The Daily Beast Podcast - The Time Jimmy Carter Played White Supremacists for Fools

Episode Date: March 5, 2023

Former President Jimmy Carter wasn’t the most bubbly member of the government, a bit “prickly,” says Jonathan Alter, author of His Very Best Jimmy Carter, a Life, on this bonus episode of The New Abnormal politics podcast. And while this I-do-what-I-want attitude didn’t make him the most loved at the time, it did allow him to follow his morals—and troll the hell out of white supremacists. Alter joins the show to tell TNA co-host Andy Levy this story along with more of Carter’s most under-appreciated accomplishments. Plus, Andy and co-host Danielle Moodie expose what they think is Ron DeSantis’ biggest kink. 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. Hello and welcome to another Sunday bonus episode of the New Abnormal, and we thank you so much for being here.

Last month that was announced that Jimmy Carter, the 39th president of the United States, had decided to spend his remaining time with his family in Plains, Georgia, to receive hospice care at the age of 98. Joining us today is Jonathan Alter, the author of His Very Best Jimmy Carter, A Life, to tell us all about the former president. But first, let's have some fun. Are you guys ready to listen to some clips? Hell yeah? Yeah. Okay, so we all hear about the supposed safe spaces, us Democrats. But triggered snowflake, Ron High Heels DeSantis,

is trying to not let people wearing Trump merch in his book events or a safe space, fearing their wrath. So let's listen to the security guard deal with Trump fans. Because of what you're wearing? They told me to say, anybody wearing Trump has to go right now. Oh, wow. What's a thing? Dern.

Free speech. I'm sorry, guys. I have to call LPD now. That's fine. There you go. That's all right. Okay. Free speech.

Okay. Okay. Look. I understand. I understand the impulse of not wanting to be around people wearing Trump gear. So I get it. But yeah, that's pretty funny. Like, first of all, Mr. High Heel White Boots,

it is really something. Their projection of their masculinity, right? They're so fucking tough. Talk so tough. But Ron DeSantis, who is turning Florida into an entire fascist state, can't bear. He has to cover his little delicate eyes from seeing anything that says Trump on it. Like, this is the same man who basically you owe your entire fascist fucking playbook and career to is Donald Trump. And now, oh my goodness, it hurts my eyes.

I just, my ego can't take it. These are the same motherfuckers you're trying to court. These are your same constituents that you're trying to court. So I'm just like, it's so fucking dumb. And it just shows you how weak they are. And again, if I'm a Democrat, I'm going after your weakness. Because everything that they do is about projection. Everything.

I do want to say, though, that it's fairly obvious at this point that DeSantis has a fetish for banning things. And I'm not sure we should be kinkshaming on this show. So, you know, I think we should, we need to be a little more open-minded here. And let's just accept that he seems to get some kind of, look, I'm not a licensed psychiatrist or psychologist, but he does seem to get some kind of sexual thrill from banning shit. I think we should be very careful about what we say about him, because I do think it straddles, no pun intended, the realm of kink shaming. I think you meant the pun.

Oh, man. Next. So the Daily Wire, which for those of you unfamiliar, is most known for one Ben Shapiro. It's an outlet filled with a bunch of sickos who have beliefs almost no one in the country shares, but since they bought their ratings higher, they seem relevant.

And normally I wouldn't want us to signal boost these freaks, but you have to hear what the right. is coming for next because these guys are unfortunately influential on the people who staff right wing officials offices who help make policy. And no one is doubting that your child is great and that you having a child is a great thing. But good ends do not justify immoral means. We're not Machiavellians here. We're not utilitarians here.

We're not consequentialists here. We're conservatives. We believe that the morality of actions depends upon the action itself. And in this case, the way that Paris Hilton has done, it really shows you how morally problematic IVF is, because Paris Hilton now has 20 children. I don't think she has any children that have been born, but she has 20 frozen embryos. Why does she have 20? Why is she so irresponsibly created 20 unique human beings and then just shove them all in

a freezer? Well, because she keeps getting boys. And she doesn't want boys. She wants girls. So she's just going to keep trying IVF. She's got unlimited money. So she's just going to engage in IVF until she gets a girl. And the doctors, I think, are more than happy to do it.

