The Daily Beast Podcast - How Trump Fulfilled Barr’s Bloodthirsty Death Penalty Dreams

Episode Date: January 31, 2023

Donald Trump and his former Attorney General Bill Barr were, and still are, out for blood, literally. In this episode of The New Abnormal podcast Rolling Stone reporter Asawin “Swin” Suebsaeng talks with co-host Andy Levy about what a bloodlusty Bill Barr told him and his co-writer about his and Trump’s record-setting death row killing spree in his final months in office, and what we can expect from Trump on capital punishment should he become president again in 2024. Also on this episode: Khalil Gibran Muhammad, professor of history, race and public policy at Harvard Kennedy School and co-host of the Pushkin podcast Some of My Best Friends Are…, tells co-host Danielle Moodie the one thing that needs to happen to stop police brutality, and murder, happening once and for all, and it comes down to this group of people. For better or worse. Plus! Andy and Danielle share their thoughts on Fox News’ “disgusting” coverage of the Tyre Nichols murder and Danielle explains why the race of murderous cops really doesn’t matter. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hi, I'm Andy Levy, former Fox News and CNN HLN guy, and current cable news conscientious objector. I'm a former libertarian who now sits pretty comfortably on the left. Hi, I'm Danielle Moody, former educator and recovering lobbyist. But today, I'm an unapologetic, woke commentator on America's threats to democracy. And I'm producer Jesse Cannon, and I'm here to make sure things don't go too far off the rails. We're here to have fun, smart conversations with some of the most knowledgeable and entertaining people in politics, media, and beyond. Our goal is to try and make sense of our current crazy world, our new abnormal, and hopefully even make you laugh through the tears. What an excellent show we have today. First, we'll be joined by Khalil Gibran Muhammad, who's a professor of history, race, and public policy at Harvard's Kennedy School and co-host of the Pushkin podcast, some of my best friends are.

And he'll give us his perspective around the murder of Tyree Nichols. Then we'll talk to Rolling Stones Aswin Supisang about his blockbuster reporting on Trump's final days in his rush to get as many people, executed as possible. But first, let's have some fun. Danielle, welcome to a new week, a new bunch of new abnormal stuff that we unfortunately have to live with. And I guess before we get to the really serious reprehensible stuff, let's start with the only fairly serious reprehensible stuff. And this is Kevin McCarthy, the empty man, the so-called house speaker, going on CBS News, face the nation on Sunday and being asked about his decision to put George Santos on a couple of committees. And McCarthy, rather than he pretty much did not want to talk about George Santos

himself and started talking about how Congress itself is broken and blaming it on the last Congress and obviously talking about things like the January 6th committee. And so he just completely sidestepped any issue regarding the fact that George Sanchez. Santos is a pathological liar and has enough financial improprieties that we know about that there is a very good chance he is going to be charged with felonies. And he just did his usual Kevin McCarthy shit. He has no backbone. He has no morals.

He has no soul. He has no center. I'm running out of ways to describe the fact that he is just a suit with sort of a zombieish bag of bones underneath it. A zambious bag of boat. I love that. I think that I would have more respect for Kevin McCarthy if he would just say, yeah, I don't really give a shit if George Santos is a liar. I don't really care if he's defrauded campaign investments. I don't care about any of that. I care about power. Like, just tell the truth, right? Because to make the kind of pivot that he did when asked a direct

question about the fact that this man is a compulsive liar, nothing on his resume, nothing on his record, nothing that he said on the campaign trail is any representation of who he's, he actually is. So therefore, the voters did not have an opportunity to really choose a candidate because what they were given was some type of caricature. And, you know, if Kevin McCarthy then just came out and said, look, right now, I got a four-seat majority. And if George Santos leaves and he was in a heavily Democratic district, then I'm down to three. And I can't have that. Like, if you actually just had the stones to fucking say the truth about why you don't care what the machinations of your party looks like, because you're just a craven, hollow man,

then maybe people would be like, oh, okay, yeah, that seems right. But don't pivot and tell me that Congress is broken. When Nancy Pelosi had an actual gavel and not the Fisher Price bullshit that he's wheeling around, that we actually had bills that were passed, that the Democrats were pushing legislation for the American people, not their desperate attempt at some type of resentment campaign against the Biden administration and doing something really important.

You know, like bringing up Hunter Biden's laptop because that's going to bring down the price of fucking eggs. Right. Yeah, I mean, it would be nice if he had any balls at all. But if I remember correctly, when the FBI raided Mar-a-Lago and found those classified documents, they also found his balls in a jar. And so I think they're still in, I think the chain of custody is the Justice Department still has them.

I hope to God they do not go to the National Archives. And look, it would be nice if he got his balls back, but he shouldn't have given them to Trump in the first place. So he has no one to blame but himself. Thank you, Andy. I needed that laugh so deeply because we have spent the last week or so just in grief and in tears. And so I want to pivot to actual news and actual people who should be covered and that matter, which is the case, the awful, disgusting, horrific, horrible case of the beating death by five Memphis police officers of Tyree Nichols. a young father, a skateboarder, a photographer, a human being that was beaten to death and would die three days later in the hospital at the hands of five police officers who have since been terminated and have been charged but are out on bond because that's what we do here in America with cash bail, is that if you're poor and you can't afford bail, you stay in jail. But if you've beaten somebody to death and had a blue uniform, then you get to sit at home and await your trial. In an unsurprising turn of events, Fox News has, of course, done everything that they can to turn themselves into contortionists to uphold their defense of blue lives and police.

Because you see, Fox News only cares about police so long as they're beating or killing or suffocating black unarmed people. But when they're defending the Capitol building, then all of a sudden they're mute on the issue. I did not watch the video and everybody knows that because I posted and said that I would not watch and gave people permission if they needed to feel like they needed to give themselves permission not to watch the video. But Fox News did what they do, Andy, and you know better because you actually have been there. And they did their biggest tap dance on why diversity training is what caused this. And we need, you know, more whatever it is. So by all means, weigh in on your former employer. Because when I think that they can't get to the sewer further, my God, do that.

they deep dive? Yeah, this was, I don't even want to know. I don't know if I even want to say it's a new low, but it was pretty damn close to it. And look, I also didn't watch the video. I don't watch snuff films and that's what this is and I don't want to see a man die. And I already know how I feel about what happened in this case. And so I didn't feel any need to watch it. I understand if there were people that did and I'm not judging or anything like that. I just, I couldn't do it. But Fox News, if you watched Fox News, you saw a bunch of ex-cops defending the police and even the ones that would say things like, well, the cops didn't use the best tactics here. That's as far as they would go. And you mentioned the diversity training.

