The Daily Beast Podcast - JD Vance Thinks Suburban Woman Don’t Care About Abortion

Episode Date: August 18, 2024

 JD Vance continues to strike out, especially when it comes to knowing what women want. “What is it that JD Vance thinks that normal women care about other than control over their own bodies?” said The New Abnormal co-host Danielle Moodie. Plus! Historian Frank Andre Guridy joins the podcast to talk about his new book, The Stadium: An American History of Politics, Process, and Play. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Convierte your passion in a business with Shopify and bathe records of with the form of pay with a better conversion of the world. You've heard of the best.

The Mereverison of the world. The incredible system of Pago of Shopify facilita the company on your site web, in the social and in

in any place. That is music for your ears. No, let's more vets. Your business will be a super-exitio

with Shopify. Empeas to start your period of month in Shopify. coms bar records. 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 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 Kedden, 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. Welcome back to another bonus episode of The New Abnormal, and we thank you so much for being here. Today we're going to be joined by historian Frank Andre Gritty, and he's here to tell us all about his new book, The Stadium, American History of Politics, Process, and Play. But first, let's have some fun.

Are you guys ready to listen to some clips? Clips. I'm going to be honest. We got some good stuff. We're going to have fun this week. Wow, you've never said that before, Jesse. Ever. And you've never lied about it when you've said it.

I think we got some really fun stuff this week. We're ready. All right, let's see it. Let's see what my idea of a good time is. All right, here we have two very, very, very, very weird people talking. Fox News is Laura Ingram and VP candidate J.D. Vance, who I literally just saw a picture of him as a teenager in a men's room with three girls. What?

Every day with this guy, whether it's a quote. or whatever. It's just, I think we need to call for a total and complete shutdown until we figure out what the hell's going on. But let's listen to him, talk to Laura. It's going to be great. Senator, one of my dear friends tonight said to me, well, all these suburban women, all these suburban women, all they care about is abortion, and they don't understand that decision is with the states now. It's not banned nationally. Even if people, some people want to be banned nationally, it's with the states. What do you say to suburban women out there who are marinating in this propaganda? Well, first of all, I don't buy that, Laura.

I think most suburban women care about the normal things that most Americans care about, right? What is it that JD Vance think that normal women care about other than control over their own bodies? His response to questions that are created to help him dig himself out of the grave that he put himself in, he's just like, no, no, please hand me a bigger shovel. Like I just, I don't understand the response here. Like, normal women don't care about it. What are you talking about? Like, every woman, every person with a uterus cares about their ability to decide when, where and if they want to have a family.

And they want that for their kids. So, yeah, you take that away. It's going to be the kitchen table conversation that is going to go on until women get their rights back, period. Yeah. Two things here. One, you couldn't be more right. It's like you're going on Fox News and you're hurting yourself. Like, man.

We're an ingram, which might be the ultimate handicap in that of interviews. I mean, my God, like, it couldn't be any more, like, like they are throwing you. Everybody. You know, it's right over the plate. It's slow. And you are striking out. And it's just, you know, maybe you don't belong in the big leagues at that point. I don't know.

It's a T-ball. They're not even throwing it. It's literally on the fucking stand for you. Yeah. And the other thing is, though, I do want to say that this does seem to be the new Republican strategy on abortion. We had Trump at his press, whatever that was at Mar-a-Lago, I think that was last week, saying that abortion is not a big issue in this campaign and that people aren't talking about it

anymore. And now we have J.D. Vance saying that, you know, he doesn't think that suburban women are all that concerned about abortion. And I think two things. One, boy, are they going to find out they're wrong as they've been finding out for the past few election cycles? And two, it's like, you know, wishing it don't make it so. And I understand that they don't want to actually talk about their positions on abortion because most people don't agree with them, women and men, but particularly women, but I think also men don't agree with how off the charts extreme they are on this. So their strategy seems to be to downplay abortion and reproductive rights as much as they possibly can. But, you know, of course, they're running away from their own record when they do that.