It's a very expensive process. Doctors are more than happy to trans the kids. It's a very expensive process. The doctors are more than happy to engage in IVF. It'll make them a lot of money. So who knows that maybe Paris will get 25 of her sons frozen forever or 30 or 35 until she gets a girl. She says she's waiting for that girl. Now, obviously, if it were reversed and you saw someone say, yeah, I'm putting all the girls in a free

or until I get a boy, I really want a boy. You'd have the feminist screaming and crying and say this is sexist and terrible and eugenics. But because it's a boy and boys are castigated by the culture, they don't want to say that. Because boys are toxic. You know, masculinity is evil and toxic. We have to get rid of it. That is really evil stuff. Yeah.

So here's the thing for people with uteruses and folks have been saying this for quite some time. These motherfuckers are not stopping at. abortion. They're not going to be happy until one, birth control pills are gone and that the only way that you can conceive of having a child is through their wondrous world of rape because they also don't want to outlaw that from happening, right? Like it used to be in the case of a mother and all of these things, but they are coming for IVF. They're coming for every which way that people are able to form the families that they want. So now for those things, that want babies, they don't want them to have them in the way that you want to have them or can

have them. So the audacity that you're going to go after people who are so want a child, so want to expand their family to go through a brutal at times fertility process in order to make that happen. Now you want to come and rob people of that option. Trust me when I say that they continue to step their foot just further and further across the line, you are going to piss off the wrong people and those that are wealthy and influential at that. And that is something that the right is not ready for, and I cannot fucking wait for it to come. I have to express some ignorance here. I did not realize that in vitro fertilization was any kind of political issue. And that's always the thing is that they'll go one step further, the second.

How could you give him an inch? I mean, again, maybe I'm just ignorant. I've never heard anyone come out and say that in 2023 anyway, come out and say that IVF is immoral? Because they think it's unnatural. It wasn't God's way. Neither were they're limp dicks, but you don't see them trying to ban a Viagra. No, that's a fair point. Yeah, I mean, IVF is not mentioned in the Bible, but neither is Seattle.

So this is Michael Knowles, and, you know, he has a lot of fucked up views. So I guess I'm mad at myself for being surprised at this because as you both said, like, you know, yes, we've all known that whatever they say at the beginning is not their end game. And their end game is always, you know, 10, 20, 30 steps further. I just never expected IV. IVF is, God, I know so many couples that could not conceive. And as you said, Daniel, went through this hellish process. And by the way, expensive as fuck process.

Yeah, so expensive. Because they wanted a child so badly. Man, these people talk about, in the same breath, they talk about not wanting to be replaced and how white people have to have more babies. And here's a rich white baby that was just born. Do you think they would have thrown her a fucking parade? That's what I'm saying.

Like, this should be what they want. It's just, wow, I, well, thankfully, this is probably the dumbest thing we'll hear from the Daily Wire today. Andy. I mean, I just want to follow up, though, that I don't know if you guys have seen that meme where it's Jesus standing over the surgeon who's taking out a tumor. And he says, where do you do it? I put that there. Yeah.

And that's really where I think we're going here. Okay, but I do have very bad news. The ridiculous this doesn't end. So this demented man, Michael Knowles, is now going right with his other Daily Wire, another host they have Matt Walsh, who's podcast's four. most person who literally won't use a public restroom because he's so scared of transgender people being in it, which makes me really feel bad for the census family endures when they're out shopping. But now they want to ban transgender people as well. In order for women to have the right to have their own bathrooms, you have to ban transgenderism

entirely. You can't just ban it for the kids. It's got to be entirely. In order for women to be able to have their own locker rooms at the gym, you have to ban transgenderism entirely in order to protect business. businesses from having to participate in weird occult sexual rituals like the transgender transition. You have to ban transgenderism entirely. I love this bill because it is so much more aggressive than the other bills we've seen.

I don't mean to knock the other governors and the state houses. They've done a great job laying the groundwork, rather. But this bill goes much further. And it reminds us of a truth in politics that Republicans all too often forget. you're either on offense or you're on defense. You're either making gains in the culture or you're losing ground in the culture. There's no standing still. There's no status quo.

