that were built in the 1860s they were not they were not they were built in the 1960s why are they built in the 1860s. They were not. They were not. They were built in the 1960s. Why were they built in the 1960s? Because that's when the Civil Rights Movement happened, and they wanted... So the response to that is to go back

and celebrate the days of slavery. It was actually... There was a big surge of that was before that. It was during Reconstruction, and the biggest surge of Confederate monument building coincided with the biggest surge of confederate monument building coincided with the biggest surge of lynchings and the resurgence of the kkk after reconstruction once the jim crow era started and then there was another surge like you said right before this i mean you can look at

the charts and those surges of building coincide with some of the most you know hateful periods in our history yes the more pissed off that people got about African-Americans or other groups getting more rights, the more statues that were built. It seems like that's something we should not celebrate. No. I saw this theory online, which is that one of the reasons

that Trump cares about this so much is he's very worried about his statue being torn down one day. Guess what? There will be no Donald Trump statue statue that is not a thing that will happen so do not worry sir this is not a problem that's going to affect you i certainly hope not so let's talk about and then every oh then there's the then there's the slippery slope argument which trump has been making too like oh you know if we tear down all the confederate statues and when do we stop why don't we tear down a george washington statue or thomas jefferson statue since they were slave holders it's like my response to that is you know what let's start with the confederate statues

let's take them down and then you can have some other debate like george washington thomas jefferson obviously slave owners but like we're talking about people with redeeming qualities with things that we can also with with qualities and achievements that we can also celebrate, even as they have qualities that we can criticize. There is no redeeming quality. There's nothing to celebrate about Robert E. Lee. He led a rebellion against the United States of America for the purpose of defending the institution of slavery.

It's just... It, have you seen the polling that shows that majorities of americans oppose the pulling down of these and you know my response to that is i don't care yeah i mean i do not care that is not the point this is also kind of pulling like a lot of to a lot of people's credit they hadn't really thought about it for a long time and they probably haven't thought about i bet opinions in a couple weeks after this will be much more sharply i bet not as many people will be opposed because now people are going to because of what we've seen over the last couple weeks people are going to associate this with what they saw the hate that they saw in charlottesville

so this is i'd love to like dig into more polling on this because i think a lot of people probably were like well i haven't given much thought to this you know and again i tweeted about this the other day you should take a look at read mitch lander the mayor of new orleans's speech uh after new orleans took down their confederate monuments which only happened a couple months ago it's a very very powerful speech one of the best speeches i've read in years. And he makes a very good case for why these monuments should be taken down. And he makes that case as a Southerner. So it's a good read.

Yeah, it's a great speech. So let's talk about the reaction to Trump's press conference, which has unfolded over the last couple of days. Again, I'll go with the New York Times, their lead last night. President Trump found himself increasingly isolated in a racial crisis of his own making on Wednesday. couple days again i'll go with the new york times their lead last night president trump found himself increasingly isolated in a racial crisis of his own making on wednesday abandoned by the nation's top business executives contradicted by military leaders and shunned by republicans

outraged by his defense of white nationalist protesters in charlottesville it's quite a lead we saw you think he was shunned by republicans yeah we should get to that well i want to break out all the different groups here let's talk about the ceos talk about the well so the military was it was a pretty extraordinary day where the heads of the army the air force the navy the marines and the national guard all five armed services chiefs posted statements on social media condemning neo-nazis and racism obviously they didn't call out their commander-in-chief by name, but the fact that they posted those statements is unprecedented. You know, something like that has never happened before. So that was something. CEOs, a couple dozen CEOs from the country's biggest companies

resigned en masse from Trump's economic councils after quite a bit of pressure we should thank the organization the color of change led that fight trump of course tweeted that he dissolved the councils first which is a lie you can't dump me i'm dumping you exactly no and that's and look that is a uh a good that should teach us a lesson, what happened with the CEOs, about the power of public pressure and activism. A lot of these CEOs would not have quit those councils had it not been for all the pressure they received online. And people should know, like a lot of these CEOs, a lot of these companies, they get, they monitor social media. When there's mentions of their CEOs and mentions of their companies, it matters. It makes a difference to them, especially the biggest consumer facing companies. You know, when they