So I don't think it's going to fly. I just keep thinking about how long it's been since Dobbs was overturned and how long they've had to get something together here. And the best they could come up with is Trump lying, saying all the experts wanted. row overturned and then no, this is not actually popular. This isn't just polling. This has been numerous elections now. We've seen this has been the determining issue. I don't hate to see it go bad for them.

No, I don't think they can do it. I don't think that it's possible for them to do it because their position is so extreme. And regardless of the fact that I think it's loathsome and oppose it, forget my opinion for a second, but only for a second. the majority of Americans think that they are extreme on this shit and that they're weird and out of touch. And so I just, I don't think there's anything they can do but to try to pretend that it's not important and somehow will that into reality by speaking it. All right. Now we're going to get a little weird, though. Oh, dear.

So you got to bear with me here. We're going to play something from Real America's voice where this guy, Derek Morgan from Heritage Foundation, is going to talk. And there's images of project 2025 on the screen, but he's going to say a good policy. Let's get weird. So here at Heritage and across the movement, we've been looking for ways to save in every department of government, including the Defense Department. And so we would advocate taking a hard look at the defense budget, looking at the research and development budget, which continues to grow very, very fast, even as procurement is behind.

So we really can leave no stone unturned. every single government agency needs to do its part. And in fact, in our first pillar playbook, we want to close several government departments as well. So should the American people elect strong conservatives to office, we think you could certainly get rid of many agency of government, starting with the education department department. Wait, what did he say that was good? Cutting to the defense budget and cutting the research and development of it. Okay, because all I landed on was cutting the Department of Education. Yes, yes.

That was the bad part. I said one good, one good parts. First of all, one lies across the board. They're not going to cut defense. They're not, are you kidding me? Particularly Congress is good to cut defense because. Give me a break. Yeah, the trick of this always is that Rathia, et cetera,

put their different wings of it all in different districts so that they can keep this grift going. Yeah, for sure. No, I think, Danielle, I'm with you. Like, the only thing I came out of that with was a reminder that they don't want just cuts to the Department of Education, they want it gone. Which, again, that's not new, but if you look at everything they've been doing at the state level, yeah, of course, they want to replicate that on the federal level and anything to keep people undereducated.

Like, that should just be their slogan. Yeah. All right. Now we have CNN's Caitlin Collins with UAW leader Sean Fain discussing Elon Musk in Trump's Twitter spaces. Hey, thanks for having us, Caitlin. Look, this is just, it's just more of Donald Trump and who he is. You know, this is the corporate America playbook, the billionaire playbook.

They thumb their nose at labor law, and there's got to come a reckoning in this country where the billionaires in a corporate class and employers are held accountable when they break the law. It is federal law that workers have a right to strike, and you cannot be fired for striking. And, you know, Donald Trump thumbs his nose to law. I mean, there's another theme coming out. I call Donald Trump a scab because that's what he is. But, you know, there's been the word thrown around here recently about weird. And you know what?

That ticket is just completely weird. If you listen to Trump and Musk, how they laugh, how they laugh about how Musk fires people and how Donald Trump loves to talk about his favorite two words, you're fired. I mean, who enjoys that? Who takes pride in firing workers? And that's the problem here. You know, this is a whose side are you on moment. That's what this election is about.

And we know who Donald Trump stands with. He stands for the billionaire class and a wealthy. and Kamala Harris and Tim Wals, they're one of us. They're working class people, and they're going to stand up for working class people. And it's a very clear-cut election for us on whose side we're on. I like that clip. That was one of your best, Jesse. Good job.

