The Daily Beast Podcast - Proof that Republicans Know Exactly How Racist They Are

Episode Date: January 1, 2023

There are so many examples of revisionist history happening these days, particularly among conservatives, that historian and University of Princeton professor Kevin M. Kruse joins this episode of The New Abnormal politics podcast to set the record straight. He tells co-host Andy Levy about his book Myth America: Historians Take On the Biggest Legends and Lies About Our Past, which is a complication of historians crushing those myths, and shares proof that contrary to Republicans’ denials, the party actively engages in the racist “Southern Strategy.” Plus, Nixon’s role in it all. Also in this episode: TNA co-host Danielle Moodie interviews Jim Freeman, a civil rights lawyer and author of the book, Rich Thanks to Racism: How the Ultra-Wealthy Profit from Racial Injustice, to talk about the Defund the Police movement and the role police unions are playing in stopping it from happening. 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.

We're still off for the holidays, but that doesn't mean we didn't take you a fantastic show beforehand. We're joined by Jim Freeman, who's a civil rights lawyer and author of Rich, thanks to racism, how the ultra-wealthy profit from racial injustice. But first, we're going to talk to a historian Kevin Cruz, and he's going to tell us all about his new book, Myth America. Historians take on the biggest legends and lies about our past. Our next guest is an eminent historian and professor of history at Princeton University and the author of books including One Nation Under God, How Corporate America Inmented, Inverted, and White Flight, Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism.

His latest book, of which he is co-editor, is out January 3rd, and it's called Myth America. Historians take on the biggest legends and lies about our past. Here to tell us about it is Kevin Cruz. Kevin, thank you so much for being here. Thanks for having me. So Myth America is a, it's basically it's a compendium of chapters by different historians, each one about a different myth that we have been taught or taught ourselves about America. I don't want to brag, but I guess that's what it was from the title, just so you know.

But before we get into the various authors and their subjects, can you speak to the why of the book? Why did you think this book was necessary at this time? Because we all know over the last few years, even if you're not in a historian, you've seen more and more claims about the past. coming up largely through the Trump era in the Trump administration, Trump himself, constant claims about how this was the biggest, this, or the best, that, or the most important, whatever. And that kind of boasting really forced a lot of us to kind of step up and say, actually, it's not this, it's not that. But at a deeper level, we've seen a real effort to rewrite history in the present era, and not just from Trump, but from a lot of people on the political right,

who, for various reasons, have sought to either discredit. it, accurate histories of certain parts of the past, whether it be about Confederate memorials or the Republican Southern Strategy or what have you, with the Reagan Revolution, or they've tried to create wholly new visions about how things that are aberrant in the present actually have a long and noble tradition, right? America First is a great, long, proud thing and so on. And so a lot of that has driven historians to kind of pulling out their hair or whatever hair we have left. A lot of us have been active in the last few years pushing back on this, whether it be on Twitter or on Facebook, traditional venues like op-eds and radio interviews and TV hits.

We've all been out there trying to push back on this. And so it occurred to us that maybe the time had come to kind of put all these various pieces of work that we've been doing in the public sphere on a variety of media and getting back to what we all do best, which is writing kind of deeply sourced, but hopefully very readable pieces for educated audiences in a book form. And so that's what we did is we got 20 people who are kind of all stars in the field. And many of them are active on social media or media and got them to tackle things that they thought were the most important misconceptions or myths about American history today. It's an outstanding book.

And obviously, there's no way I can cover the whole thing in this interview. So I really highly encourage our listeners to go out and get it. But so there's outstanding chapters on things like, as you said, American exceptionalism. There's stuff on the Constitution, stuff on the erasure of Native American culture. the notion that it was World War II and not the New Deal that pulled us out of the Great Depression, which I have to shamefully copped to believing for a long time. There's a whole bunch of different things, but I figured I should ask you about the chapter that you wrote, which is simply called the Southern Strategy, and it lays out the case that this Republican strategy is not

a myth. In other words, the myth is that it was a myth. And my first thought when I was reading it sort of goes to something you just said. Does it just boggle your mind that you had to write this? Like, this is a fairly basic concept of 20th century American history. Why did you have to write this? It's a great point. And I say this. If anyone out there knows me from Twitter, I've done long threads on this over the last few years, first with Kanye West and then kind of a running battle with one of a cheap denialist of this, Donesta Susa. And it really was amazing that this needed any pushback at all, because this was the most conventional of political history narratives.