They had Heather McDonald, who is from the Manhattan Institute, is just one of the worst people. She blamed this all on the fact that cops are not given enough training. and as you said that they're given, instead they get implicit bias training and diversity training, which she called a complete waste of money. She talked about how the problem in this country is it's a black homicide problem, and she said police are the solution to that problem, which I have absolutely no fucking idea how in 2023 you can even pretend to think that that's true. I did not watch it.

Obviously, I did not at all put on Fox News, but these clips are. all around the internet and people were posting them on Twitter and so I watched a couple of them and then it was just like it was I don't want to say it was as bad as watching the actual video because nothing could be as bad as that but it sort of made me feel the same way it was just like I can't watch this anymore these people and I knew some of these people when I was there and some of them I wasn't surprised by some of them it was like man what the fuck happened to you which is something I say every day when I see a quote from a lot of people there it's absolutely horrific, but it's exactly what you would have expected. You know, if I said to you, I know you

haven't watched a second of Fox News's coverage of the Tyree Nichols video, what do you think it was? You would pretty much nail it 100%. And that's what their audience wants and that's who they play to. And, you know, their audience is mostly scared, white people who see a world changing around them and can't deal with it and don't want to, I just, I can't go off on that tangent because I've done it too many times, but it was disgusting and it was disgraceful and it was as far from journalism as you could possibly get. And again, it was exactly what you would have expected. You know, and I just want to add to your point, you know, it's exactly what to be expected is for folks who have, you know, continued to say that you can't call this anti-blackness because

the police officers who are murderers were black. And I realize that so many people really have no idea how white supremacy and anti-blackness was. work. And I will link this back to the erasure that we're seeing happening of history in the public schools in Florida and in other places that are just removing black spaces, black history, conversation and saying that it has no validity, which is what they say about our lives in general. That's what Fox News echoes over and over again. And you see the difference with these black officers is that they did not see themselves as black. They saw themselves as blue. And And what they understand is that in order to prove themselves in the biggest white supremacist fraternity

that there is, that you need to then act apart. Like you need to differentiate yourself. Oh, well, I'm a, I'm not a black cop. I'm a cop who happens to be black. So you look at other black people as the problem, which is what we know that policing does in this country. We've seen the Boy Scouts call them out for using black faces as their target practice at a police department last year. We saw this when we saw Ferguson and the artillery that's wheeled out when black communities are out in protest of a killing of an unarmed person, protest, which they

have the ability to do. And you see tanks in response to that. So I want people to understand that these dots, like they connect themselves. You just have to open up your eyes when it comes to understanding anti-blackness and racism in this country? Yeah, it's just, you know, the problem is, Danielle, what you're doing here is you're talking about people who deny that there is such a thing as systemic racism in America. And so obviously they don't understand that when you say that there is a problem in police forces all across this country

of systemic racism and that, as you said, that can affect black cops as well who come to see themselves as blue. not black, as you poetically put it. They cannot comprehend that. And it's like talking to your dog about John Locke. You can talk all you want, but they just don't know what you're saying. Unfortunately, we've just hardened as a society so much that there is a large segment of people who absolutely refuse to admit that all of these things are 100% true.

And this, look, this comes from the top. Donald Trump. This is a Ronda Santis. Yep. This is one of the reasons for being for the modern Republican Party. Well, not even modern in the sense of this year. It's been that way for a long time. But it's just getting worse and worse. And it's this idea that, and as you said, you were absolutely right to connect this to what is and is not taught in schools, what people like Ron DeSantis are trying to not have taught in schools, the AP African American history class and stuff like that. And it is all of a piece. And it's all

done with one end in mind, and that is to sort of deny and demolish this idea that this country was in large measure built on systemic racism, and that that systemic racism exists to this day. And they don't want to hear it, and they don't want it taught. They don't want other people learning it. My friend Mark Lamont Hill posted a thing, and was a quote from James Baldwin talking about black cops. I'll just read this quote. Yes, please do.

This black brother in uniform whose entire reason for breathing seemed to be be his hope to offer proof that though he was black, he was not black like you. Come on. It's not my place to go further into that. But it struck me that it's exactly, it seemed a lot like what you were saying just now about thinking themselves as blue rather than black. And Baldwin's point was that he almost would prefer, you know, he said, we used to say, quote, if you must call a policeman for we hardly ever did, for God's sakes, try to make sure

it's a white one. Because he was saying that in a lot of cases, black, police could actually be worse because they feel like they have to prove this to their fellow officers. Yeah. And I will reiterate what I said on Instagram, what I said in my TikTok video, Tyree Nichols is dead because of anti-blackness and a system of policing built on brutality. His murderers didn't share the same hue as him because in their eyes they were wrapped in blue. Yeah, that's exactly right. Also, by the way, your video was amazing. And I encourage if you don't follow Danielle on Twitter or TikTok, which what's wrong with you?

Thank you, Andy. But in particular, search out that video because it was from the heart and it was just incredibly well said. So in other news, which is also important because let's see, we've been waiting, oh, I don't know, I think I've run out of fingers in terms of years to count for Donald Trump to be fucking held accountable for anything that he has done over the past several years. So, you know, I have on other programs talked about the Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, who took over after Sy Vance, who had called a special grand jury in order to, you know, investigate all of the fucking wrongdoing, including the payments to Stormy Daniels, the woman who was associated with Donald Trump and the payments in the campaign and all of these things. Well, Alvin Brag comes into office.