Big Sean Fane fan here over here. Yeah, I wake up every day hoping he hasn't been milkshake ducked because I love him so much. And I think he's just an absolutely fantastic voice. for workers and for the entire labor movement in this country. And I love that coming out of that hilariously bad live stream of Trump and Musk that the UAW is filing charges against both Trump and Musk with the National Labor Relations Board because of what Trump said about firing people who go on strike and Musk laughing and replying yeah to that. And so now they've filed charges. saying that both of these men have, quote, interfered with restrained or coerced employees who were exercising their right to organize against the company,

suggesting he would fire employees engaged in protected concerted activity, including striking. And so I just, I love that they're doing this. And I love that every time Trump and or Musk opens their mouth, they raise the possibility of charges being filed against them. It was such a brilliant move to file charges against them. And who brags about firing people and destroying people's lives and, like, livelihood? Like, who gets off on that? That is why Elon Musk and Donald Trump, like, fluff each other so much because, like, they have so much in common with their evil, like, heartedness. They're gross.

So I hope to follow this UAW lawsuit because I hope it materializes into something good. What I'm really hoping is this turns into a big campaign issue. A thing I think about a lot is I was luckily very close to the Obama 2012 campaign. And one of the postmortems was the most effective ad of that campaign cycle was about Mitt Romney. They fired the workers after they built a stage for him. And this feels like the same vibe to me, that this could be a very effective ad. And Trump, in a recent poll, has showed that he's bleeding working class white voters lately. Yeah.

And this is where I think Walls has really come in. handy why we were rooting for him to be the pick is because he provides a staunch contrast to their toxic masculinity and gives, you know, white men a better model of how they can actually show up as opposed to this place of like grievance. So we only need a couple of them to be peeled off, to be honest. And I, you know, I think that this campaign has the ability to do it. Love it. Well, I have good news for you. It's now time for my apology. because here I'm going to play a great clip of Tim Walls, who really is just going to show what he's got right here.

Here's a little fact that they just told me. By the way, my week has been very interesting since last Tuesday, as you might guess. But here's a fact they shared with me as I came here to make this opportunity to say thank you. I happen to be the first union member on a presidential ticket since Ronald Reagan. But rest assured, I won't lose my way. Probably should be a few more union members in elected office, President Saunders. We might want to work at that. I think I'm looking at some.

So you heard the story. You knew Vice President Harrips grew up in a middle-class family, picked up shifts at that McDonald's as a student. I keep asking this to make a contrast here. Can you simply picture Donald Trump working at a McDonald's trying to make a McFlurry or something? Oh, he knows, he knows us. he knows us. He couldn't run that damn Flurry Machine if it tells him anything. I thought this might be a fun time for a thought experiment of what other things you can't imagine

Donald Trump doing as a worker. Working? Like any, like doing literally any job. Like we should clip that. Remember him pulling up to a McDonald's and saying that he knew the menu better than the drive-thru worker that was there? And I always list like, because this is something to brag about. Jesse, I don't think there's a job you could name where I would say, oh, yeah, I could picture Donald Trump doing that job. I was personally thinking waitress on roller skates had a roller rick personally. That's where I will shout out Eric Swalwell, whose recent campaign had. Oh, yes. Shows Donald Trump as a school bus driver.

And like the mother being terrified after he opens up the doors and says, I'll be addicted. on day one and just starts like saying all of the things that Trump has said and the mother's like, I'll drive you to school today. Like you can't even imagine him. No, no, there isn't a job. Him being a waitress on roller skates is, yeah, obviously that's absurd. It's no less absurd than any other job you could mention the idea that he could do it. I can't think of one.

And that's, I'm talking blue collar. I'm talking white collar. Manual labor, intellectual labor, however you wanted. categorize a job. I cannot picture him doing it. I just can't. Yeah, no. I won't.

Even that show, the show undercover boss, like where the bosses go undercover and take up like that, he couldn't do that. And that's a TV show. Yeah. He is really bad at saying the quiet part out loud. With their bodies, they repurposed the arena into a public square, a gathering place to express dissent,

an epicenter of activism and community building. So writes, Columbia history professor Frank Andre Gariddy of the 2020 Black Lives Matters protests. Early in his absolutely fascinating new book, The Stadium, an American History of Politics, Protest, and Play. The book illuminates the role stadiums have played throughout U.S. history, and it's out August 20th, and he joins me now. Thank you so much for being here.