hear from people who were opposed to what Donald Trump did, and those voices are louder than the people supporting him, they're going to make the right decision. Do you think it matters? I think all of this stuff matters. I think to the degree, you know, you can argue about how much it matters. I don't think that a bunch of CEOs jumping off a council, which was largely symbolic, fixes a problem. I think it sends a signal that, you know, that we don't stand, you know, that we can't stand, we don't stand for this, that this is, that we have a line in the sand, and he has crossed that line, and we are not going to associate our companies with this man. I agree with that. I just want to be clear. I do think it matters. And I think it matters for a long lines of what you said, which is, we are living in an, this is abnormal. This is extraordinary, what Trump is doing and saying and the views that he clearly holds.

And for mainstream consumer brands like Pepsi or Campbell's Soup to grant him this patina of normalcy by showing up to a meeting with him, aids and abets a deeply disturbed ideology that is now in the highest seat of power in this country. Yep. I totally agree with that. I mean, we're saying that the president of the United States is a racist, which he has, I believe he has proved over and over again the last couple, in the last week or so. It's hard for people in their minds to see, to hear the president being called a racist or to believe that what he said was racist, at least. And then to see these CEOs from Pepsi and Dell and General Electric and Whirlpool and Johnson & Johnson and all these companies, you know, the pictures of them sitting with him in the White House. Because then you have this cognitive dissonance where you say, well, yeah, maybe it was racist what he said, but all these companies that we know that we buy stuff from, they're sitting with him.

So maybe I'm wrong. Maybe he's not racist. That's why it's important for them to step down. I agree with that. It is not surprising that it took so long, but when you really, they had no other option because I think their employees would have revolted over this, which certainly is what drove a lot of what happened with some of the Silicon Valley companies

in some of the earlier instances of this. But the arguments for staying were so stupid that it's amazing. It took them days to figure, some of these folks, it took days to figure out. Yeah, happy with the outcome, but it was some of them waited a little too long. All right, let's talk about Republicans. So not one, apparently not one Republican would go on television yesterday to defend Donald Trump.

I think Chuck Todd said they invited all 52 Republican senators to come on and defend Trump and not one would do it. And yet, as ThinkProgress noted, only 17 of the 292 congressional Republicans have criticized Trump by name over the last week. So what do you think? I think that we have lowered the bar. The idea that a Republican can put out a statement, like Mitch McConnell, for instance, who leaked to reporters that he was so upset about this. And then he put out a version of verbal applesauce that just said that Nazism and white supremacy were bad without mentioning Trump's name. But like no fucking shit. I know. That is obvious. Like, that is obvious. Like, with like subtweeting Trump.

Well, have the fucking courage to say something about it. Because you know what? They are as responsible for this as Donald Trump. Yeah. Paul Ryan, Mitch McConnell, John Boehner. They all stood by him. They coddled this anger. They knew it was there. And they may not be white supremacists or Nazis or racists themselves, but they sure as fuck wanted the votes of racists. They were willing to tolerate

birtherism in the hopes that would help them win elections. They have allowed people like Steve King, one of the most racist people in America, to be in their caucus, seek out their votes, pat him on the back, eat fucking lunch with him once a week. And this is where we wind up. None of them, with the brief exception of John McCain during the 2008 election, the fucking courage to do anything. All of these people, Mitt Romney himself, who has shown a lot of courage about Trump in recent years, all of those Republicans in 2012 went hat in hand to Trump Tower to kiss the ring after Trump had been a birther for years to seek his endorsement. Reince Priebus sought his support and money. All of these people have, they have known this was happening in their party and done

