Hi, I'm Molly John Fast and this is Fast Politics, where we discussed the top political headlines with some of today's best minds, and Mitch McConnell warns of a future headline Russia wins, America loses some future. We have such a great show for you today, Talking Points memo Josh Marshall stops by to survey the fallout from Signal Gazi. Then we'll talk to poet and writer Anthony Walton about his new book, The End of Respectability, Notes of a
Black American, His life and his Nation. But first the news.
So Bally, I think the buyer's remorse, even in the Republican Party, is starting to hit Trump's economic policies.
Who could have seen it? Certainly not everyone.
Certainly haven't been podcasting about this for weeks that this was going to happen.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, certainly not everyone. You'll be shocked to know that Republican Representative Bacon us that limiting Trump's presidential powers his tariff powers might have been a better idea. Congressman Don Macon says the president was never meant to have broad tariff power under the Constitution. I would add a normal president would have been fine with broad tariff power tariffs. Even Trump one point zero sort of figured
out how to use tariffs. But Trump two point zero seems set to use tariffs in the most destructive way possible. And FYI, what did the Dow close down today? The markets hate this, right, this is it's in. Here's what markets hate, instability. Here's what Donald Trump is doing making them unstable?
What is Donald Trump's brand? Instability?
Stability? So the Dow is down about one one point six y nine percent, seven hundred points today. The SMP is down. SMP is down almost two percent today. Look, they hate it, right, they hate it. They hate the Nasdaq is down two and a half percent. People are worried about the tariffs. And I might add that Trump World is going about this as is typical, in the stupidest possible way, just completely ridiculous. So what they're doing is instead of they're raising these tariffs, and then they're
saying you can't raise prices. By the way, when Harris talked about possibly doing some kind of price thing to make it so that companies couldn't gouge consumers, she was met with the pushback to end all pushbacks. So I think It's a bit interesting now that Donald Trump missed her Republicans. I thought Republicans believed in free markets, right, So here's Donald Trump saying you can't raise the price of cars even if they're more expensive for you. Pretty interesting stuff here.
Yeah.
And I think the Heritage Foundation, they're a little project to have unitary executive theory, is going to be seeing a little bit of pushback now.
It's like they knew that this guy was a complete lunatic. I mean, it's nobody remembered Trump's first administration. I feel like I'm going crazy, like we are. So it's like the United States of Amnesia. Right. We have just completely completely gone down this rabbit hole. So now Trump has more power than he did the first time. The first time, when he had all this power, it was a complete disaster. Now he has all this power, and I guess what's going to happen. Tell me it's gonna look a lot
like the first time. A complete disaster.
Oh there's some writing on the wall for how much sure worse this disaster is going to get. But another thing American economy depends on to stay strong is tourism and fight bookings from Canada to the US have pummeted over seventy percent.
We have hit this. Look, there are things stupider than what's happening right now, but I can't think of them right now. So Trump is having a war with Canada. He's mad at Canada because Trudeau is handsome. He's not even the PM anymore, because the Canadians are smart. I don't know, because of fent and all whatever. I mean, the truth is, this is all ridiculous. Trump is mad at Canada. So he has put in these tariffs. He has done all sorts of weird stuff to Canadians. Canadians
have they have a thing now. They say elbows up, and it means that they're going to protect each other. Okay, so we are now in a hostile relationship with Canada. Canada the nicest people you've ever met, Canada. I mean it is. There are no words for how stupid this is. So as a result of our incredible stupidity, Canadians don't want to come here. So flights the US have fallen more than seventy percent. So this is April saw the steepest drop, with just two hundred thousand bookings seventy six
percent from the one point three million bookings. This is real, This is gonna have real effects. Right, These are Canadians going to places like Detroit and New York and these are they're not coming terrorism terrorism, excuse me. Tourism will take a huge head. Our economy will suffer. I mean, this is like the stupidest self perpetuating moronics ever known to man. And none of us should be surprised. And this is what you people voted for. So congratulations, Maga.
You didn't need that tourism anyway, Ley.
I got bad news for you. There's more stupid to come.
The House.
Democrats are tearing it to the White House for citing you're a musk to the Signal Gate investigation.
Yeah, nobody better to solve crimes than people who are sell the mystery than people who are involved in the mystery. I feel like if you get Elon Musk investigating into Signal Gazi, here's what's going to happen. Musk is going to be like, why wasn't I at it? You added f Goldberg but not me. Yeah, Like this is again, this is they want to stop corruption with corruption, and
none of us should be surprised. Elon Musk will exonerate everyone involved, because of course he will, because this is where we are right now, and none of us should be surprised. And this is Somalia.
As we know.