Thank you for having me. I'm delighted to be on. Absolutely. So something I found really interesting is that throughout the book, you point out the often opposing roles of the stadium, which you describe as the tension between social inclusion and exclusion. Explain what you mean by that. Yeah. You know, stadiums are built to bring people together. They're built to attract crowds, right? They're built to have what we typically think of as people come to a sporting event or their favorite concert performer. And yet they, over the years,

since their earliest iterations as circus tents and ballparks and the aftermath of the Civil War, you know, they've been space of exclusion of the articulation of kind of elite domination, the articulation of the ways in which governments try to project their power, whether it's a municipal government or a national one, right? And yet at the same time, because they do attract people to recreate or to work, they wind up in places where you see this interesting dynamic of people coming together and yet also facing these barriers that are reflected in the largest society along the lines of race, class, or gender, or sexuality, right? And so that's the dynamic I find utterly fascinating about them.

And that's certainly the case in recent iterations of the stadium where we see them as, you know, really built for by and large an affluent crowds. And we see this clearly with the proliferation of luxury suites and VIP sections, etc. And yet we think of them at these places where everybody can go see their favorite team or their concert performers. So that's kind of the dynamic that I traced throughout American history. It's so interesting. And so I want to go back through that history. As you write in the book, and as you just said, stadiums were mostly built to cater to elites and maybe boxing arenas being a notable exception, some circus big tops. But in the late 19th century, this sort of starts to change. And it's all because of those pesky immigrants, isn't it? This is correct. Yes. And we see this very clearly in the history of Mazda Square Garden in New York City, right, which has many iterations, you know, at first emerged on the east side. on 26th Street just north of Massas Square Park. And, you know, at that point, the United States is facing a moment that should sound familiar

to your listeners, a moment of nativist reaction to immigration. You know, at that point, you now had, you know, tens of thousands of immigrants from Europe, but also from other parts of the Americas coming to the United States. And the question of immigration becomes a major political question, right? But it's also because immigrants are forming a large demographic at stadiums and arenas as they're emerging in new ballparks and other indoor arenas at that time. time, right? And so, you know, some of these forces come to a head at the infamous or famous 1924 National Democratic Convention where the question of immigration is central. And the party

is struggling to figure out how are they going to come together in the midst of this divisive nativist politics confronting an emerging immigration, you know, pro-immigrant politics. That's being shepherded in by the immigrant politicians who are emerging in the Northeast. And so those are the forces that clash at the 24 National Democratic Convention 100 years ago. And then the Great Depression hits in 29 and gives us the rise of European fascism. And you say that America's stadiums and arenas transformed into battlegrounds where the era's political conflicts played out. How does this happen? It happens because in this period, whether it's the ballpark or, you know, and I focus mostly in this chapter on the indoor arena like Mazda Square Garden, these buildings

are political meeting halls. There are places where, you know, people see boxing matches and the circus, but they're also places where the local political groups are holding rallies. I mean, we see this over and over again in terms of communist party rallies, socialist party rallies. And by the time you get to the 1930s, you know, with resurgent fascism in Europe, you're seeing the struggle of Nazism happening in Madison Square Garden with a very infamous rally in 1939 that was held by the German-American Bund, right, in which they're literally trying to harmonize Nazism with American patriotism, with this large display of George Washington in the middle of the arena and speeches on

and on anti-Semitic ad nauseum. And yet we're seeing, you know, people pushing back against that, too, as crowds gather outside the arena to protest the rally and also people inside the arena charging, is the board Greenbaum most famously charging the state, the stage trying to stop the rally, right? And so, you know, the garden is known as the world's most famous arena, but throughout most of its history, it was, in fact, a political meeting hall. And it remains that, you know, deep into the 1970s. Yeah, for sure. And you mentioned the 1939, the, as you say, the infamous German-American Blint Rally. And it was just the prior year, 1938, when Joe Lewis defeated Max Schmelling at Yankee Stadium, that was also, you know, became a big political moment. That's exactly right.