and one that not only scholars have written about for decades, but the people involved wrote about 12s, right? You know, Nixon talks about this in his memoirs. Herodin, his advisor talks about it in his memoirs. This is not some, you know, wishful thinking theory that we've imposed in the past. The people were talking about it in documents at the time and interviews of a time and book since. Talk to this. Lee Atwater, he gives an interview in 81 where he talks about the old coded racism of the Nixon era of Southern strategy.

This has long been conventional wisdom. heads of the Republican National Committee apologized for this. Ken Melamine apologized for this. Michael Steele apologized for this. The thought that suddenly people are saying, oh, this never happened. This is all a myth.

It was just kind of insane and frustrating. And so it's what led me to do this on Twitter. But to your question of, why did I have to write this? Well, it's both everywhere in historical literature, but the books that are out there in it, and political science too, the books that out there are tend to be kind of phone books. Right.

800-page books, really dense, really deep, because there's that much evidence on this. And as I would do these threads, I kept thinking, well, I wish I had some short article or piece that I would refer to people. Well, like any professor who wishes there was something to assign on a subject, I just did it myself. So it was a great excuse to do it, right? Because it actually, it took this thing that was kind of in the ether and the background,

and I thought I knew about. But the more I researched this and wrote the piece, I got really excited about it because I found stuff that even I didn't know. going into this, right? And so that was really exciting for me. It wasn't just kind of getting a familiar narrative down. It was really deepening it and getting some really fun, rich examples to highlight it. So it was worth it for me, at least. I hope it's worth it for other people to read it too. No, it's funny that you said that because that was how I felt when I was reading it. So the Southern strategy is this, again, fairly well-known idea that as the Democratic Party moved away from being,

you know, the party of slavery and segregation, the GOP sort of consciously moved to fill that void and to become the champion of white Southerners. But when I was reading, I'm of a certain age. I associate the term with the people you mentioned, with Richard Nixon, with Lee Atwater. And in particular, I sort of thought that this strategy was born out of Nixon's loss in 1960. But from reading your piece, I learned that, no, this actually went back even further than that. Yeah, it's really remarkable.

And, you know, as early as the late New Deal, Democrats are riding high and strong, and Southern Democrats are starting to flirt with. the Republican Party. They formed this bipartisan coalition in the Senate. The Southern Democrat of its Republican issued this thing called the Southern, not the Southern manifesto, the conservative manifesto. But it really takes off after the Dixie Krat rebellion in 48. And the traditional story here is, is yeah, Strom Thurman became a Republican, but not until 1964, not until the Goldwater campaign. That's where this all crystallized. What I found is it's right after the Dixie Krat campaign in 1948 when Strom Thurman briefly bolts the party. Thurman goes back to the Democrats,

but Republicans literally come down to the South and are trying to recruit Dixiecrats. And it's everyone from the guy who'd been the vice presidential nominee in 1944, Ohio Senator John Bricker, to South Dakota Senator Carl Munt, who's a key ally of Joe McCarthy, to the chairman of the Republican National Committee, comes down to Alabama in 1952 and says quite explicitly, Dixiecrats believe in states rights. Republicans believe in states rights. We should merge, right? And so this effort to recruit them is on really early, earlier than I think a lot of people had thought about, certainly scholars, I think of the Dixiecrats would know this, but I think the general public had your kind of understanding, which is this is all Goldwater and Nixon, right? It's a sudden shift in the 60s.

But it's a long process. It's a process that doesn't end in the 60s. It certainly doesn't start in the 60s. It's when it unfolds over decades. And that's the story I really wanted to tell here. Yeah, no, and you did an amazing job. And there were just unbelievable little details in there. And there were a couple that stood out to me.