nothing about it because they thought it helped them politically. So spare me your fucking statements. As you can tell them, I'm worked up about this no man i mean look love it said the other day i think he tweeted this that uh some of these statements reek of bad conference calls you can hear the conference call with all the advisors right like we have to say something the boss has to say something about this should we put trump's name in it i don't want i think they should do that. If they put Trump's name in it, then they're going to be a target. He's going to go after them. I don't think we want to go that far. I think the base is on the other side of this one. I think the base probably likes what he did. So maybe, but you know what, the media is hounding us that we're going to get in trouble if we don't put out any statement at

all. Let's just do a general condemnation of white supremacy and nazism leave it at that we won't mention trump no one will notice we won't get any calls about it right it's low it's lowest common denominator morality it is i mean the most important story in the country right now is that the president united states is defending nazis and white supremacists if you're a politician and your statement doesn't offer a specific view on that, don't bother releasing the statement, you know? And so did you notice that some, that Jerry Nadler, Democratic representative from New York has introduced a resolution of censure against the president.

Censure is basically a formal disapproval that Congress can pass, and they can censure a president, they can censure a fellow member of Congress, a senator, a representative. They're very rare. It's basically like a step below impeachment, right? You don't remove the person from office. If you censure another member of the House or the Senate, they can be removed from various committee chairmanships i think only andrew jackson has been censured they tried to censure bill clinton uh around the monica linsky scandal so anyway nadler has introduced a censure resolution backed by a couple democrats what do you think about this because my thing is like if

you're a republican and jennifer rubin who is a conservative columnist, Washington Post, wrote this yesterday, she goes, if you're a Republican, the only thing that matters is if you sign on to this censure, if you vote to censure the president. Otherwise, your statements don't really matter that much. morally outraged by the president's support of Nazis. It's I mean, that's such a fucking crazy thing to say. But if you were so outraged by it, do something about it. And put your put yourself on record that you disapprove of what Donald Trump said, not the general concept of racism, but of the racist in chief. And if you're willing to do that, that's great. And I think voters should know if you were unwilling to do it. So I think this is the right thing to do. It's a good idea. And let's see how much, how outraged these Republicans really are. Right. Yeah. I mean, put up or shut up. Notice that no one, we talked about the CEOs resigning. Notice no one from the Evangelical Council has resigned. Religious group of people

there. Why is, it is, I want to know why there's not more pressure on these people. Is it just assumed that these faith leaders are going to be totally okay with racism and white supremacy and everything else that has come from Trump? How did, like, I understand why all the pressure was put on the CEOs, but why, like, what is the argument from some of these evangelical leaders why they would stay? And it really goes to some of the real, sort of the tension within, I mean, Trump is a truly immoral human being, yet he got tremendous support from the evangelical community and the evangelical leadership for sure. And it just raises a lot of questions about what is driving their political support.

And if you can't, if one person on that council can't walk away over this. I think I might know some of the answers to those questions. Yeah, yeah. I'm subtweeting them. I don't believe it is their faith. It's a pretty sad, pretty sad state of affairs there. Should we talk about the staff? We have been told by many media outlets,

many anonymous sources and many media outlets, that Gary Cohn was outraged and very angry. He was so outraged and angry, he went right back to his desk and got to work. So Gary's upset.ina powell's upset jared and ivanka they they've been trying to moderate their their father father-in-law you know on this issue but they were on vacation so they really couldn't be bothered i'm just this it makes me so angry because you know what none of this matters these people have no influence

over their boss they can't control them they. They can't persuade him. They can't convince him. He doesn't take their advice. They are useless to talk about anymore. They are useless. I find these people to be morally bankrupt. If you are so upset that you will dispatch your friends or your personal PR firm, wherever the fuck it is to call reports and be more upset you are then fucking quit or shut the fuck up yeah like and at least at least steve bannon is out there just admitting that he's happy about all this on the record you know like he's just like yeah this was this is what i wanted trump killed it in that press conference good for him the rest of them they don't have the courage to talk on the record about how they feel. They just have to go, they have to go call up Jonathan Swan at