There's no neutrality. And what the conservatives have screwed up on for at least 50 years now, probably more, is the libs make some crazy aggressive play. And then we try to dial it back by about 5 to 10 percent. Or worse, we try to slow it down by about 5 to 10 percent. So the libs attack the family through feminism, the fundamental political institution. They claim that men and women are basically the same. That takes the culture pretty far to the left, and then conservatives try to inch it back a little bit, but by the time they're even thinking about inching it back, the libs push forward with the normalization of other sexual practices,

gay rights, among other things. And then, by the time the conservatives are trying to dial that back, the lives are they've lurched much further to the left. They're trying to redefine marriage now. I say redefine marriage. Well, I don't know. I guess we could come to some kind of terms with a civil union. And by the time you say that, whoop, they've lurched even further to left. Now they're saying, actually, we've got transgenderism.

Actually, now a man can become a woman. A man can become a woman. Okay, but maybe we shouldn't do it to my, by the time we say that, oh my gosh, we're now, we're all the way off the screen. Because now they're trying to trans the kids. And there are many conservatives now her saying, look, if you're a man and you want to put on a dress, that's fine. But just don't do it to children. Just don't make me pay for it. no the only way even to stop there even if all you want to do is stop where we are right now

the only way to do that is to push so aggressively in the other direction that you're trying to take background that we seated years ago decades ago Kansas absolutely leading the way love it yet again you know when we say that the end game is is never what they first aggress on here's war proof yeah and we all knew this I mean we all knew look Everything, anytime it's about the kids, that is a cover for where they actually want to go. It's never about the kids. This, I mean, this is a clear example of it. But yeah, they want to ban quote unquote transgenderism.

And they always have. All these people who, you know, are constantly referring to the left as snowflakes and all this stuff, they are scared of their own fucking shadows. Come on. anything that, you know, makes them even the slightest bit uncomfortable, which, by the way, they shouldn't be in the first place, but anything that makes them even the slightest bit uncomfortable, they immediately leap to, we have to ban that. We have to make that illegal.

That can't be allowed. And it's just, I mean, these are the most fragile people possibly in the history of the planet. And they just cannot bear to think of a country that is not like it was in the 1950s or the 1850s or the late 1700s or whatever time they want to pick. Fuck, half of them seem to, you know, I think they would have been most comfortable in like the 1300s. It is absolutely unbelievable how fucking fragile these people are. But yeah, see, this, unlike the IVF thing, this is not a surprise. And this is exactly what they've wanted from the beginning. And that was very, very clear.

And they, I guess, sort of politically smartly tried to make it an issue about kids. But it was never that. And it has always been this. Here's what I'm going to say. The reason why trans people are so fucking vital, right, to the report. Republicans crusade against a wokeness. The crusade against, you know, LGBTQ plus people is because transgender people refuse to live a lie, right?

They refuse and have the courage not to fucking conform, right, to the way that society has told them that they should be, right? When you see a bold, ferocious, amazing trans person living in their truth, doing nothing other than that. That in and of itself is an affront, right? It is an affront to patriarchy. It is an affront to white supremacy. It is an affront to the lies that they have been filling our heads with

since we come out of the fucking room and they put a blue or a pink hat on us. And so what has happened in our country is that people for Republicans, right, and their level of comfort have become too free. That people recognize that gender is a fucking construct, that we don't live inside of a binary and that it's a part of a larger capitalistic patriarchy scheme to keep control over people. And so what do you do when people start to become more free?

You ban their right to bodily autonomy. You begin to ban their ability to tell you who they are as opposed to who you want them to be. That's what they are doing. And that's why people need to fucking connect the done. dots and not get sidetracked by these conversations about drag queens and fucking M&Ms and all of this bullshit because at the end of the day, it is about control. And what trans people represent and what queer people represent and black people represent

and people of color represent are people that have decided and choose and fight for their ability to have autonomy against a system that was built to oppress them. So fuck all of them, honestly. because they don't have remotely as much power, backbone, and strength as trans people have in their fucking pinkies. Amen to that. You know, you do have to feel a little bad for them. They're still adjusting to the fact that women are allowed in the workplace. Not for long. So all of these other things just make it more difficult.