One was, you mentioned that at the 1964 GOP convention, the presidential convention, there was not a single black southern delegate. And you point out that Roland Evans and Bob Novak wrote at the time of the California delegation that there were, quote, no Negroes or Jews. The idea that the state of California couldn't even find a black person or a Jewish person to be one of their delegates is unreal. Yeah, it's amazing. And this is a period where for all our complaints about political journalism in our own time, in an older era, there were people who were very astute about tracking changes in real time, even if they went against their own preconceptions. And Evans and Novak are a pair of kind of legendary political journalists who are dumbstruck

by what is going on with the Republican Party as it's changing before them, right? I talk about a little bit earlier in that piece when Bob Novak, who later gets a reputation on CNN as this kind of arch-conservative figure. Right. Young Bob Novick goes to the spring. meeting of the Republican National Committee in Denver, I think, in the spring of 1963. And he's dumbstruck by what he's seen. It's a sudden change in which these southern figures are all over the party. And they are clearly turning the party, as it was said at the time, Lily White and Hard Right.

And he's dumbfounded by hearing people use racial slurs at meetings, by hearing people talk about, you know, this isn't South Africa, you know, where we're not outnumbered that badly. We can take control. And he comes away in this in 63, saying, it seems like there are a lot of. of people in the Republican Party that are intent on making this the white man's party. And so that change was stark and pronounced in that moment. And it certainly carries through the 64 campaign, which lots of great people have written about. But again, as you noted, my point here is to kind of spread it out beyond that inflection point, really talk about what came before and what after in addition to the massive changes in the 60s.

Yeah. And I want to jump ahead to the 1968 campaign because then we have the back in the game, Richard Nixon, obviously. But as you point out, he finds himself running not just against Hubert Humphrey, but also against George Wallace and basically unrepentant segregationist. And so Nixon has to sort of do this, it's almost like triangulation. And he forms an alliance with Strom Thurmond. And then the interesting thing I thought was you mentioned that he starts using phrases like law and order as code words, because he doesn't want to go as far as George Wallace, but he wants to signal that, you know, he's still sort of on that team. And I was wondering, Is that, because law and order is now sort of a famously or infamously used all the time as code for racial things.

Do you think that's the first time that that happened? Oh, that's a great question. In fact, one of my forthcoming books, I mean, way forthcoming, I'm barely in the planning stages, is going to be on the politics of law and order in New York City. So I should have an answer to this already. It's Wallace who popularizes it. I'm sure the phrase had been used in that context before, but Wallace really takes it mainstream. And Nixon, as you note, copies them on this.

So much that Wallace complains in the late 60s, I should have trademarked my speeches, you know, Nixon and you are stealing lines from me verbatim. But Nixon has the advantage there of not just running against the very liberal, Hubert Humphrey, the Democratic Party, but he's got the very conservative Democrat, George Wallace, running as an independent. So he can kind of run right down the middle. We often think of Nixon as this reactionary figure, but in 68, he's the moderate option. Right.

And he does reach out to people with code words. And this is a part of the current denialism over the Southern strategy. Dinesh D'Souza does us all the time. Oh, we're supposed to believe they use code words. They didn't know what was going on. Literally, in the documents of the Nixon administration, their aides are saying, we are going to speak in code rules. I mean, this is, again, this is not something that we're kind of inventing that a whole talk.

Not the playbook in front of us. And this is what they say. And so it's rather than being kind of starkly racist, you can speak in terms that make it clear that you're going to soft pedal civil rights, right? You're going to make strict constructionist appointments to the Supreme Court, right? I'm going to put a pro-police officials in place. We're going to listen to all sides of these issues. You know, there are ways in which you can say,

we're going to kind of pump the brakes here, right? And for Southern segregationists, that was enough. You know, it brought Strom Thurman on board. It brought people who took their cues from Strom Thurman on board as a result. And this was something that Nixon, as I believe you point out, this is something that Nixon sort of learned from the doomed Goldwater campaign of 64. Yeah. He talks about how Goldwater sort of, he doesn't really say he went too far in what he believed,

but he basically says, well, Goldwater made the mistake of saying these things. Yeah, yeah. He says, you know, and this is, again, another thing where the people who argue the Southern Strategy is a myth. Nixon and his memoir say the idea that Goldwater started the Southern Strategy is bullshit, is his word. And he wants to say that, look, there was an earlier path to this in which Eisenhower, when Nixon was VP, made Enroads in the South, and that is the best Southern strategy model,

and that's the model that Nixon wants to use. And so he says, look, Goldwater went at foam at the mouth segregationists. Right. Goldwater went after the wrong kind of White Southern. Right. He went after the really reactionary kind. And instead, you need to go after the kind of moderate conservative one, the one who has objections about integration that they maybe don't want to voice with kind of the thunderous,