We have two high-profile prosecutors that quit because they say that their case is stalled and that they had more than enough evidence to bring an indictment down on Donald Trump. Well, let's all play the breaking news music once again because according to the New York Times, the Manhattan prosecutors will begin presenting Trump case to the grand jury. I have never in my life seen more motherfucking presentations like this is a high school fucking Science Fair, that we have seen presentations and grand juries on Donald Trump's crimes. And yet we see still no indictments whatsoever. So once again, Alvin Bragg coming up with the grand jury. And New York Times is saying, well, it seems, you know, we're laying the groundwork

for, quote, potential criminal charges against the former president in the coming months. I trust you, Andy. I will not hold my breath because I am not looking to pass out. Yeah, don't hold your breath. We need you alive. You're right. You mentioned you're running out of fingers. And I guess technically it's only been a couple years. It has that feeling that we're into toe years. It has a feeling that if we're not there yet, we're going to get there at some point. And we're going to have to start using the little piggies. I cannot figure Alvin Bragg out for the life of me. And one day he's dropping cases and lawyers are quitting, you know, cases against Trump. And then we get this as reported by the New York Times that, they are supposedly going to present evidence to a grand jury and that they've, according to the times, they've begun contacting officials from Trump's 2016 campaign and all this stuff. I agree with you. 100% I am not holding my breath. Call me crazy. I don't trust Alvin Bragg at this point. I don't trust him to have the follow through. I would love to be

wrong about this. I feel like I say that a lot on this show. But I mean it every time I say it. prove me wrong. Make me eat my words, Alvin Brague. I'll more than happy. You know, I will be very happy. I will throw some soy sauce on them or something. And I will saute it. Yep, I will eat, eat them the fuck up. We'll see what happens. And we say this a lot. And it's just so hard to sit here between people like Alvin Brag and people like Merrick Garland. It's just so hard to sit here and think, well, maybe Donald Trump will finally face justice. Like, right? There's just no way you can pop. possibly think that at this point? We had Elim is still on the show over the weekend, and he said the same goddamn thing. Like, he has all but given up hope that we are going to see any type of action take place by

this Justice Department because Merrick Garland, I don't know if the man has a spine or if he's just an amoeba. It's unclear because you have mountains and mountains and mountains of evidence. There's been so much research. There has been so many interviews. There has been so many eyewitnesses. And yet this is why he got the name Teflon Don. Yep.

Right? Like this is it. Because if you are rich and you are white and you are a man and you are a cis and you are a het, then like you are Teflon. Then the rules do not apply. And you add celebrity onto that and then former president label onto that. I mean, I don't know we want to say and Merrick Garland told us that no one is above the law, but I beg to differ.

Yeah, and I'll just say your interview with Elie Mistell was fantastic. And coming up this next Sunday, I interviewed another Ellie, Ellie Honig, former prosecutor with the Southern District of New York, CNN chief legal analyst. And he is, I can tell you right now, he is going to say a lot of the same things that Ellie Mistal said and that you and I are saying. And he talks specifically as a book coming out this week about how they get away with it, is the subhead of the book. And he's talking about people. He talks a lot about people like Trump and compares them to mob bosses and stuff like that. And it just, it really is unreal how it is exactly the same playbook that is used by mob bosses and that they always, the bosses always somehow managed to skate. And as you said, it's pretty much every example in the book is it's a rich white dude. In a lot of cases, it's a famous rich white dude. It's Harvey Weinstein who skated for a lot of.

long time, thanks to Cy Vance, who you mentioned as Alvin Bragg's predecessor here in New York, Attorney General. We all know this. We all know that there are, at a minimum, there are two justice systems in this country, and one is for rich white dudes. And look, you could probably argue there are more than two because then there's another one for not rich white dudes, and then there's another one for people of color. We all know this, but we are just every day we are given more and more examples of it. Man, I just don't know. Like, I, just look at all this shit and I'm like, is this ever going to change? Like are, are the people on the mind pod 200 years from now going to be saying the same shit?

Or, you know, is something going to change at some point? The name of the podcast. That's not the name. That's the general term for them. They'll just be called mind pods. Oh, okay. Got it. Yeah.

Because they will go directly into your mind. Into your mind. Yeah. Oh, okay. a story for another day, but that seems hopeful. Not at all, not at all terrifying. Folks, I am very excited to welcome to the new Abnormal. Khalil Gibran Mohammed, who is the professor of history, race, and public policy at Harvard

University and is the co-host of the podcast, some of my best friends are. Kaleel, I wish that you were coming on the show under better circumstances. I feel like we need a professor at this time. so much so that we have books and curriculum being banned all over the place, that it tells us that this time is a time that requires education. The murder of Tyree Nichols and the video that many have watched, and I have said before, I did not watch the video. I allowed people to understand that you do not need to feel like you are disconnected from the quest for justice by choosing not to subject yourself to that type of trauma and that it is okay to find other ways to share, share his art,

share his photography, share his smile, share his energy, that that does not need to be the last imprint. So I just first, Khalil, want to get your thoughts on the media coverage. This comes on the heels of another young black man that was tased to death by police in Los Angeles. Then a couple of weeks later, it is this brutal beating death of Tyree in Memphis. This comes off the heels of so many murders in the midst of the pandemic. We were called out to be in the streets when it wasn't safe to breathe the air just to say that Black Lives Matter. So what do you feel about this moment, this coverage? And I won't ask you if you think this time is different. I just want to know how you feel. Yeah, that's a really good question. And I just want to say, am I talking to somebody who's

deeply invested in this space, you might really know where I'm coming from. Like, I'm ready for retirement. Yeah. Yeah. Like the level of consciousness I have as an individual at 50 years old, you know, I am officially middle age. I had done more work in my past and it's likely to be the case going forward. I've spent almost 25 years in this particular field of combat that is understanding and diagnosing systemic racism in the criminal justice system only to arrive at a moment where it seems that we are further away than we've ever been. And so when you describe what we're facing right now in terms of media coverage, including Tyree Nichols beating death, the thing that is most top of mind for me is how we have to see it again to somehow decide we have a problem that we

knew we had yesterday the week before, the month before that, the year before that. It's a little bit like the mass shootings. And so our country's broken. It's broken. It's sick. The levels of ignorance and misinformation that shape our national politics, you know, it's worse than it's been in my lifetime. And certainly social media hasn't helped. So that's how I'm thinking about this moment. And you are a professor of history. And I try not to get caught up in the we have not changed over time, that there has been no growth because I know. that that isn't true. But I also know that the first video beating that we saw was Rodney King. And that being the first video where those white police officers were let off and following that,

a city would go up in flames. And so the idea that we would say that good policing looks like more black cops, looks like body cameras, looks like all of these things, Well, Khalil, here we are. Hmm. Yeah. Some, you know, 30 years removed from Rodney King, but just a couple of years removed from George Floyd. Yeah, yeah. Which happened in broad daylight and, you know, in high death. In high death, yeah.