Axios and, you know, let them know that people are very upset and they're, or call up the New York Times and call up the Washington Post and go on background anonymously to talk about how upset they are. One of the things that's been bothering me recently is, do you ever remember reading about what Obama, NEC chair, Gene Sperling felt? What his emotions were on any given day? Do you ever remember reading a story about how you felt about some strategic decision or whether I was in a good mood

or I had gone to an office somewhere and feeling isolated. No. I did not. And we are living in this weird reality show with these incompetent people. And the argument for the amount of coverage on the staff from reporters has been, it's important because who's up, who's down, who feels happy, who feels sad, gives you some clue to what the Trump administration is going to do.

And it doesn't. I think it does not. These people are irrelevant. There's only one person that matters, and that person is Donald J. Trump. Whether Steve Bannon is in a good mood, or he's on the rise, or John Kelly is monitoring phone calls, none of it fucking matters. All that matters is Trump. John Kelly is monitoring phone calls.

None of it fucking matters. All that matters is Trump. So let's spend less time trying to read Steve Bannon's mood ring and more times trying to find out what the corruption, the Russia investigation, all the other stuff that is a massive waste of resources in American time. I didn't know whether Steve Bannon, whether Steve Miller is friends with Javanka or Bannon. It's like it is as if the entire media was covering a seventh grade class somewhere. That's right. And look, they do that often. They did that. They do that with every administration, right?

There's more focus on the personalities and the drama and the high school nature of it all. It matters even less in this administration because no one has any influence over donald trump at all he just does whatever he wants to do so we should just stop talking about all of them or at least if you want to go read all that stuff because it's fun soap opera reality tv garbage and you're just interested in that go for it but don't think what you're reading tells you anything about what donald trump is going to do it's like the Real Housewives are destroying our government. So let's talk about, is this a breaking point, what has happened over this week? Has something fundamentally changed?

You know, we should talk about public opinion, because what inevitably happens after an event like this is there's a couple days of outrage where, like you said, you know, I think the media has done an outstanding job not both sides in this, you know, I think the media has done an outstanding job, not both sides in this, you know, meeting the moment of how awful this is in a lot of their coverage. I think CNN has done a great job. I think New York Times, Washington Post. But now the polls start coming out, right? And this morning we saw a CBS poll that said 67% of Republicans agree, support Donald Trump's response to Charlottesville. And you can already see now, and you're starting to see now a few more stories.

New York Times had some of these with interviews with the Trump supporters who were saying, oh, I think he did the right thing. I think this was, I agree with him. And you can start to see now where this coverage could go in the next week, which is eventually we're going to get to the, have Democrats overplayed their hand because all this talk about racism only helps Trump with his base. You know, you can just see that coming. And I don't really know what to do about it. Okay. I have some thoughts here. One, if you read a poll, which says, well, first, let's talk about the reporters. If you interview people who identify themselves as Trump supporters, they're going to support

Trump. It is selection bias and how you do it. If you were to randomly call people who you had on file for having who supported Trump in a poll six months ago, and then you asked a bunch of those people how they felt about it, that's what to do it. But walking into a coffee shop in the reddest part of the country and saying, hey, do you support Trump? Or you talk to the New York Times, and then being shocked when they tell you that they support Trump is pretty asinine. Second, if you read a poll, like it is, if I was a Republican, and I saw that two thirds of my fellow Republicans supported the way Donald Trump has handled this in bolstering Nazis and white supremacists, I would go looking for another party. But if you're looking at the politics of this, you could say, oh, two-thirds of Republicans support Trump. Or the other way to look at it is he lost more than 20 points of his support over this.