I want to say one more thing because we hear a lot these days about how conservatism is the new punk rock. I see that quote everywhere. And it just, it is amazing to me that the same people who think that they're the new punk rock are the same people who want to do things like ban transgender people from existing. And also, like, these are the people, by the way, who say that conservatism is the new punk rock while they're on their book tours at places like the villages. So maybe figure out what the fuck you're saying and how stupid you sound. And no, you're not the new punk rock. Just shut the fuck up. Okay, while this podcast usually sticks to national politics, I have to point out when our absolute moron of a mayor, Eric Adams, says something this dumb and proves to all the people who said he wasn't a Democrat that he actually is a Republican.

Well, he's ruled like one. He talks like a Republican. He used to be formally registered like one. And now let's listen to him talk exactly like one. If we are bringing our best fight in the ring, we would not have homeless in this. city. We would not have a crisis of domestic violence. We would not have children because when we took prayers out of schools, guns came into schools. It's a hard one to respond to because it's so there were a lot of bad quotes in that whole thing. One of them involved, I don't remember it was his press secretary or one of his people saying that Mayor Adams was sort of one of the elect, as in, you know, chosen by God. I do want to point. out that this is the guy who not that long ago, Democrats were inviting to speak to them

about the future of the party and how to move the party forward. And I remember at the time being like, what the fuck are you doing? And now, with the benefit of, you know, all of this, I can amend that to, what the fuck are you doing? This is, this is whatever. He sucks. God, he's, I missed Blasio. I never in my life thought I would say that. Right there with you.

Yeah. I don't know who thought that putting a former cop. Yeah. A man that was a Republican until I think roughly the beginning of the 2000s and then switched to becoming a Democrat into being mayor was a good fucking idea. But I'm pretty sure. that we had separation of church and state for a fucking reason. I'm pretty sure that, let's see, shootings, school shootings didn't start happening after prayer was removed from schools.

I'm pretty sure that happened after, you know, we let the ban on assault rifles kind of fade into the sunset and then decided to do nothing about that. So when they equate, oh, it's God that's going to stop a motherfucking bullet as opposed to legislation, then you, sir, should probably go maybe to seminary and get the fuck out of office and go someplace and pray about it as opposed to putting policy agenda together about it, which you're not doing a very good job of. I mean, maybe he'll be a one-term mayor. That seems to be trending. God, that would be nice. So who knows? Daniel, I have a bad news for you because sometimes people are like, oh, well, maybe he misspoke a little. He said, in retort to you, don't tell me about no separation of church and state. State is the body,

church is the heart, you take the heart out of the body, the body dies. You know what also happens? If you take the brain out of the body, the body dies. Okay, that's a perfect end, but I want to do one last thing. We haven't heard from Senator John Kennedy of Louisiana in a minute, but he spoke at C-PAC. and he had some wise words that I think we'd actually agree with him for once. What else is the truth? The truth is that God is great. Beer is good. And the United States of America is star-spangled awesome.

Hell yeah, brother. What are we agreeing with here? I don't drink beer. No. Beer's good. Okay. I'll take your word for it. University of Virginia law school graduate.

They should lose their accreditation. By just about all political metrics, Jimmy Carter had a failed presidency. He was a one-termer. The U.S. economy was in the tank. There was the Iran hostage crisis, the failed rescue attempt. He had a rare for a sitting president serious primary challenge in 1980 from Ted Kennedy, and he lost the general election in a landslide to Ronald Reagan, who ushered in an entire era dedicated to principles that were fairly diametrically opposed to his.