I mean, one of the themes of this book shows how sports has always been intertwined with politics, right? And as the 20th century unfolds, we just see this over and over again, right? And so Joe Lewis's fights with Max Schmelling, the first one, and then the second, when she loses to Schmelling, and Schmelling becomes this icon of the Nazi regime in Germany. And then when, Lewis defeats him decisively in 1938. This is not just the victory of a black boxer defeating a white boxer. This is about the question of Nazism. This is the question of democracy and freedom.

And that's what is being celebrated at Yankee Stadium when he wins that battle in 1938. And also on the streets of Harlem and across the country, right? And so what we're seeing in the stadium are, again, not just boxing matches to sporting events, but oftentimes events that have a larger political and social significance. And let's talk then about another thing that you, that you, that you, write up so well in the book, the 1941 Sugar Bowl at Tulane down in Louisiana, where Boston College, one of the teams playing in the Sugar Bowl, they had a star running back, Lou Montgomery, who was black, and he was not allowed to play. As you point out in the book, the stadium, and you don't mean just this

stadium, but the stadium in general, the stadium was a prominent location in the geography of racism in the South. Yes. The stadium in my book is an institution, right? And I think, It doesn't matter if it's Wrigley Field in Chicago or the United Center in Chicago where the Democratic Convention is going to be held next week or the college football stadium. It's an institution where we see the status quo preserved and challenged. And in the chapter on the Sugar Bowl in New Orleans, which was held on the grounds of Tulane University for a long time before I moved into the Superdome in 1975, you know, what we're seeing there is the attempt of the white Jim Crow South to project its image on the national stage through

this annual New Year's dear ball game college football game that was very popular and very prominent in the South and Southern College Football and a national college football culture for decades, right? And so, you know, we're seeing that 41 Sugar Bowl or 75,000 people congregating to watch this sporting event. And yet one of the teams is not allowing one of their best players in Longhomie to play in the Sugar Bowl. And this happens again and again in that period in the Jim Crow era where we see northern schools or professional teams. teams, basically adhering to Jim Crow segregation when they play Southern schools or Southern teams. And that's what we see at the Sugar Bowl. And by watching a lot of the highlight films

from that era, from the 40s and 50s, you see over and over again the kind of ways in which this is this kind of Confederate fantasy being projected through the halftime show, through the pregame pageantry, and through the exclusion of black players deep into the 1950s, and then really is into the early 70s where we really see the Sugar Bowl fully desegregated. And as you point out, the TV networks, et cetera, all went along with it. Absolutely. You know, the Sugar Bowl was about the performance of national reconciliation. And that meant that northerners were complicit in that performance. I mean, we see this in national politics, but if you look at the history of sport, and we know this already, do the story of the segregation of Major League Baseball,

but that's certainly true with college football and really all professional and collegiate sports at that time. And so, yes, if you're watching the Sugar Bowl, you know, on ABC Sports in 1970, where even there, you're seeing two all-white teams playing together and you see the Confederate flags waved into crowds. I mean, this is about, again, the Southerners saw it. They're projecting of their regional culture, but it was an attempt to sort of, you know, kind of withstand the gains of the civil rights movement, which were really, really becoming more palpable by the 50s and 60s and 70s. And so, yeah, so there's a lot more at stake at that Sugar Bowl than just simply the New Year's Day, you know, game in which, you know, one team is going to beat another. So let's talk about the civil rights movement and stadiums. A recurring