George Wallace segregation now, segregation, tomorrow, segregation forever. but they're kind of happy with segregation, right? They maybe don't want Jim Crow, but they want Lily White suburbs that are kind of left alone from the people and the problems of the inner city. And as long as you can assure those people, don't make them identify as they're racist, but mollify and appeal that basic racist instinct.

Well, then that's the way to go, right? And that's what Nixon is so shrewd at. Yeah, he really was an unbelievable politician. And I think it's easy to forget that with sort of the caricature that he became. game and, and depending on how old you are, what you remember is the rich little impression of Richard Nixon or something like that. But he really was. He had amazing political instincts. This was a little tough because I didn't want to ask you directly about the other essays because

you know, you didn't write them. But so I thought I would ask, you know, was there one thing or or things in particular from the other essays that really stood out to you, like stuff that you read as a, as an historian and thought, wow, that's really fascinating. Yeah, yeah. And, Again, this is kind of like a Christmas wish list for me, as I got to bring some of my favorite people in here. And ones were ones who kind of replicated arguments I'd seen before, so it wasn't really surprising me. Others kind of took advantage of work they were doing in the moment

and kind of crystallized things. And so just for my part, too, that really stood out to me were Larry Glickman's piece on the White Backlash, which kind of crystallized some things I've been fumbling around with for a long time, basically you have this as a, even though it's a term I've used myself, it lets the people off Scott Free, right? They don't have any agency. they're just backlash, they're reacting, right?

It's not their fault. They're the victims here. It kind of undergirds unwittingly an argument about that kind of victimization politics that you see among some white conservatives. And then the piece that Glenda Gilmore did on the good civil rights protest, which really crystallizes some things that I'd been, again, struggling with on my own about we constantly hear people denigrate Black Lives Matter and other protests today as not going about it the right way.

Well, look at the old protests. We criticize those two, right? you've now built an image in your mind of this kind of saintly Martin Luther King, Jr., who everyone loved, that wasn't the case. You know, the last year of his life, he had a popularity rating in the 30s. So those two pieces that really jumped out of me. But honestly, every single one in here is just, I don't know I'm biased, but I really, I really love the cast that we put together and the amazing work they brought to this. No, and I couldn't agree more. But in particular, I agree with you about the myth of the good civil rights protests because it's driven me nuts for a long time, but particularly, as you said,

said during the BLM stuff, when I would see conservatives tweeting or, you know, writing exactly what you just said that, you know, Martin Luther King would never have done this. It's like you would have hated Martin Luther King and you would have trashed him and called him the devil and called him a communist and called for his arrest. Stop it. Just stop it. It's embarrassing. But they have no shame, so you can't even say that. But yeah, so totally, I agree. There were a couple other things that this is moving a bit off the book, but it was something that struck me, again, why, Oh, I was reading the book. This struck me. So I want to ask you about it. I don't know if this is still the case, but I am old enough to have been taught in school at a very young age that George Washington was incapable of telling a lie that as a boy, he admitted to chopping down a cherry tree. That was, you know, the big myth. And obviously, that is a complete fabrication that was made up by a Washington biographer, you know, after he died. I don't think I was ever later taught that this story was, you know, I guess somewhat ironically, a lie. So maybe this is done. But again, while I was reading the book, it kind of struck me that this is like the, like the original myth, the urban myth of America, at least as far as what we were taught in schools.

And again, it's sort of like it gets to American exceptionalism and a lot of the other things that there are chapters on in the book that, you know, look at our founder. He could not tell a lie. This is who we are. No, that's a great point. I had thought about that. I mean, it's kind of the origin story of innocence is that what you learn about. George Washington was he was honest and trustworthy and true. Maybe.