So I'm just, you know, so I'm trying to understand when people call for police reform as we've been calling for it since before you were born, since before I was born, and yet here we are. What do we really need to call for? Well, a lot of things, but I think the deeper issue here are two foe. One, there's a history of structural racism that we've never reconciled with, nor attempted at scale to undo. And we can talk more about what that is in case people don't really understand what that means. That's number one. Number two, the problem of structural racism has been so, so unobluxed.

appreciated by the majority of white Americans in particular who hold the balance of power demographically, they hold the balance of power politically, they hold the balance of power economically, they hold the balance of power culturally in every possible way. And so when white Americans as a categorical demographic claim that they don't have anything to do with this, whether it's the Tyree Nichols case or whether they believe that this is only a case of individuals, they are the enemies of progress, period, because they created the problem. And I'm not trying to sound like some crazy anti-white person with the last name Muhammad. I'm just saying, you're asking a Harvard professor, it's like, they are the instrument of change because they can either respond to

the demands for change that black people and brown people and white people had made at the margins around these issues, or they can stand in the way. So we have both the legacy effects of structural racism, its contemporary and innovative manifestations today, and an unwillingness of white people in mass to decide that they no longer find it acceptable. That's the problem. And so whether it's policing, whether it's education, whether it's housing, whether it's banking, whether it's the health care system, you name it. That is where we are right now in 2023.

And the problem that I find, right, through the work that I've done for over a decade, is are we just wasting our time trying to convince the wrong people to change hearts minds and convince the people that have spent their entire lives gaslighting the rest of us. There's not a problem. It's bad apples, they continue to tell us, Khalil. It's bad apples. I say it's a poisonous orchard, right, that is spread from sea to shining sea. So I'm confused. How many individuals make a bad bunch? I wonder, as we try and wrap our minds around this, one of the many comments that are being made, and you touched upon it, but I really do believe that we are so malnourished for education in this country, that this can't possibly be anti-blackness.

This can't possibly be racism because the cops are black. If you listen to Fox News, which I tell people don't do, you would think that, like Tyree, among every other unarmed black person is just asking for this. And this was black on black crime. So how do you talk to people in a way that allows them to understand what anti-blackness and systemic racism actually is? Sure. Let's start with Tyree Nichols.

The way that we understand how structural racism works in this instance is that what happened to the victim who is black is the evidence of racism. This is true in almost every arena of the criminal. criminal justice system. When white people look up and say, we go to prison too. The problem isn't that they go to prison too. The problem is that when it is the race of the victim in the case of white victims of murder, black people are much more likely to serve longer terms in prison. Our death penalty has been applied disproportionately to people who murder victims who happen to be white. Our policing system treats black suspects and defendants more harshly and with more punitiveness and more lethality

than it does white people, regardless of who the officer is. We have reams of data coming out of Department of Justice investigations going back to the Rodney King era because it was the Clinton administration that created the conditions for what we call pattern and practice investigations, which can lead to consent decrees when a police department loses its autonomy and a federal monitor comes in to say, you must do X, Y, and Z to stop brutalizing or abridging the constitutional rights or civil rights of black people. These consent decrees have happened in the blackest cities in America with the blackest police forces in Baltimore, in Newark, in Detroit, in Chicago. Do I need to go on? So we already.

have the evidence that when it comes to policing black people as the victims of police brutality, as the so-called guilty parties who's collective guilt justifies discriminatory policing in the first place, your innocence is not guaranteed you if you are black, period. Ray Kelly told a national audience on Meet the Press in 2013, I can send every one of your listeners to the YouTube, You can watch it for yourself. When then host David Gregory asked Ray Kelly is stop and frisk racial profiling, Ray Kelly's response said, well, what we're doing is essentially using reasonable suspicion that a person might be about to commit a crime.

In a sense, he said, innocence is not the appropriate word. And then we went on to say this is standard law enforcement practice. Translation, if you live in a so-called high-crime, area and you happen to be a black male, you are presumptively guilty, period. And police officers have maximum discretion to abuse your civil liberties, to abuse your physical person, and indeed take your life if you object in any way, shape, or form. That is the systemic structural racism that is existing policing, of which black and brown police officers are themselves also guilty of. In the case of Tyree Nichols, yes, in the case of Freddie Gray, yes. And some of your listeners

might remember the case of the Danzinger Bridge shooting, which was a literal execution of black people on a bridge trying to escape the floodwaters of Katrina. In that case, several officers killed people, including a black officer. Rodney King told me directly when I interviewed him just about a month before he died. I wrote about this in The Guardian, so people can follow up and look at it. He just published a memoir called The Riot Within. In this memoir, he talks about growing up in the south central area of Los Angeles, and he says that his friends were regularly abused. He said they literally made sport of it because cops would come up, shake them down, and then bash their body parts into the squad cars. They would leave dents of the abuse.

and it was black and white officers. So the structural racism is baked into the treatment of black people, regardless of who the officer is. And let me just add to this, if we were to quantify what we know happens in cases when white people are even accused of heinous mass shootings, they are much more likely to be taken into custody, including Dylan Roof, who literally killed nine people,

innocent people in a church and was offered a meal before he was taken to detention. There is a double standard in how we police, how we sentence, how we incarcerate, shall I go on? I mean, no, because it's just depressing me. But at the same time, what I find so disturbing, you've just listed out facts. You've just listed out headline cases that most Americans know or remember. You remember those names. You remember Freddie Gray. You remember Rodney King, right? These are headline cases that, quote, unquote, stop the nation, but for a moment. And then everybody went back to doing what they were doing beforehand.