Right. And if 67%, I've never seen Trump poll so low with Republicans over something. Third point, I don't care if Democrats ever play their hand here. That's not the fucking point. I totally agree. This is not actually, it's the Bannon argument. If Democrats talk about race, we'll win. Well, if the president of the United States is endorsing and supporting white supremacists and Nazis, someone better stand up and fucking say something. And I don't really care what the polls say about it. This is actually a moral issue, not a political issue. We can worry about the politics later, but we have to

do the right thing here. Let's not poll test our response to what Trump is saying. That's not the right approach. And look, we're not dumb here. We know, like, I'm fully aware, we all lived through 2016. Now, we saw that every time, you know, Donald Trump would say something racist or sexist, it would lure Hillary Clinton into responding. And then that was the news of the day. And then maybe she wasn't talking about the economy. And so it didn't help the campaign. Like, and then that was the news of the day and then maybe she wasn't talking about the economy and so it didn't help the campaign. Like, I get that.

And I get that sometimes he wants to drive a wedge through the party and through the country by using racially divisive rhetoric and what he did this week. Bannon said it. Bannon admitted that what they're hoping for is to use this as a wedge issue. We all get that.

But there's sometimes you just have to stand up and say it's fucking wrong. And it doesn't matter about the politics. That's right. It's just... Okay. When we come back, we will talk to Vice News' Ellie Reeve. Jews will not replace us! Blood and soil! Blood and soil! Blood and soil! Blood and soil! On the pod with us today, from Vice News Tonight, correspondent Ellie Reeve.

Ellie, thank you for joining us. Thanks for having me. So we just played a quick clip from the episode of Vice News you did on Charlottesville. I believe it aired on Monday. So you've been in Charlottesville since Friday morning. What made you go down there? And how did you end up interviewing Chris Cantwell, the white supremacist speaker with Unite the Right that you spent some time with? I've been covering the alt-right for about a year and a half. And looking at sort of the promotional materials about the event, I knew that it was going to bring together a lot of groups

that had been fighting amongst each other. So I thought it would be big. Then I did some reporting and realized the turnout would be pretty big. So I decided to come down. Of course, I didn't think it'd be violent like this. Yeah. Can you compare what you've seen in Charlottesville to President Trump's description of the scene? Were there a lot of, did you see any fine people who were innocently protesting with Unite the Right? Were there, were the leftist mobs there, were they equally violent, or what did you see? It was shocking to me that he said, he pinpointed Friday night as the night that there were nice people.

That was the night where it was so clearly organized. Everyone had tiki torches, those who didn't show up with tiki torches were given tiki torches. Those who didn't show up with tiki torches were given tiki torches, right? They had very clear organizing. It was an unannounced event where they all showed up on the field on the UVA campus. There was security being run by Army veterans.

There were people doing crowd control. There was no one there who was just really into Robert E. Lee. When you were in the van with these folks or in sort of embedded with them, did you fear for your safety or had you sort of built relationships with these people prior to this? I'd never talked to Cantwell before this story, but they are familiar with my reporting. But they don't like the press and they don't like women. So, yeah, there were moments that I thought it was a little hairy.

But I knew that in that van, I knew that if I got that guy ranting about the Jews, they wouldn't kick us out. So, you know, I let him go. Now, one of the people filming that was my producer, Josh Davis, who's Jewish. So, yeah, there were some tough calls at some point. Were you surprised by how openly Cantwell and others were advocating violence? We can listen to a clip of him in the hotel with you. What do you think this means for the next alt-right protest? I say it's going to be really tough to top, but we're up to the challenge.

Wait, why? Why? Tough to top? I say it's going to be really tough to top, but we're up to the challenge. Wait, why? Why? Tough to top? I mean, someone died. I think that a lot more people are going to die before we're done here, frankly. Why? Why? Because people die every day, right?