I don't think that's the sum total of any individual. Right. And the fact that we have to instill that in our children is really remarkable. He becomes this morality play for us, right? And I think your larger point about how, you know, you were never taught that that was wrong. This goes to, I think, a problem we have with American history writ large in this country is a lot of times, yeah, I got a PhD, so I took a lot of classes in this. Right. class or two in college. But a lot of people, they kind of get through grade school history and,

and, you know, maybe they take a year in high school where it's kind of view from 30,000 feet, and you're moving very quickly. Maybe you get to World War II, who knows. There's a lot of history that is taught quickly and shallowly. And that's just, I think, of the nature of, you know, what folks have to do in grade school or even in high school. You can't quite get into the depths of this with a lot of students. And so a lot of people stop there. They have this vague notion. And so what stands up to them is a simplistic view of the Civil War or the Washington myth about the cherry tree, right? And that's all that really sticks to them. And then when they hear professional historians like me and the public square pushing back, you know, on these things, they kind of take it personally, right?

Because you're arguing against, you know, their third grade teacher or a beloved high school teacher or something like that. Why do you hate America? Yeah. And you hate America, right? Right. So that's a problem with how we knew this. But again, another reason why I think so many of us have been trying to get out there in obvious. op-eds and radio podcasts and certainly social media to try to push back on this because what I found

and what really excites me about this stuff is that there is really a hunger out there for history. And I think what historians have realized in the last few years is that people are going to go looking for history in the public sphere. And if it's not professional historians out there providing it to them, you know, if we don't come out of the ivory tower and actually engage with the public, well, it's going to be, you know, the Bill O'Reilly books and, you know, that kind of level of history, which is not well done, might have a partisan point of view. And so we've got to get out there and do that teaching that we do in our classrooms. We've got to do it, you know, out in the public sphere too.

Yeah, you know, my dad was a, he taught high school history for 30 years. American history. And he passed away seven years ago or so. And something my mom, you know, obviously I don't want a soft pedalist. We are incredibly sad about that. But something my mom says now is she's like, sometimes she's, she's almost happy that he didn't live to see what's going on now. Yeah.

Because she said he would just have been, he would be yelling at, he would have been yelling at, he would have been yelling at the TV and just in absolute shock and anger at, at how facts are being treated and how history is being treated. And that leads me to, I guess, one final question. And it's the very first line of your intro to the book is we live in the age of disinformation. And maybe I read too much into that. But I thought it was interesting that you said, the age and not an age. Was that syntax purposeful or am I just reading too much into it?

You might be reading too much into it, but I like it does feel like, I mean, there might be another age of disinformation, but I think it's what really marks our current moment. It's not just misinformation. It's, there's a willfulness in this, right? And so it used to be, again, if someone were to come up to me and relate the story of Washington and a cherry tree, I wouldn't think they had a malicious motive in mind, right? I just think they didn't learn the right thing. These days, though, it's people who have a lot of money behind them, a lot of influence, a lot of a pretty loud megaphone on places like Fox News and things like that, who are intentionally pushing an distorted view for their own ends. And that's really remarkably

different than the fights we've had over history in the past, and we've had fights before. And I think it's incredibly dangerous. But again, it shows the reason why so many of us are out there pushing back. And again, the whole reason I'm on Twitter is that I used to just yell at the TV like your dad would have saved my wife's sanity and to maintain my marriage. I took it online. Whether that was good or bad, I don't know. But I'm still married. So that part's good.

So yeah, okay. So at least we know it's a good, it's a net positive in that sense. Personal. If nothing else. But yeah, I think you're absolutely right. And, you know, we always talk about, like, there was a big phrase that's always been around low information voters. And I feel like we need to change that because it's no longer low information voters.

It's bad information voters. And it's just, as you said, it's amazing that it's just, this is what people are doing and they're doing it. There's a sense of purpose behind it. They're doing it for a reason. And it's just, it's absolutely horrible. And the book is amazing. I encourage, again, even if you're sitting there thinking, well, I already know all these things were myths. Trust me, you will learn so much from the book anyway.