In this case of Tyree Nichols, it says the constant question asked in mainstream media, will this time be different? And I said, so what is different about this time? When is the time going to be different? And in order for the time to be different, Khalil, what actually is. needs to be different. Because black and brown people, to your earlier point, have been marching, have been writing letters, have been sitting in, have been voting. Because if I hear another damn person tell me that, well, people need to vote, we do in mass. So what I hear is that the

problem is white America. And so if the problem is white America, but white America gets to opt out of education, they get to opt out of empathy, they get to opt out of compassion, they get to opt out of compassion, then where do we go if the solution is also the problem? That's a grand damn good question. That's why I told you I'm looking into retirement. You literally have to laugh to keep from going crazy. Because look, let's just unpack the relationship of this to Rhonda Santis. And I'm not going to take too long setting this up because it's obvious. But first of all, two men of color contributed to George Floyd's death. Let's just remind everybody that.

Derek Chauvin is the household name for his knee on his neck. But there were two men of color holding him down, other parts of his body. Derek Chauvin didn't kill George Floyd alone. So that's just one other instance where we can add to what happens to black people when it comes to policing them, regardless of who's wearing the badge. Now, what happened after that we all just witnessed two years ago? Tens of millions of white people. Estimates run as high as 25 million.

white people in some of the widest places in the United States of America, places where black and brown Asian people don't even show up as statistically significant. There were sympathy protests in other European countries and of course in Latin America and in Africa and Asia. So we're talking about an international moment when white people in America in league with others around the world decided enough is enough. What was their response to the political establishment of as many places in America that could control how white people think about this, which is sometimes hardcore red states, sometimes purple states, even sometimes blue places, like New York City. What happened is Governor DeSantis, among other places, led the way to passing laws to make

it harder to protest against the police. An attack on the civil liberties sacrosanct right to actually assemble to protest your government became subject. to increase scrutiny. Additionally, the very mechanism that would allow people to be organized for change, which has always been an education process. Fox News does it well every single night. They educate their viewers with propaganda in the most egregious, appalling ways for people whose jobs are held to a much higher standard. Me as a professor, you as a journalist. So, that being said, the threat that those millions posed was that if they learned a lot more of what they could see with their own eyes, if they could match their eyeballs to their actual brains connected to their cardiovascular system, including their heart, they might actually demand a different America. But what we've seen play out over the past two years is a legislative concerted effort.

And I don't want to sound like the Fox News crazy conspiracy theories. I'm just pointing out basic stuff. Connect the dots. Yeah. Simply that we have a huge portion of this country that has legislatively made it harder for white people to learn what is the historical and present-day context that explains what happened to George Floyd and what does structural racism look like in all of its many aspects, which is only the latest instance in Florida where Ronda Santis, a likely presidential candidate for 2024, has banned African-American studies at the AP level because guess what? It includes lessons and learnings

on how to understand structural racism. So you're right. It is impossible to imagine change at scale as long as enough white people actually want Ron DeSantis as their leader or want Kevin McCarthy as the House Speaker. And so I'm trying to dial it back so I don't sound all crazy. But that is the legislative and connective tissue that explains what needs to happen and why it hasn't. But here's the thing. You are not crazy. I am not crazy. Anybody who is conscious is not crazy to what is happening. I think that the goal is to disconnect the dots, is disinformation, is to make sure that their constituents, this base of white people, stay closed eyes and closed ears to the issues and are just fed a steady diet of lies.

to make them feel good about themselves. I mean, when you have a governor that is passing legislation that has in its definition white comfort, I mean, give me a break, right? Like, we're no longer hiding, right? They're no longer hiding. There was a time when we had gotten racism not under control, but at least to a place of the margins, where to be a racist was not a badge of honor.

So my last question for you, as we're running out of time, is what do you do with the fury? What do you do with the rage? Because, you know, 50 seems real young to retire. It feels also too old to continue doing this day in and day out and not going crazy. I have an answer, I think, that certainly works for me. I can no longer be complicit in my positions, whether it's at Harvard or anywhere else, as someone who will accept the ways in which these institutions function to legitimize anti-blackness or white supremacy or forms of oppression that affect non-gender conforming people. What I think people like us, that is, as people of color, ought to be paying really

close attention to as the demographics of this country become browner and browner, there will be even more black and brown people in positions of leadership and governance. Republicans are at the front edge of this, but Democrats won't be too far behind. In order to maintain legitimacy in a white minority country, you will need black and brown people to stand up for the way this country functions. And so there would be lots of carrots, lots of prestige, lots more firsts. And when you, as James Baldwin so eloquently put it, are paying for the price of a ticket, which is to assimilate into a system that was built to destroy your own people, you will have to live with that. Because I'm not going to say this is the beginning, but we are going to move into hyperdrive

in the next 10 or 15 years. The baby boom generation will die. DeGen Xers might get a shot at the table, but the millennials will definitely be in leadership roles. And either they're going to be baby Herschel walkers. Come on. Or baby Marco Rubio. And Ted Cruz is, like, are they going to follow their lead into the abyss of hyperdrive of America that is speaking of apartheid states, this is what we face. I can control at least my own complicity in that shit show as it unfolds. And I hope I can do more because I'm trying everything I can. But more of us will be called upon to sign off on this madness. Yeah, and I for one, yeah, my pen is broken. So I'm not, I'm not signing off on a goddamn thing. Khalil Gibran Mohammed, professor of history, race and public policy at Harvard

University, and the co-host of some of my best friends are, thank you so much for making the time to join the new abnormal. Appreciate you, your work, and your voice always. Thank you. Thanks for having me. Before 2020, there had been three federal executions in 60 years. Then Trump put 13 people to death in six months. This is the subhead on a recent Rolling Stone piece laying out the inside story of how this came to be, a piece co-written by Patrick Rice and my next guest, Asowin Sub-Seng, aka Swin. Swin, thanks for joining us. Thank you so much for having me. It's great to be back. So let's start with the basics here. This six-month period that we're talking about,

this wasn't the beginning of Trump's presidency or the middle of it. It was literally the last six months of his presidency. I was thinking these are like anti-partons at the same time that he was actually pardoning people like Paul Manafort, Roger Stone, Jared Kushner's dad, Janine Piro's husband, and also, by the way, trying to steal an election. Right. And also when all of the race-related tumult and protest movements were going on and obviously against the backdrop or foreground, however you want to find it, of the coronavirus hellscape at its peak.