I mean, do you... But not, like, of a heart attack. I mean, violent death. Well, people die violent deaths all the time, right? Like, this is part of the reason that we want an ethno-state, right? So, like, the blacks are killing each other in staggering numbers from coast to coast. deaths all the time right like this is part of the reason that we want an ethno state right so like the blacks are killing each other in staggering numbers from coast to coast we don't really want

to have a part of that anymore and so the fact that they resist us when we say hey we want a homeland is not shocking to me all right these these people want violence and the right is just meeting market demand did it surprise you that he was so open about that? That was what was most surprising about me. I thought that even that publicly, even if they were advocating violence, that they would try to be quiet about it with the media. But it seemed like that was just he was fine with it. I think there might be some disagreements over PR strategy among some of them. But I had heard sentiments like that, that there needs to be violence

before there's some kind of revolution and movement towards fascism. I wasn't expecting him to have quite so many guns. I wasn't expecting him to say that killing Heather Heyer was a justified and righteous thing to do. So that did shock me. Cantwell and the guy in the van with you

are figures that are familiar to people because, you know, we sort of sometimes see these Ku Klux Klan members are like very clear, you know, obvious neo-Nazis. What is the relationship between folks like them and like Jason Kessler, who I guess organized this, and Richard Spencer, who have tried to, you know, put, you know, white polo shirts and khakis on the Nazi movement? Yeah, so there's this whole ecosystem of the alt-right, and I can get into why I call it that, but there's this whole ecosystem of these guys that's kind of under our noses,

because the internet means, you know, not everyone has to read the New York Times. They've got podcasts, 100,000 listeners a week for some of them. They've got sort of think tanks. So these guys all know each other, and they're all connected. Kessler is kind of a newcomer. Spencer is known for being a publicity hound, but he does have a pretty strong organizational role. He's involved with his own think tank,

but also this thing that functions as kind of like a fraternity for white nationalists. It's called Identity Europa. You have to not have a criminal record, not do drugs, and not have any racial admixture to get in, right? So, and those are the guys that show up on the scene. So, yeah, they're all connected. Some people are more powerful than others. So why do you call them the alt-right? Because some people have said,

oh, we should just call them white nationalists or white supremacists. They are white supremacists. But alt-right is different in that it signifies the demographics and the tactics, right? Like, we have a hard time talking about class in America, but when people say Richard Spencer is dapper or articulate, what they're saying is he sounds upper middle class.

He sounds like he went to an elite university. He sounds like me, right? So we associate the Klan with rednecks, right? Yeah. The alt-right is going for the college-educated guy, and they're using social media tactics, very sophisticated ones, instead of burning crosses in people's yards.

They have talked to me about how, for the next demonstration, they want to have stronger controls of aesthetics, which means no swastikas, because that's a dead political movement, and no, to quote them, whiteas, because that's a dead political movement, and no, to quote them, white trash, because they want to look successful. Wow. You went to the memorial service for Heather Heyer last night and the vigil. What

was that like? How are the people in Charlottesville doing right now? They're in shock. Heyer's memorial was very moving. Her family talked about her as a really passionate person who hated unfairness and injustice and would be very vocal about that, even if it got her into trouble. I thought it was really poignant that they weren't afraid to make it political. They didn't talk about Trump or something,

but they said, like, don't let her death be in vain. Go out and take action. People come up to me on the street in Charlotte, and they just all feel so shocked. They're very emotional. This thing that happened to their town, they didn't know it was coming. I talked to a man today. He said, you can tell it was a terrorist attack because we are all terrorized. I mean, the town is just sort of torn apart. But the vigil last night was a really healing moment, I think.

How close were you to where the terrorist attack happened when it happened? Just a few feet. I was standing around the corner in a doorway trying to get some shade, and we heard this like horrible like loud crunching sound and then all these people screaming so i backed against the wall i was like like does someone have a gun no it doesn't sound like a gun and then we looked out and i was then i realized that that sound was people's body being hit with the car people keep asking me how did you keep your composure in front of nazis like whatever i'm not gonna not going to let them win. But like trying to hold it together when that happened,

that was actually really hard. Yeah. I thought what was, I can imagine how hard it was for you to interview Cantwell and, you know, you're trying to be, you were very good at asking him tough questions without pushing so much that he would get really angry with you. I thought that was a very, that must have been a hard balance to strike, right? Yeah. And you don't want to get in the weeds with them with their like quack eugenics theory. Right. Yeah. We also wanted to make this story about the event and not just a profile of Cantwell. He, he did get quite mad at me. He's an emotional man. I could tell that.