It's required reading. And the book is Myth America. Historians take on the biggest legends and lies about our past. You can pre-order it now. It's out January 3rd. Kevin, thank you so much for joining me. I love to having you on. My absolute pleasure.

Great chat. Folks, I am very excited to welcome to the new abnormal. Jim Freeman, who is a civil rights lawyer and is an author, author of the book, Rich, thanks to racism, how the ultra-wealthy profit from racial injustice, and also directs the Social Movement Support Lab, which provides multidisciplinary assistance to communities fighting for racial justice. Jim, thanks so much for making the time to join us on the new abnormal. I wanted to start off today by talking about a new report that you have out, which is in conjunction with a couple of other organizations, including yours, entitled Criminalization

versus Care, how the 20 largest U.S. cities invests their resources. I want to just read a little bit of the opening in the executive summary and then just jump right in with you. And so the opening goes, you know, in many communities across the U.S., when children and families need help, there is a robust network of supports and resources to meet their needs. When residents experience mental or behavioral health challenges, there are systems in place to provide the appropriate care. In these communities, there are abundant parks and recreational opportunities. There is a vibrant cultural scene. Efforts are made to ensure access to affordable housing and address climate change. In these communities, ones that millions of...

of parentheses mostly white and affluent, U.S. residents enjoy. The priority is spending tax dollars in building systems of community care. However, in many other U.S. communities and particularly communities of color, that is not the case. So, Jim, explain to us why and what it is that you have found. Because as a black person, as a queer person, I try and sound the alarm on what I think is obvious, right, which is a lot of what it is that you have written about, that you have studied, which is that people benefit from keeping other people down. White affluent people benefit from keeping black people and communities of color from being able to close the racial wealth gap. As a matter of fact, the racial wealth gap was created on purpose. So speak to me a little

bit about that. Yeah, Danielle, really what we wanted to show in the report is how warped our public budgets have become over time. And really, this is, this is in significant part in response to what happened after the murder of George Floyd and then the uprising that happened after that. And when communities all around the country, and particularly communities of color, when what they said was, we're investing too much money into police, into the criminal. justice system or we call the criminal legal system and not enough into public health, into supports for families and children, into affordable housing, into all these things that communities need into addressing climate change. What was often said in response was, in fact, our police departments

are underfunded and that there is no money left over for all these things that you say you need. So what we wanted to show is that it is an absolute joke to suggest that the criminal legal system is underfunded. So what we looked at in this report was the amount of money going into the criminal legal system, we call the mass criminalization system. That's police, that's sheriffs, that's criminal courts, that's prosecutors, probation. And then we looked into what is going into, you said systems of community care. So public health, wrap around supports for families, addressing climate change, parks, arts, culture, that sort of thing. And so it's how much money is going into this one system versus is how much money is going into these eight other really essential systems that communities need to

thrive. And what we found is that in almost all the cities, there was vastly more public investment, more tax dollars going into mass criminalization, then was going into what these communities actually need. As you were saying, you know, the lack of resources in this case was not the problem. The problem was that rather than those resources being used to create more livable communities, that policymakers were instead directing them far more to systems that are putting people in handcuffs, putting people in jail, putting people in prison. What we want to do is just make it very apparent to people that this is not some abstract idea. This is happening every day where our tax dollars are being used in ways that are creating

immeasurable harm, particularly to black and brown communities. Yeah, you know, I'm looking at the map that you have in the report. And I just want to read this for folks. Each of the 20 largest U.S. cities is spending at least hundreds of millions of dollars per year on the criminal legal system. With the vast majority of those resources going to the police, many cities and counties spend in the billions with New York City the largest at $7.7 billion in 2022. Jim, Jim, that is disgusting. when I look at that number for New York City where I am and to think about the narrative, I want to speak on that for a moment, the narrative that Republicans and the right make in pushback

to this the concept of defunding the police, which was really about, like you said, reallocating funds, right? Instead of spending billions of dollars, in locking people up, spending billions of dollars to pay police salaries, how about we put them into mental and behavioral and community health well-being? How about we put them into wraparound supports and into affordable housing and into environmental sustainability? Talk to us how the narrative gets completely co-opted, right, in terms of this idea of defunding the police as opposed to reallocate.