This was a story that I covered a little bit back when I was at The Daily Beast before I moved over to Rolling Stone. And it's something that I covered as much as I could at the time. But as I kind of prefaced there, there was a lot going on. I don't mean to sound glib about it. Sure. But this execution spree, this bloodbath, whatever you want to call it, that was being undertaken by President Trump and Attorney General Bill Barr, this was happening and sort of vibrating

for half a year in the background when there was a lot of other chaos and mass death and anti-democratic activity going on. You also flicked at how this did not happen at the beginning of Trump's presidency or the middle. It was at the tail end. if it were up to Trump and Jeff Sessions, before Bill Barr came along, this would have gotten underway years before it actually did. There were moves within the Jeff Sessions era, DOJ, to try to get this ramped up and started up again. Obviously, there were a bunch of legal and practical hurdles

to that. Donald Trump in 2015 and 2016 campaigned on bringing the death penalty against criminals and convicted murderers in a big way. And he was saying this at the time when there was this sort of unofficial decades-long moratorium on federal executions, not talking about state executions, but federal. Right. That's something that I hadn't really been that aware of until I started looking to this in 2020. When Bill Barr came along as Attorney General, he really did kick the door open for this and was able to bring to fruition a vision that not just Donald Trump had had since his 2016

campaign, but that Bill Barr had had at the very least. released since the George H.W. Bush administration, when he wrote memos to then President Bush, the first one, about how necessary capital punishment was for justice and retribution and all the rest. Donald Trump only gets one term, at least so far. So this execution blitz only gets to go on for the six months at the end of his presidency happening up until the doorstep of Joe Biden's inauguration. And Joe Biden, he campaigned in 2020, on anti-death penalty platform. He was very explicit about that. He openly talked about his desire to end the death penalty in America and a whole bunch of other criminal justice-related reforms and things like that. You can probably imagine he's getting

a lot of heat from activists who work in this space for how much he is absolutely colossally dithering on that. But, you know, the Democratic Party is going to be the Democratic Party. So, for one part of the piece that you mentioned that we published at Rolling Stone, and we got to jump on the phone with former Tony General Barr for a little bit, and I just asked him, well, there were only 13 killed in this series of executions of yours and Donald Trump's, would more have occurred if Joe Biden had it won and if Donald Trump had managed to win the 2020 election. Barr's very succinct, very simple response was, yes, that was the expectation. So another reason, and I think there are a lot of reasons this story matters now, Donald Trump

is once again campaigning to reconquer the White House in 2024. And he has once again explicitly said on the campaign trail that when he's presidents, again, we're going to be doing the death penalty again in a big way. I want to execute more people, want to be able to give the federal government and others leeway to execute more drug dealers than we are currently allowing to happen in this country. Ron DeSantis, who is, of course, the runner-up right now in the 24 ongoing dick measuring contest, is someone who has made his views on capital punishment very clear from a policy standpoint in Florida. And there was no reason to doubt that even if Trump isn't elected to another term, that someone like

Ron DeSantis with a Republican Attorney General and a Republican administration wouldn't pick up the work that cut short when Bill Barr and then Donald Trump had to leave. And on the Democratic side, for people who do support serious reform on this issue and who do believe that the death penalty in capital punishment is cruel and unusual punishment and should be done away with in this country in the same way that's been done away with in a lot of other comparable countries, Attorney General Merrick Garland did in the middle of 2021, I believe, reimpose the so-called moratorium on federal executions, as was the expectation. But even the Biden administration and Biden-era DOJ have signaled a significant openness to bringing back the federal death penalty, even if just for one specific case.

But it really goes to show that where we are at, if you are looking for any seriousness on anti-death penalty action where it comes to the two major political parties. One of them is dithering at best on their alleged values and policy preferences. And the other is just calling for as much blood and bloodlust as possible on this particular issue because it's good with their voters, I guess, and they believe that this is the way that you deliver a blow for justice in this country, even if it's not a deterrent. First of all, I was going to say, if you could make your answers longer in the future, right? You got me going there and you weren't rude enough to you're off.

I'm kidding. I want to talk about these actual, these 13 executions. In your piece, one of the things you note is what was Trump's pretty much his just lack of interest in any of the details surrounding this executions? And I read that and I thought that doesn't sound like the Donald Trump I know. It's funny because that is true, but to an extent, when you bring in things that he really cares about whether it's the John Claude Van Dam movie Bloodsport or real life lurid in graphic details. You can grab his attention. Like, look how much he loves to ruminate in public about the

gory deeds of MS-13 killers or aspects like that. For this six-month killing spree, before it got officially started, months before it did, Bill Barr told us that he was in the Oval Office with then President Trump for an unrelated meeting, and that as he was leaving, he was leaving, he offhandedly mentioned, oh, by the way, we're restarting federal executions. And Trump, according to Barr, perked up and was like, oh, are you for the death penalty? And it's kind of a funny thing for Trump to say to Bill Barr because to not know that what your own attorney general believes about the federal death penalty and where we stand there. Very publicly believes. It's kind of a weird one.