Yeah. So since you've been covering the alt-right for a while, what have you noticed about the success of their recruiting efforts? I mean, have you seen, how short of a distance is it between people who troll around on some of these right-wing, alt-right websites and people marching with torches in Charlottesville? It's hard to keep track of because there's so many different social platforms. But they start really, really young. And what comes first is the misogyny, right? But, like, it's these frustrated young men who can't get dates.

And then slowly it moves to more and more, as they call it, edgy stuff, the racism. Something that I think is really telling is a term of art in their world is autist, A-U-T-I-S-T, as in someone who seems autistic. Like, they use it both as an insult and as a badge of honor. And then when they swarm on something like the Clinton emails, like Pizzagate, like Shia LaBeouf's protest art, they call that weaponized autism.

protest art. They call that weaponized autism. The idea is that like a bunch of, you know, guys who don't have social lives, who have an obsession, who won't get off the internet, are able to swarm and, you know, basically cause news events to happen. How has Trump being president affected this movement and the people in it? Trump being president affected this movement and the people in it? They love him. They love him. I mean, they always tell me, they always act surprised but happy when Trump sort of throws them a bone, right? Like the Holocaust statement where he didn't actually mention Jews, right?

They thought that was, like, they couldn't believe it. Like, it was incredible to them, right? Same thing with Tuesday. One kid texted me, like, my God, I love this man. He really does have our backs. Like, they don't actually believe he's one of them, that he believes in all of the race science and, like, you know, all the other quackery.

But they think he's basically on their side ellie thank you so much for joining us and thank you for um all the reporting that you're doing from charlottesville it's meant a lot to a lot of people so appreciate that yeah be safe and everyone if you haven't watched already which i know millions and millions of people have, go check out Ellie's reporting on Charlottesville, Vice News Tonight, Outstanding Show, good friend of the pod, Reid Sherland, the head writer there. Go tell the whole crew we said hello and stay safe down there. I will do. Thanks so much. Thanks, Ellie.

Bye. On the pod today, we also have from the Southern Poverty Law Center, Leisha Brooks. Leisha, thank you for joining us. Thank you for having me. So we're very familiar with SPLC on Pod Save America. For those who aren't, what does the Southern Poverty Law Center do? We do a few things. Primarily, we're a civil rights law firm, but we also have a project called the Intelligence Project that tracks and monitors hate and extremist groups. We identify hate and extremist groups, and it's our wish to push them back to the margins.

And we also have a project called Teaching Tolerance that provides free resources to educators on anti-bias topics. Has there been a rise in the number of white supremacists and neo-Nazi groups during the Trump era? You know, we publish a map, a hate map, every year, and it comes out in February. I can tell you that, without any surprise at all, that the numbers will increase. All I have, the figures that we have currently are for 2016. There were 917 active hate groups last year, 99 of them being neo-Nazi, and 130 Klan groups. We do expect that number to increase. We did see an increase in the number of hate and bias incidents that happened in the immediate aftermath of the election.

And people have talked about that a lot, tying Trump's campaign and his successful election to the way the right got so excited and emboldened and animated their cause. And we saw that, I think, very clearly in Charlottesville. their cause. And we saw that, I think, very clearly in Charlottesville. Have you seen a change, not just in the aggregate numbers of these individuals, these groups, but in their behavior since Trump has come on the scene? Oh, yeah. That's what I mean when I refer to the emboldenment of them. It used to be last year, you know, kind of before the presidential election, so let's go two years back, where, you know, there was some shame around it. You didn't see white nationalists or white supremacists just out in public,

proudly proclaiming who they were and trying to kind of take over, as we saw in Charlottesville. Now, this began with the Trump campaign. As he entered the election on this kind of anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim, with all this rhetoric, that really enlivened the movement and made them feel that they had someone on their side. It goes back even further than that. If you go back to the election of President Obama, David Duke has said that the election of Obama was really a wake-up call, and they used it as