billions of dollars that would serve us all well, including the taxpayers who are flipping the bill for these staggering numbers. Yeah. So you're exactly right. I mean, what happens is that it really wasn't that long ago. It was only a couple of years ago when it seemed like our country had decided collectively that we were actually going to do something about this, right? Everyone was talking about this so-called wake-up call. that we had after George Floyd and that this was finally going to be the time when we actually do something about this system. What happened was we never actually woke up, right? We never actually put real effort into addressing this, into addressing the dynamics that make those sort of

tragedies a completely predictable result. And it's important for us to understand why. The reason why is because there's a very well-funded opposition that sprung into action to prevent change from happening and continues to do so today. So, and this is the stuff that, you know, wrote about in the book, which was, you know, if you look at what happened after the initial reaction to George Floyd, like really in the fall of 2020, what you had was organizations like the Heritage Foundation, which are overwhelmingly funded by, you know, the super rich, like the Koch brothers. What they decided to do was to launch a back the blue police pledge to support the status quo in law enforcement in this country. And that pledge has now been signed by over 200 members of Congress, by eight governors,

by over 300 state and local officials around the country, as well as hundreds of thousands of members of the public. Right. So that's where they put their resources into. These folks have also been putting a lot of resources into supporting police unions. What has happened is all around the country, and these are the dynamics I encounter with the communities I work with all the time, is that these police unions have been given an enormous amount of power, not to enforce the law, as you might think of, you know, with the role of law enforcement, but to actually make the law, to define the priorities for communities, how the law is going to be enforced against them.

So on one hand, you have communities who are saying, like, we should really, you know, think about this. What is the best way to respond to the public health and safety issues in our community? it seems like the way we've been doing it has been causing a lot of people harm. Maybe we should take a look of this. And then on the other hand, you have people saying, absolutely not. We're going to continue doing what we've been doing, which is throw police at the problem over and over again, even if no reasonable person would actually think that this is the best way to handle particular issues that arise in communities. And then what happens then is that that gets passed down the line into the budgetary process.

So when it comes time to make these hard decisions about whether to give money to, you know, your Department of Public Health or your Department of Housing or your Parks and Recreation Department or anything else, or are you going to give it to the police and the district attorney? Those folks have basically won that fight every year for about 40 years. And so other departments have seen their budgets cut or at best stagnate over time, Whereas if you follow the trajectory of police budgets, they have consistently gone up year after year after year so that most of the cities that we looked at in the report, even if you adjust for inflation, their budgets have increased more than doubled or tripled or sometimes even expanded beyond that over the last few decades. So these are really consistent recurring problems that we have to get a hold on if we're ever going to have any chance of addressing these problems in a real way. The fact is, you kind of stated it in your answer, is that there is no desire to fix anything, right?

Like, there is no desire to reallocate funds. There's no desire because communities of color and white communities aren't looked at as the same, right? I want you to delve into that a bit because we love to pretend when we're having these conversations and you hear politicians say, well, I think somebody said recently, and I can't remember their name, but they're gross, basically said, oh, you know, the next time that you're getting robbed, call a crackhead instead of a instead of the police officer since you wanted to fund the police so much. They say they make up these, you know, boogeyman stories about how crime will rain down if we actually put money into affordable housing and into the education system as opposed to inflating the budgets of the police in the same

way that we do the military on a larger scale, right? And so talk to us about how racism, right, and upholding white supremacy plays a major role in this and how we're not actually having the right conversation when we're talking about the idea of decreasing police budgets so that we can actually get to the there there, the core of the issues that are affecting communities of color that are, again, purposefully done. Yeah, well, you're exactly right, Danielle. I mean, if you're working with the communities that I've worked with, you know, for 20 years, been working on these issues all across the U.S. when residents of the communities that are most impacted by these systems that are most impacted by mass incarceration, mass criminalization, when they very reasonably ask,

how is this continued investment in police in particular? How is that going to address the root causes of crime? How is that going to prevent crime from happening? At no point in 20 years, have I ever heard them receive a good answer? Because there is no good answer, right? If you actually analyze what causes people to commit what we define as crimes, what police actually do or what they're good at is non-responsive to those dynamics, at least the vast majority of those dynamics. So I think that is the systemic racism. That is the upholding of white supremacy that you refer. to is that folks aren't even allowed to ask these questions most of the time. And when they are asking those questions, they're not given reasonable answers that are then reflected in policy.