theme of the book, obviously, is that the stadiums are American public. squares. And, you know, you write a lot about the segregated Jim Crow crowds, the fact that for a long time stadiums were pretty much strictly masculine domains. And a lot of this really does start to change with the rise of the civil rights movement. And stadiums play a large role in the civil rights movement with organizations like Martin Luther King's Southern Christian Leadership Conference holding rallies. And then also on a cultural level with concerts from black artists, festivals like watt stacks that combined both sort of politics and culture. Talk about that. Talk about how the civil rights movement really affected stadiums in this country. What we're seeing in the post-war

two period, the 1950s and 60s, moving into the 70s, is stadium becoming publicly managed. You know, before that period, stadiums were largely owned by private entrepreneurs looking, you know, whether they were professional team owners or, you know, people trying to profit from the, for the entertainment industry, but in the 50s and 60, they became publicly managed. And that dovetails perfectly with two monumental processes, the growth of the sport industry in this country and the Black Freedom Movement, really taking shape, reviving in the 1950s and 60s, most famously with the Southern Freedom Movement, but also throughout the country as well, right? So UCLC is coming together at the local stadium and the ballpark. And you see that in the ways of which the SCLC, the Southern

Christian Leadership Conference, is holding massive rallies at Cobour Arena in 19th. where Martin Luther King gives his first iteration of the I Have a Dream speech that he gives the March on Washington months later. You see that in the ways in which freedom ride rallies are happening in the Los Angeles Sports Arena in 1961. And then you're also seeing this in even after Dr. King's death in Los Angeles, where you see a wide swath of political groups and 20,000 people mourning his assassination. And everything from, you know, Cesar Chavez's Mexican-American, you know, farm movement in California

to, you know, black nationalist groups, to, you know, more moderate, you know, political groups as well. And so, you know, this is why I argue that the stadium throughout history and in this period of particular, you know, becomes this kind of semi-public square where political battles of thought, where communities come together to mourn, to protest, right? And the Black Freedom Movement obviously played a huge role in that process. And, of course, in desegregating the crowds as well, right? As we see Black athletes performing on a more substantial scale in the 1960s and 70s, right? And it's the Black Freedom Movement, but it's also other freedom movements as well. I mean, I talk about

the gay games as well. I mean, one of the things I'm trying to do in this book is to show how a variety of movement create this massive cultural change and change the media of what stadiums are supposed to be, aside from just being a place of entertainment. And I think that that's one of the things of the books trying to show. No, absolutely. And you got at it there a little bit. But what started in really in, maybe the late 50s, but certainly in the 60s with the civil rights movement, as you say, continued through that the 70s and the 80s with the women in locker rooms, quote unquote, controversy. And then, you know, from an LGBTQ plus perspective, in the 1980s, you had the gay games, you had the act up activism at Shea Stadium, which it's bizarre. I'm a huge Mets fan. And I'm old enough that

the 80s or a decade I remember fairly well. I had completely forgotten about that. You know, Andy, I'm old old old. I soon. I should have remembered the active protest. And I didn't. I did not. You know, that's something about my own coming of age as a straight guy who, was on the radar, my radar as a teenager. And I think that's one of the wonderful things about this project. It's allowed me to kind of see the wide variety of social movements have had an

impact in American history, right? And so yes, yes, absolutely. The stadium is a place to protest, it's a place to come together. It's also a place of work. And that's what I try to do in my chapter on the struggles of women's sports writers to break into the press box and

locker rooms in the 1970s, which was portrayed at the time as this sort of invasion of women who want to, you know, go see naked men or hang out with men at the ballpark. But in fact, it was really pioneered by these, you know, emerging, you know, second-wave feminists or even those who weren't feminist per se, but or, you know, enacting feminist principles just by showing up at the ballpark and daring to argue that they had a right to cover sports just like men. And so it's a fascinating story in which you're seeing, you know, overtime, eventually by the

late 70s, there's a very famous legal case that's filed against the city of New York and New York Yankees for gender discrimination at Yankee Stadium for. disallowing Melissa Lutkey to interview New York Yankee ball players at Yankee Stadium. And they win the case. And that becomes a major shift in the ways in which we start to think about women as sports writers, right? And not just women as athletes, but actually people who can author the story of sports in America.