a kind of a recruitment tool. So they were laying low during the obama years um very upset that that that he was re-elected but then in trump they saw kind of you know the last best hope the nation has been experiencing kind of tremendous you know demographic shifts and uh white nationalists and white supremacists will tell you that you know know, it's white genocide. They coined this term white genocide, which is a false narrative that, you know, whites are losing all types of political power and trying to be pushed to the side because of multiculturalism and an emphasis on diversity and inclusion. So the election of Trump and these kind of code words around make America great again and his focus on nationalism really, really inspired them.

So when he won the election, they were just delighted, just delighted. He came out in the streets, and that's when we saw the uptick in the number of hate and bias crimes. I mean, you probably saw the images. All the images that were out, the swastika was back. They changed to make America great again, to make America white again. These were all over the country in places in the south, in the west, just everywhere. We looked, digged into the data a little bit, and noticed that the primary motivation for these bias incidents were based on anti-immigrant sentiment, which is no surprise because that was kind of the number one issue in Trump's campaign.

It was closely followed by anti-black racism, which he didn't really speak to in his campaign much, but it reflects the ongoing anti-black racism in this country. So they felt like, you know, now that he has Bannon in his circle and Gorka, they are just beside themselves and feel like this is really their time. So that's when you find, you know, what happened in Charlottesville. We've never seen before all of these groups kind of come together in the way that they came together in Charlottesville.

Before they were kind of just, you know, doing their own thing and really not getting along well at all. But now they came together, 12 different groups came together in Charlottesville to proclaim proudly and loudly white supremacy. Have you gotten a sense of what their plans are post-Charlottesville? Are there other rallies that they're organizing in other cities across the country? Well, Richard Spencer has already announced his stop at return to Texas A&M. And as I understand it, Texas A&M is denying him the right to come,

but I don't think that that will stand. He's also announced that he's coming to the University of Florida in Gainesville. There are a couple of rallies scheduled for San Francisco at the end of this month, and there's something in Boston on Sunday, this weekend. What are some of the legal strategies that you guys use to fight some of these groups? Well, it's really difficult because we also kind of support, we do kind of, we support the First Amendment and free speech. kind of support we do, kind of. We support the First Amendment and free speech. So they are wrapping themselves kind of in this free speech. They're trying to position themselves as free speech martyrs, so we don't want to fall into that trap. They do have a right to express their

beliefs, no matter how abhorrent they are. We protect free speech, so we can't sue them on those grounds. Our most recent lawsuit against a hate group, we just filed a suit against Andrew Englund, who is the publisher of The Daily Stormer. That's the largest neo-Nazi site in the country. And we did that because he called a troll storm on our client, whereby she was harassed and continues to be harassed by all of his followers. So when we can find a legal way to sue them for what they're doing, we will do that. We can't sue on, we can't abridge their First Amendment rights to, you know, speak out. How can our listeners who are disturbed by this general trend and what happened in Charlottesville

help do something about this problem in America? Well, I think that I'm encouraged. I think, you know, it's very much like Heather Heyer's mother said yesterday. You know, this is an opportunity to amplify what Heather was doing and what people have been doing on the ground in terms of standing up against white supremacy. It's out there, out of the closet It's out there out of the closet. We can be out of the closet, too, and we should be. We should continue to take a stand against it, speak out, speak out loudly, make demands of our local, state, and federal officials,

and tell them that we will not allow this. Regardless of what the president says, we have to come together as a people and say in a loud voice that we stand against white supremacy and white nationalism in all its forms. We have to push them back into the margins and not normalize this behavior. Lisa Brooks, thank you so much for joining us, and thank you for the work all of you are doing at SPLC. We appreciate it. Thanks for having me on. Bye. Take care.

Thank you again to Vice News' Ellie Reeve and Leisha Brooks from the Southern Poverty Law Center for joining us today. And we'll see you again on Monday. Bye, guys. Thank you.