The Trump administration is very excited to annex Greenland so that they could turn it over to be a libertarian play state. And the Vances went there to try to scout things out and who it did not go well.
Yeah, congratulations to all who celebrate. Vance went to Greenland. So there was a lot of back and forth on this. Usha was going to go by herself, then she went with JD. Honestly, there was going to be a cultural visit. Then it was a real visit. Now they couldn't find anyone who wanted her to come to their house. The Consulate asked, I mean, this is so incredibly unsurprising.
I mean, there's not a lot of people in Greenland. I looked it up. There's less people at Greenwood than fifty six. Yeah, there's barely more people than in my tiny, tiny neighborhood in Brooklyn, and I live in one of the smallest neighborhoods in Brooklyn.
What I think is interesting about this Greenland thing is that you saw Vance is interesting because he's so unpopular and he's so able to kind of transmit anything reasonable. So he goes to Greenland and he and he's not dressed up, he's not wearing a suit. He's wearing this weird black sweater like somethings really disrespectful. Yeah, and he says, he goes to this base space in Greenland and he speaks to troops Vance's military force. Is not necessary for
the US to expand its presence in Greenland. I mean, it's just so menacing, like leave them a loan. And then he goes after Denmark. Denmark has not done a good job for the people of Greenland and the US needs to step in. Good luck to this. I mean, there is no mean we're going to go to war with Denmark. Now. This is so stupid. Everything is so stupid. He says it Russia and China increasing their footprints in
the area. Look, he had remembered this was going to be a bigger trip and he had to scale it down because of this row with the governments of Greenland and Denmark over a lack of invitation. This is what we become, right, we are We're not even invited to places like Greenland and I think this has happened so quickly. We're like in we're like two or six weeks into this, and none of us should be surprised. Josh Marshall is the editor of Talking Points Memo. Welcome back to Fast Politics, Josh.
Marshall, thanks for having me.
When Signal Gate happened, or as I like to call it, signal Gazi, I thought, yes, signal Gazi, I thought not. I stole it from someone on the internet. Obviously, when Signalazi happened, I thought, oh, this is going to be the beginning of what a Trump administration has historically been like. And I was not. I was not wrong.
Discussed No, No, you weren't wrong. It definitely has. It's definitely broken through in a way that nothing else so far in this administration has broken through. And as always in the sort of the unique dynamics of press stories and stuff. As much as this is a big deal and a bizarre deal, like, it may be more a bizarre deal than a big deal, although it's both that it's not like other things haven't happened that were also really big deals, right and arguably much much bigger deals.
But there are just dimensions of this story that it. You know, Wan dimension is that we've got this sort of like running twenty years thing about classified information, right.
It's it's it's almost like a kind of a a A A A.
A play trilogy that has all these little storylines in it and all these times when one thing happened or another thing happens, so everybody can say, well, I guess what about Hillary?
And what about this person? About that? Every it builds in all that stuff.
It obviously ties into the kind of political elites fixation on national security matters and and and and and classification. And then there's the other thing that you know, everybody people have a time when they're planning the keegger when parents are away on the weekend and you lit grandma in on the chat thread, right that kind of.
Yeah, in this case, Jeff Goldberg would be grandma right.
Yes, exactly, exactly exactly.
And and so that there are dimensions of it like that that are very relatable to people, or even the sort of there's a sort of a visual reference we all have with the screen capture of the embarrassing text back and forth or stuff like that, so everybody can kind of relate to that where everybody can't say, like, I remember the time you shut down my USA aid, what were you thinking?
Right?
Right?
Right, So all of those things kind of play into it and and have made it break through. And one of the things that is like all, like all stories that have a lot of legs and a lot of traction, it is to use the fancy in the fancy graduate school sense of the term. It's a very complex text, right, There's a lot in there, and people keep fighting new layers of it.
So, yeah, it's so interesting when we're talking about this because it is there were this administration. I feel like I think Benghazi Gate was the beginning of Benghazi. Signal Gate was the beginning. And then we had in rapid succession, Democrats winning that effort Marry Trumpy Pennsylvania. And then we're seeing the or we're seeing the polling from this this
Wisconsin judgeship looks pretty good for Dems. Now, we don't know what Elon's going to do because he's he's going to ord twenty billion dollars to the person who manages to whatever anyone who registers to vote for this Trumpy
judge in Wisconsin. And remember there's also this issue in Wisconsin where we have Elon has a lawsuit about Tesla dealerships being owned by the car manufacturer, and so you have, as with everything with the Elon Musk, he's conflicted up the wazoo, and he's also involved in politics, because really how we got here and I want you to talk about this because I think you and I both agree on this. There is just a straight line between Citizens United and where the fuck we are right now?
Discuss Yeah, there's absolutely no question about the absolute no question about that.