And we see a similar dynamic with the gay rights movement and the LGBTQ movement that's emerging in the 1980s in the midst of the AIDS crisis and the catastrophe and the massive homophobic movement that was, you know, pioneered by, you know, Anita Bryant saved the children campaign, the late 1970s, and you have this amazing grassroots movement in San Francisco, you know, basically argue that gay people have a right to occupy public space and perform an athletic competition that's modeled on the Olympic Games. And they do that at Keizard Stadium, another publicly managed venue in 1982 and 1986.

And it launches the gay games phenomenon, which leads to this day. And so, again, we're seeing how different groups have approached this institution and try to stake their claims for equality and citizenship in the United States. Yeah, it's absolutely amazing. And then that brings us to the 1990s, and here we start to see a change. And maybe talk about the cultural differences between the mid-20th century stadium building and the wave that we're in now, which started in the 90s. Obviously, the stadiums are way more expensive now, but it's a lot more than that, isn't it?

That's correct. The stadium gets remade into a corporate billboard, starting. in the mid-1980s, when you start to see naming rights agreements between municipalities or franchises and corporate interests. You know, a phenomenon really gets shepherded in by the 1984 Olympic Games, where we see this unprecedented, you know, investment in a sporting event. I mean, the sport industry and the corporate industry, you know, kind of come together in a very, you know, unprecedented way in the 1980s. And we see this manifested in the ways in which stadiums are built, how they're named, and how they're conceived, right? And it's at that time, we,

You start to see a perforation of stadiums as places of leisure for the VIP set. You start to see the ways in which they are seen as places to generate economic development in previously struggling inner cities in the Midwest and other parts of the country in the 1980s and 90s and into the 2000s, right? You know, before that, you know, stadiums were seen as municipal buildings that honored veterans and honored Americans of various types, right? And the identity of the stadium has shifted completely from a monumental space of memorialization to one that's celebrating a corporation, right, state farm insurance or Toyota

Enterprise, and then the people, you know, the teams that play in those venues. And yet they are still, by and large, publicly managed or relying on public subsidies for their existence. And that's the tension and dynamic that I tried to show in that, you know, in that process by which essentially see the corporatization of stadiums since the 1990s. Yeah. At the end of the book, you sort of take a good look at how stadiums became sort of intertwined into a, let's call it, a military athletic complex. But then you follow that with a look at the Black Lives Matters movement, with Colin Kaepernick taking a knee, with the WNBA protesting Kelly Loughler, with NBA players and baseball players, staging walkouts after yet another police shooting of a black man. And I just kept thinking,

that's really quite the juxtaposition. It is. You know, and I think it's, I mean, it's very much emblematic of larger American history, right? This kind of continuum between, you know, moments of democratic opening and social mobility and then moments of oppression. And we've seen that in an accelerated scale since 2016, for sure, if not before, right? And I think that's because, you know, in the aftermath of 9-11, you know, we see the stadium be converted into a place that's a recurring, you know, pep rally for the military and for police forces. And I think that's the other piece that I'm making a point that Howard Bryant, the great sports writer, has made in his great book, The Heritage. It's not just the honoring of the military. It's the honoring of law enforcement, right?