But again, to your point, he's not exactly a details guy. Barr also told us that after that one brief kind of tangential conversation in the Oval Office, he does not recall speaking to Trump once about the series of executions and definitely not any of the specific 13 individuals or cases or inmates. Having said that, there is a part of our reporting where we show where Trump is very much invested in the details. And that includes a moment with one of the inmates' cases where it's just days from the scheduled execution in December 2020, this guy named Brandon Bernard, and we can get more into his story in a little bit if you want to, but just to give your listeners the Cliff's notes, if they heard about him in

late 2020, it was probably because they saw a headline or a social media post or something on the news about Kim Kardashian being the celebrity cheerleader for this federal inmates talking about how he was a model of rehabilitation. He didn't pull the trigger. Her heart breaks for the victims, which were two youth ministers. But Brandon Bernard absolutely does not deserve to die. And like, please let him live for his, not just his family's sake, but so among many other reasons, so he can stay alive and spend the rest of his life behind bars and continue his work in counseling at-risk youth to not go down the same violent and misguided roads that he went down. So Trump was hearing from a lot of people, or a significant amount of people, I should say,

who were pro-commutation. It's like, look, with a stroke of pen, just give him life in prison, and you can kill other people, I guess, but spare Brandon Bernard. So at one point, while he's trying to figure out what way he goes on this, at some points, according to people we spoke to who are intimately familiar with this, he sounded pretty sympathetic to his case. and if your listeners read about Brandon Bernardi, it is hard not to feel a lot of sympathy for the guy.

Yes. So Trump is kind of wavering, going a little bit wobbly on his blood thirsty, quote unquote, tough on crime stances. And then he decides, I'm going to let the parents decide. So he makes sure he gets on the phone with the family of the victim. And during that call,

they described to him, among other things, the graphic and horrid. details of the double homicide. And at that point, according to people who knew what was going on at the time, those were the details that sealed Brandon Bernard's fate. At that point, if you get Donald Trump on the phone with still grieving parents and have them described to him the gory and incredibly ugly details of a vicious violent crime, it will lock him in. There is no turning back. Any hope for a sign of mercy with a stroke of the pen from Donald Trump.

has gone out the window. And that's exactly what happened. Yeah, the Brandon Bernard case, which you highlight in the piece was, I mean, look, the crime he was a part of was truly horrific, as you said. But also, as you said, he didn't pull the trigger. By all accounts, he spent his time in prison trying to, if not atone for what he did, but certainly change his life and do good and be a model to younger people to try to keep them from going down the same path that he had gone down as a youth. Because again, I think he was 18 when this crime happened. Right. He was a low-level member of this local gang that he followed him with. He was ordered to do certain things. And even from when he was a very young man, people who knew him from decades ago, including his longtime attorney Rob Owen, he would stress that, yes, it is a story of redemption and rehabilitation, but he saw this person when he was like a scared, friend kid who, yes, part took in a really horrible thing. And it was an of someone who is not a caricature of a monster.

Kartokin a monstrous thing, but he never saw this kid as a monster by a respect and certainly didn't as he saw him grow into a middle-aged man. Among his final words before the drug took effect and he was officially killed by the state in late 2020 was, I'm so sorry to the family. There was basically nothing greater that he's felt over these years and decades than that. And he went further than that, significantly further than that. I mean, the remorse is one thing. The desire to apologize as profusely as he could, as many times as he could to the family of the victims is also another.

But on top of that, he stressed that he did not want anybody, anybody, not a single person, to feel an ounce of guilt for his execution. Even the executioners who were getting ready to plunge the needles into his arms. So there's a lot we can say about the kind of person he was, the kind of man he grew into before he was. But hearing that, when I was starting to really research this piece and talk to a lot of people who were involved with the efforts on various sides of the time, that is one of the things that stuck with me. The Brandon Bernard thing was horrible. The Lisa Montgomery thing was, if possible, maybe even worse. And we don't really have time to get into it here. I'll just briefly say that this was a woman in her 50s, who as a child, was repeatedly raped and beaten by her stepfather. To the extent that not only did she suffer from severe mental issues, as one would expect from this, she had actual physical injuries to her brains. And she absolutely committed a horrible murder. But I don't know how you look at a woman like this who has had her mind.

and her brain destroyed and say it's okay to execute someone like this. But because we're getting low on time, the single most chilling line in the piece was you touched on this before, and you didn't have it as a direct quote in the piece, but it's from a good Catholic Bill Barr saying that the only reason the administration stopped at 13 executions is that they ran out of time. That to me was the most chilling and upsetting and just, to me, that's just like pure evil.

Yeah. And right, as I was mentioning before, he bluntly told us that, yes, the expectation and the plans were to add more people to the roster. And the only reason they weren't added is because they couldn't because Joe Biden is not Donald Trump. And Donald Trump ended up massively blowing the 2020 presidential election. And just to be clear to your listeners, we did not have time in roughly 4,000 words or 3,000 words or however long this piece ended up being to get into every single 13. of the individuals during this killing spree. I would have liked to. Yes. But there was no room for that, so we highlighted two cases. These two cases, the more your listeners read about it, I think a lot of them will agree with us that they are very sympathetic cases. I don't think you'll shock anybody

listening to this to hear that of the 13, not all of them were people like Brendan Bernard or Lisa Montgomery. There certainly were people who committed some of the worst crimes you could ever imagine, who never showed an ounce of remorse. Like there's one man in particular, I forget his name, who was killed during the spree, who really does seem like just a miserable, horrible, evil person who, when asked, do you have any remorse or any final words for the family? Now that we're about to kill you, just simply said the equivalent, nope, let's get this over with, I'm okay with what I did, or something like that. So I'm not asking anybody necessarily to shed a tear for that individual. I will say that in full disclosure, I personally am inalterably opposed to capital punishment. I think

scumbags like that should be convicted and rot in prison for the rest of their days. Yes. But I guess my point is if you want to be pro-death penalty in this country, including in the incredibly perverse form he took during Donald Trump and Bill Barr's six-month killing spree, you have to accept, or at least you should be forced to reckon with the idea that people like Lisa Montgomery or Brandon Bernard are getting the exact same treatment as like the Hannibal Lecters of the world. Right. I personally do not think that that is a form of decent or moral justice.

But that's just me. Yeah. Swin, thanks so much for joining us. The pieces at Rolling Stone, it's fantastic. And just to address something you said earlier, I read the piece and I was like, did we know, we must have known this, obviously. But I had, as you pointed out, I had forgotten. And I went back and did some research.