But what he didn't have by any metrics was a failed life. Joining me now is the author of the 2020 book, His Very Best, Jimmy Carter Alive, and MSNBC political analyst Jonathan Altered. Jonathan, thank you so much for being here. My pleasure. So in my intro, I said that by political metrics Carter had a failed presidency. But in your book and numerous other places, you have made a very compelling argument that actually had a lot of substantive presidential successes and that we do both him and history

a disservice by constantly referring to him as a quote unquote failed president. Talk about this because even today I don't think that's the general perception among Americans. You're right. The general perception is bad president, great former president. And I think that's horribly oversimplified and in some ways is just wrong. I think his presidency was undervalued. underrated, and his post-presidency while inspiring and full of achievement and, you know, set a new standard for former presidents is a tad overrated, in part because when you're a former president, you don't actually have any real power to change lives in the same way that you do as president. So while he, you know, prevented conflict in 1994 in North Korea and Haiti as a former president,

and he has nearly eradicated Guinea worm disease and made great progress against river blindness. If you set those achievements against what he accomplished as president, they're relatively minor. So just to start, if you'll indulge me on some of the overlooked accomplishments as president. So he got more legislation approved than any president since World War II except for Lyndon Johnson. You go, how could that be? I mean, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama and Ronald Reagan, they served two terms. Carter only served one term. But Carter had a Democratic Congress for four years, and Obama and Clinton only had one for two. And even though he had some problems with Congress and they didn't like him very much personally, he had overwhelming majorities. And so was putting points on the board all the time, 15 major. pieces of environmental legislation, for instance, which includes the first funding for green energy, a bill to clean up toxic waste dumps that now cleaned up thousands of them in the years since. The first fuel economy standards for automobiles, doubling of the size of the national park system

with acquisition of millions and millions of acres in Alaska and also in other places. And, you know, I could go on on the environmental side, legislation to allow for the first time public utilities to use clean energy, incentivizing them to do so. And then, you know, the first civil service reform in 100 years. Right. Establishments of the Departments of Energy, Education, and FEMA. So the beginning of emergency management, coordination in education legislation. I could go on and I don't want to get too down into the weeds on policy, but do want to, like, turn briefly to foreign policy. So people associate him, as you said, with the failed Iran hostage. Rescue mission, hostages were held through the election and right up until Reagan's inauguration. And that humiliated

Jimmy Carter and since he was held hostage. But they came home safely. You know, that story ended, well, if he had bombed Iran, as a lot of people were urging him to do, including his own mother, you know, he probably would have been reelected, but the hostas would have been killed. And then elsewhere in foreign policy, you have the Camp David Accords, which, you know, are the most successful peace treaties since World War II. Israel and Egypt have not fired a shot in anger in the 40-plus years since. And they had fought four wars just prior to that. So, you know, people think that Jimmy Carter is a pro-Palestinian president, and that is true. He was the first one to call for a Palestinian state, but he also was the greatest president for the security of Israel since Harry Truman

because he took the Egyptian army, which is the only army capable of destroying Israel off the table. The recognition of China, normalization of relations. This was a huge thing in the establishment of the global economy. So Gerald Ford, if he had one in 76, would not. have recognized China. Carter did so when Deng Xiaoping went back. The first thing he did was legalized private property, which kicked off the greatest economic boom in human history and the bilateral relationship between the United States and China for all of our current problems is the foundation of our global economy. The Panama Canal Treaties, long forgotten, where we turned over control of the canal to Panama, hugely.

unpopular in the United States. Ronald Reagan was against it. Two-thirds of the public was against it. It required two-thirds to ratify in the Senate and Carter. It was really hard. It really hurt him and senators politically, but they got it done. And according to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, it prevented an open-ended Vietnam War in our own backyard in Panama. And we would have had to put a minimum of 100,000 troops in to secure the canal. And meanwhile, It created great goodwill throughout Latin America, which helped lead to a democratic transformation of the southern hemisphere, where many countries went from autocracy to democracy. They also did so because of Carter's human rights policy, which I think he considers to be

one of these greatest achievements, even though it was unevenly applied. But this set of whole new global standard for how governments should treat their people. and it helped lead to the end of the Cold War and also to freedom for lots of political prisoners around the world, many of whom like Voskal Havel and Kim Dai Chung in South Korea, went on to become presidents of their country and credited Jimmy Carter with their lives and their ability to help restore their societies. I know it's kind of hard to believe. I've been rambling on, but I've actually just scratched the surface