In principle, there's nothing wrong with that, but it becomes a massive political campaign to generate support for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. And that has a major impact on the way in which we understand American patriotism. It becomes this kind of hyper-militarized expression that centers on jet flyovers and stone-faced soldiers at every turn. If you look at patriotic ceremonies from the 1970s, they're very, very different than they are after 9-11, right? And much more militarized and celebrating, you know, very specific sort of celebrations of life. enforcement. And then also we see, you know, starting with black athletes and other athletes in the 2010s and most famously by Colin Caput. But others, when they start taking a stand against police violence, it's very, very little tolerance for their activism. And we're talking about people

just taking a knee. We're not even talking about speeches and things that, you know, the Civil Rights movement was doing in the 1960. We're talking about just an athlete taking a knee for crying out loud, right? So, you know, what we see since that time is are the ways of which political expression has been narrowed publicly, I would say, right? And how the Black Freedom Movement and others inspired by that movement, you know, in the aftermath of the police shootings of the 2010, you know, push back and, you know, somewhat effectively, you know, were able to sort of call out this dynamic that had been, you know, very repressive in American society. I mean, I think we're still at that point now. But, you know, here in an election year, you know, it's very interesting

to see how, you know, what's going to happen over the next few months now moving ahead. I shouldn't do that as a historian. I think about the ways in which the politics of our time are going to show up at the local arena or stadium. Yeah, for sure. And this is not in the book, but back, in June, Major League Baseball played a game at Rick Woodfield, which historically and famously is where the Birmingham Barons of the Negro League once played. And I was curious what you made of that. Yeah, the Black Barons. That's the Negro League team. The Barons were the all white teams. Oh, right. Sorry. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, one of the things that this book is trying to do, I'm trying to get beyond the

nostalgia that we associate with the old ballparks. You know, and I understand this. It's very seductive. I totally get it. Rickwood Field is, by definition, a monument to segregation. That's why you had black teams playing there, right? And so it's great that the Negro League legacy is being honored. And I think it was so great about Reggie Jackson, the very famous Hall of Fame, you know, expressing his experiences playing there in 1967, you know, after desegregation supposedly happened, and expressing, you know, the horrors that he felt, you know, trying to start his career there, it just shows you that the Jim Crow legacy is part and parcel of that story. And it can't just celebrate black achievement and, you know, at a face the history of Jim Crow segregation. And I think that

that's what we saw in the commemoration of a baseball history, you know, back in June. Yeah. No, I remember, you know, I was watching the game live. And when Reggie Jackson told his stories, it was a weird thing to think, but because obviously it was horrible what, what he and all the other players went through. But I just sat there thinking, thank God he's telling the story because this whole sepia tone stuff, look, I'm glad they were honoring the Negro League players. But like you said, it really was just sort of, you know, putting a, I don't know, some kind of code. of like a fresh paint on a dilapidated shack that that was just, you know, absolutely horrific. No question. I mean, I think that that's one of the things we've seen in major league baseballs

is, you know, attempt to sort of recognize the history of the Negro Leagues. And that is a worthy effort and every Negro League player should be honored and celebrated for their careers, the legends and the lesser known, but, you know, you can't do that, you know, while sugarcoding, you know, the conditions or overlooking the condition that created the Negro Leagues in the first place, right? And I think that that was great about what Reggie did. And I have a feeling that was not scripted. No, I don't think so either, yeah. So it was just great for him to do that.

So it was just great for him to sort of speak some truth there in the midst of the glorification of baseball's past, you know, and I think that that's, and again, that's why looking at these buildings are really significant. As you see how they can preserve the status quo and you can see the moments when, you know, freedom struggles, breakthrough. And we see, you know, efforts to actually expand what it means to be American happening in a building like Rickwood Field. Absolutely.

The book is The Stadium, an American history of politics. protest and play. The author is Frank, Andre Garidi. Frank, thank you so much for being here. The book was so interesting and so fascinating, and I hope everybody runs out and buys it. Andy, thank you so much for bringing me on. It's been a pleasure. 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. This podcast is a daily... Want more great listens? Check out our comedy podcast, The Last Laugh, and our star-studded the Daily Beast

podcast at the DailyBeast.com slash podcasts. If you enjoyed this episode, consider becoming a Daily Beast subscriber. Subscribing is the best way to feed the beast and support all of your podcasts as we cover what might become the darkest timeline. Head to the DailyBeast.com slash membership slash podcast and sign up today.