And yes, there were things written about it at the time. But as you said, there was so much going. I mean, we were in the middle of an insurrection. COVID was going on. I think your instincts were 100% correct to highlight this now because it is something that is easily forgotten. And it shouldn't have been. Swin, thanks again.

Thank you so much. Andy Levy. Danielle Moody. Who is your fuck that guy today? So my fuck that guy today, and I feel like we do this a lot, it's a plurality of guys. guys. It is the House Judiciary Committee in the Great State of North Dakota, and they have a bill that wants to ban, according to the advocate, visual depictions of sexually explicit content

from public libraries. So maybe you're thinking, well, that's dumb and stupid, but obviously they're talking about, like, you know, hardcore pornography and graphic sexual acts, and, you know, maybe we don't want five-year-old seeing those. But of course, that's never what they mean. They might mean that, but it also somehow always includes any references to sexual orientation or gender identity. So we're seeing this across the country. As we know, we talk about this a lot on this podcast, as we damn well should. And this bill goes as far as to say that librarians who don't remove these books. Again, this is books that might include simply, references to sexual orientation or gender identity. If they don't remove these books, they can face up to 30

days in prison, Danielle, prison. We've reached a point in this country where we're talking about putting librarians in prison because they have books in a library that might actually mention that some people are gay and some people are trans. And it is just, I don't know how we got to this point because it honestly did seem for a while as a person of not young age who remembers back in the day when this shit was common, it seemed like we were going in the right direction on a lot of this stuff for a long time. And then at some point, it turned into a sign wave and we sort of started falling back down the backside of the wave and crashing. And it's absolutely disgusting and it is nothing but it's just censorship and it's just shit that I had hoped we'd

moved past and stupid me thought we had moved past but we're going back it's retro chic I guess if you want to call it I've said this a million people have said this it's the same playbook that was used against gay people back in the you know I mean look I remember it from the 80s and it just seemed like we had gotten past that and I do think the majority of the younger generations, Gen Z and whatever, look at this shit and they're like, are you fucking crazy? Like, what is wrong with you? But unfortunately, they don't run the country yet. And so we have people my age and older and even some millennials who just seem to want to send us back. And back to a time when gay people had to be completely closeted when trans people, as far as they were

concerned, didn't exist. There was no such thing. And anyone who might be self-harming. or worse because of gender dysmorphia, well, they're simply mentally ill, and there's no place for that in society. And they want to go back to that shit. And I'm sick of it. And we need to start going back to where I thought we were actually moving as a society. But instead, we seem to be going further in this direction. So a huge, a big old fuck that guy to the North Dakota House Judiciary Committee. Amen. Amen. And you know what I always think about every time I see now these stories of the book bannings and the now the one of jail librarians is that we're not dipping into fascism. It is here.

That this is what this looks like. And then on top of that, you asked the question you said, there was a time when you felt like things were going in the right direction. Yeah. We were getting too free. Yeah, I guess. That's the problem with quote unquote conservatives and these rabid right wingers is that we as a people are becoming too free, owning ourselves too much, becoming too conscious of their

bullshit. And so this is what the pushback looks like. But aren't they the ones that keep saying live free or die, don't tread on me, government stay out of your lot? Yeah. Yeah, stay out of their lives, but in my vagina. So there's that. Right. Exactly. Yeah. So who is your fuck that guy, Daniel? You know, it's a network because we don't just do people here, right? Like, we're inclusive as fuck. And so it is the entire network right now of CNN. And here's what I say to that. CNN, you have just received your eight-year lowest ratings. And now they're bringing on Bill Marr's HBO show overtime, his post-show segment to air on Fridays because the head honcho, Chris Licked, of CNN, says that he's going to reshape the network.

including hiring and entertainment personality. Can somebody explain to me that why when folks decide that they want to shake things up, that a white man seems to be the only motherfucker they look for, particularly one that happens to be a racist, that happens to be an Islamophob, that happens to be a transphobe, that their idea of shaking things up is going and say, hmm, he's only in his 60s, so that seems to be right.

I just, I'm so fucking tired. of these places. And I honestly, I hope that CNN, I hope their ratings continue to go downhill. Because when they decided that they were going to open up their doors to former Trump staff and think that that was going to show them to be somehow neutral, no, you're not neutral. You are just about that bullshit. And we're going to both sides ourselves into like a civil war because of the fact that you're going to give people who you know readily worked for a liar, for a racist, for a xenophobe, for an Islamophobe, and you're going to give these people a platform?

Because that's the insight we need in America right now? Are you fucking kidding me? I just, I got to tell you, this whole campaign with these people between going after trans kids, between going after the LGBTQ community, amping up their anti-blackness and celebrating the death of innocent black people in this country,

I tell you, mark my words, chickens will come home to Roots. Evil doesn't just live forever. People are conscious and they are getting free and they will free themselves from this bullshit. But I'm telling you, free yourselves from CNN. Free yourselves from watching that motherfucking channel because it's trash. I want to be a little careful about what I say about Bill Moore

because I know Jesse is a huge fan. Okay, okay, okay, Jesus Christ. He is the fucking worst. And there's just no other, you know, long-time listeners of this podcast know how I feel about Bill Moore. He fucking sucks. And look, if you want to go in a comedy direction, you know, you hinted at this, give Roy Wood Jr. a call. Give Wanda Sykes a call. Give someone else a call. And if for some reason you decide it needs to be a white dude,

I assure you there are in the seven digits of people who would be better than Bill Maher. Just stop with this guy. And I don't know what the hell CNN is doing. I don't think Chris Lick knows what the hell he's doing. I think there's a reason their ratings are tanking. And, you know, this is. sad thing is it would be nice to have another alternative to Fox News that people could watch and actually learn shit from. And putting Bill Maher on is not news. That ain't it. News. That ain't it. It ain't it. So fuck them. Fuck them. Hope you enjoy checking out this episode of The New Abnormal. We're back every Tuesday, Friday, and Sunday. If you enjoyed it, please share it with a friend and keep the conversation going.

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