of his achievements in those years. We didn't talk about deregulation of airlines, which allowed people to visit relatives who otherwise wouldn't have been able to because of high airfares, trucking deregulation, which basically allowed for the establishment of the just in time, delivery service, which is system, which is now, you know, at the root of FedEx and everything else, and, you know, all sorts of minor things like deregulating the beer industry so that we could have craft breweries. So the list goes on. And Billy Beer. Billy Beer, we haven't even talked about. So Billy caused his brother a lot of trouble. Yes. Yeah, Billy was an alcoholic. So he would pour the contents of his own beer into the toilet and fill the beer can with vodka before he would go out and make

public appearance. Billy Beer was, it didn't taste so good. Yeah, I remember as a kid, I had an empty can of Billy beer in my room that I guess my parents must have bought. Neither of my parents were drinkers and definitely not beer drinkers. But obviously they bought it as like a souvenir of the Times and gave me the empty can. And I just remember seeing that can every day of my childhood in my bedroom. Well, I have a couple in my house. So Billy, Billy was really funny, especially in the 76 campaign. He got off a number of good lines before, you know, his problem.

started to consume him when his brother was president. But Jimmy Carter started zero percent in the polls. And when he told people he was running for president as a former governor, the Atlanta Constitution ran a headline. Jimmy Carter is running for president of what? And his brother, Billy, told reporters, he said, I got one sister who's a holy roller. I got a mother who, join the Peace Corps when she was in her late 60s. I got another sister who rides with the Hells Angels, and my brother thinks he's going to be president of the United States. I'm the only normal one in the whole family.

And that gives you a sense of how colorful Carter's family was. Yeah, absolutely. I feel like I got too far into the sheep dip of his presidency, And he mentioned early on that while he was a loser politically, you know, he won it life. He led just an extraordinarily rich, epic American life, only 12 years of which was in public office. Yeah, absolutely. I'm curious, do you think at least some of the sort of this conventional wisdom that he was a failed president? Is that a product of his personality?

Because he was kind of like, in a sense, he was kind of like the anti-Ragan. Wasn't he personality-wise? Yeah. He could be a little cold. He could be a little aloof. He was maybe too honest with the American people about certain things. Yeah, he was definitely too honest about a number of things. I mean, he even told them when he was suffering from hemorrhoids, which was TMI. Right. And there was, he could be a little bit odd sometimes. And you're right. He could be frickly, aloof, was not popular in Washington, was not particularly popular with the press. And so all of this. contributed to that. The main thing, I think, is that, look, he was made president by Watergate, because he came along. He said, I won't lie to you, which he didn't, basically. He exaggerated

sometimes, but he didn't lie. And, you know, we need a government as good as its people. And it was the perfect post-Watergate message. And the press ate it up in 1976. But then the post-Watergate press also undid him, because every flap, like we talked about his brother, you know, his brother. Right. Became a lobbyist for Libya, you know. Jimmy himself wasn't at all implicated, but that scandal was called Billy Gate. Every flap, and there were dozens of them, they would attach Gate afterward to it, the press would. And so, you know, they assumed that he must be crooked like Nixon, you know, and they tried to bring down a president.

So, and he just wasn't as charming as Reagan. And so the contrast with Reagan was really, really strong. I think the other thing that happens is that journalists judge politicians by how they're doing politically. Historians need to judge political figures by how they change the country. So these are just, you know, two different lenses to look at our politicians through. And so I just concluded that he was a political failure, but a far-sighted success. And we haven't even talked about climate change and the other things where he was like just way ahead. Well, I want to jump a little bit here. As you pointed out earlier, we talk a lot about his post-presidential period and we focus on things like his work with Habitat for Humanity and the

building of houses. I think that's sort of the iconic image we have of Jimmy Carter now is him building a house. And things like that were legitimately fantastic. I'm not downplaying them. But I want to ask you about something that happened more recently. He put out a statement after George Floyd's death and the protest that followed. And in that statement, he said that since leaving the White House, he and his wife, Rosalind, had seen that, quote, silence can be as deadly as violence. And he went on to say, people of power, privilege, and moral conscience must stand up and say no more to a racially discriminatory police and justice system, immoral economic disparities between whites and blacks, and government actions that undermine our unified democracy. We are responsible for

creating a world of peace and equality for ourselves and future generations. I mean, my God, what a statement from a former president. So there's so much that's interesting about that. First, just very briefly on Habitat for Humanity. I worked with Jimmy and Rosalind building a house in Memphis in 2016. And my hat's off to what they did for Habitat. Once a year, they would go all over the world and spend a week building a house. But in truth, He never ran Habitat for Humanity. He was chair of the board for a while. Right.