And so I would point out, I'm very lucky in a sense in that the people I work with are the people who are asking these questions, who are fighting these systems day to day around the country. So I generally operate from a pretty optimistic place because I see progress being made. made in cities and states all across the U.S., where people are actually, you know, forcing these hard conversations and bringing these issues up. And, you know, what I found is that there are actually vastly more people who are calling these things into question and are pushing for really, I think, reasonable change than there are on the other side of the issue. The other side of the issue is actually very small. It's dominated by a very small number of very wealthy people

who have been able to protect their agenda and advance their agenda through a set of particular strategies. And I think the real purpose of the book and the purpose of this report, for example, is to shed light on that, right, to expose that playbook so we know what we're going up against. So we have a chance to win because we can't win if we don't understand who's on the other side. And for a long time, I think a lot of us who were doing this work, myself included, we didn't fully understand what we were going up against. Now I think there are more people who do have a good idea of that. And I think that's why that opposition is getting more and more desperate, which is why they're doing things like advancing the anti-CRT, the anti-critical race legislation and things like that. I want to lift up another point that you make in this report, criminalization versus care, how the

20 largest U.S. cities invest their resources, which is this. Sustaining the mass criminalization system is extremely costly for local taxpayers. For example, in each of the cities, the amount of local dollars being spent in 2022 on the criminal legal system is between $902 and $2,826 per household. Average local spending on the criminal legal system at the county level is another $15 to over $1,400. You know, last question for you, Jim, do you think that this is the conversation that needs to be delivered directly to taxpayers, which is your money is being misspent, right? Your money isn't being used to strengthen your communities or keep it safer. It's actually being used to balloon police departments and mass criminalization employees as opposed to creating the care systems

that are what create healthy communities? Well, I certainly think that's part of the message that they need to receive. I do think there's a danger in boiling everything down into sort of personal economics and finances. There's a lot of influences pushing in that direction, that it needs to be, you know, we need to be talking about efficient use of resources and we need to be talking about how to maximize our resources and tax dollars and things like that. I think it's part of what people need to hear. But I also think that people, particularly those communities, those families that are not affected by these systems in a direct way, or at least not in the most direct ways, I think they need to hear very clearly about the harm that's being caused. I think we have to lead with that. People are just going to have to learn to hear that better than they, better than they do now. And particularly, obviously, I'm talking about white communities here. White communities have been very skittish about confronting the damage that's.

being caused on a day-to-day basis. They've been very hesitant to come to terms with the fact that we have allowed our government, our policymakers, our public infrastructure, to inflict harm on us, on the people it's supposed to be serving. We need to really get our minds around that and the implications of that, the disparities within that. And I think that has to be priority one. But in a world in which there are a lot of folks who have been very resistant to that message, I do think it can also be valuable to point out to them that also, by the way, this is costing you a lot of money. And sometimes that can wake people up and at least create an opening for them to understand

on other levels, moral, ethical, what have you, that the systems they are supporting have been enormously harmful in ways that also reverberate back on them. And even if they are not most directly impacted. Jim, I thank you so much for the work that you're doing to bring people's attention to the wastefulness, right, in terms of where we're putting our resources and where we're denying resources to funnel to. Folks, the report is criminalization versus care, how the 20 largest U.S. cities invest their resources. And the book by Jim is Rich Thanks to Racism, How the Ultra Wealthy Profit from Racial Injustice. Jim, thanks for making the time for the new abnormal. I appreciate you.

Thank you so much, Danielle. Hope you enjoyed 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 Beast production with production by Jesse Cannon and Seamus Calder. Want more great listens? Check out our comedy podcast, The Last Laugh, and our star-studded The Daily Beast podcast at the Daily Beast.com slash podcasts. If you enjoyed this episode, consider becoming a Daily Beast subscriber.

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