You know, his main thing as a former president is the Carter Center. Yes. So I think people assume that Habitat is his organization, and it's not. But nonetheless, he did a lot to put it on the map. He took a bus as a former president and took a bus all the way to New York for their first, an overnight bus. Can you imagine a former president to build a former president? to build rehab a building on the lower east side of Manhattan, and it was on the front page of the New York Times the next day.

And that put habitat on the map, and it's now the largest builder of nonprofit housing for the poor in the world. That was important. On race. So Jimmy Carter grew up in the Jim Crow South. His father was a white supremacist. His mother was enlightened on race up to a point, and she was a nerd. who took care of black patients' sharecroppers for free when they were sick. And when he left home to go to the Naval Academy, he defended the first black midshipman

at the Naval Academy, and then he defended his black crewmates aboard a submarine when they were discriminated against. And he quarreled with his father about his father's rancid racial views, which were all too typical of white southerners of that generation. But then when he got home in 1953, his father died and came home and take up his civic activities and run his business and eventually go into politics. And through that period, after Brown versus Board of Education, when white terrorism surged in the South, Jimmy Carter ducked. And he was not a part of the civil rights movement because he was ambitious in politics. And as he told me at one point, he said, I could either be governor of Georgia

or I could be an outspoken supporter of civil rights, and I decided to be governor of Georgia. And he actually pandered to segregationists to get there in 1970 when he was an elected governor. Then on the day of his inauguration as governor of Georgia in 1971, he says in his inaugural address, the time for racial discrimination is over. And all of the segregationists would, voted for him, felt he was betraying them. And the black voters in attendance watching, they were incredulous. They couldn't believe he had said this. And he went on to integrate Georgia state government, point black judges, senior black staff, hung Martin Luther King's portrait in the Capitol, became very close to the King family. And, you know, eventually that led to this statement that you

read. So this is a man who spent the second half of his life making up for what he did not do in the first half. So he knows firsthand that silence is violence because he was silent. Right. And the lesson of that that he's trying to convey to people and that I discussed with him and it's a very uncomfortable subject for him. But the lesson is it's never too late. It's never too late to come to the side of racial justice. And he admitted grudgingly in my conversations with them. And I quote in the book, I quote, is kind of a grudging admission that he was late, late to his awareness of the extent of what was happening to black Americans. So he grew up, steeped in this racist society, and rejected it early on, never said, never quoted saying anything racist.

himself. No evidence he ever used the N-word, but everybody in his family did, including his sainted mother, who was otherwise so enlightened. So this is a very complex and really quite fascinating period of his life. He's from planes, but the county seat of Sumter County is Americus. It was serious racial unrest that used to be called. In Americas, in 1963 and 1965, Tom Brokaw made his reputation coming down from Atlanta where it was a local reporter and covering it. And you had literally the sheriff who Carter at the time was friendly with and he made Bull Connor look like a nice guy. Martin Luther King described him as the meanest man I ever met. And the sheriff was using electrified cattle prods on 13-year-old black girls.

So that's what we're talking about in this, you know, this era of what. terrorism and Carter is trying to negotiate all of this and still stay alive politically. But then when he got the big jobs, he did the right thing. And I think there's a lesson in that too. Yeah, that's absolutely amazing. Jonathan, I wish I had five times as much time to talk to you, but unfortunately we don't. I encourage our listeners, if they haven't read it already to go out and get a copy of your excellent biography of Jimmy Carter, his very best Jimmy Carter alive. Jonathan Alter, thank you so much for being with us. Thanks so much for having me on, Andy.

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 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.

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.