That it is.
I think it's hard for certainly hard for young people to know, but it's even hard for us older people to quite remember that only about fifteen years ago. Obviously, obviously very wealthy people still had a lot of attraction in politics. But this this whole kind of like I'm putting fifty million in this year just wasn't the thing.
You couldn't you could not do that. There are obviously things people could do at the margins, but the it it used to be for the the the ultra rich kind of like I'm gonna I'm gonna slurp up this swimming pool through a straw.
There just wasn't that. It was too tight.
You couldn't do it and now where obviously it happens every year. That's the key in every in every political cycle. You have the dynamics with Democrats about their small givers and all sorts of stuff. And obviously many wealthy people, very wealthy people also contribute to Democrats. But Republican campaigns now are real dominated by the decisions of twenty years
thirty people. That's the funding base, the billionaires, and that is just that's just totally new and with and you have it even more with Musk, where obviously he's he's takes it to you feel bad for the people with two or three billion who are kind of cant keep up appearances around around the Bezoses and the Musks and stuff. But with Musk he also has because of the different holds he has in communication and technology and national security stuff.
That there was that moment late in the twenty twenty four campaign where people were saying, like.
Can he pay people to register?
Is that like that can't That's not legal, right, And I think there was a moment of recognition where he's like, yeah, yeah, sue me, dude, or like charge me, but that's not gonna work because like.
Good luck rich.
I'm too rich, right, I will bet the I am like a black hole and the light is going to bend around me.
Kind of.
Yes, that's a big moment when that happens somewhere.
That's true.
No, And I mean I think, like the clearly, lawlessness is how we got here, right, and lawlessness is how we'll stay here unless things get worse, which is real possible.
Yeah, unquestionable.
I think we are in many ways in the next year or so at this break point where we're gonna we're going to have a pivot in one direction or another. Like I think one of the dimensions of and you kind of alluded to it with these upcoming elections that are the Wisconsin one is is a is foundationally a big deal special election Florida may not be in itself the hugest deal in the world, but it may be a very big indicator. It may have a lot of
political impact. And one of the things that I think I've heard a lot, I think everybody has heard this discussed, and it kind of spooks people is they don't seem they don't seem to be acting like they're worried about the next elections. That mean they have reason not to be kind of like what are we?
Yeah, what's happening here?
Like they why isn't gravity affecting them? Or why don't they think gravity will affect them?
I mean, the good news, the good news is not to interrupt you, but the good news is they are worried because we because Trump would not have pulled the least of nominee nomination if he was not worried about losing that seed. So sank God, honestly he did that because had he not, I would have been like, why is he not worried about losing a seat when it
looks like they might lose this Florida seed? And we're seeing right Trump's pollster Tony Fabrizio saying that he doesn't he sees this Florida seat, which isn't an R plus whatever our plus fifteen. I think it's yeah, first district, it's well, yes, the Macates.
Or is it?
There's at Gates.
There's the Matt Gates district, which that election I think is the and then the Walls one is Florida six, and that's the one that's that seems the most. That one is very Republican. The Gates district is like triple Republican. Yeah, I mean it's literally like like, I mean, look if you have yes right right, So yeah, so that one is even in this climate, that would be hard. But I think I think people are wrong to be thinking there's some something up their sleeve that they might not
have to worry about the next election. But what I do think you're seeing is a mix of hubris on Trump Trump and the Republican Party's part, but also a sense of kind of last chances and thinking that we are going to eighteen months is a long time and that maybe we can do so many things in eighteen months that even if we lose an election, we're going to have re you know, reoriented, retilted the game board enough that will that we can handle losing a few elections.
So there's definitely a not just a sense, but a reality that everybody is everybody is doubling down, everybody's going double or nothing, and that creates this immense tension that we can all feel in American life right now.
And actually, as we're talking about this, if you taught, I was talking to someone, a reporter, straight, a fancy straight reporter, who was talking to me about talking to some people from heritage who we're saying to her, we don't give a fuck. We're going to get enough stuff in.
Now.
The whole goal here is, and this is not a state secret, they published it in Project twenty twenty five, we're trying to flood the Supreme Court with stuff so we can radically remake the federal government. And that's what this is. Now. That said that, so they are like parallel destructive tracks. The thing as a journalist, I think you and I, at least I am the most pred out by is the disappearing grad student sending them to a detention center in Louisiana.
So let's talk about I mean, there's a lot of To me, there's a lot of scary things, but that is that is one hundred percent one of them. And these things, there's so many levels of that. I think we've all now seen the woman who's a gradu student of Toughts being sort of kidnadnapped on the street. And what strikes me there though, is one thing is people who are here for educations, their lives are being their lives, their careers, et cetera, are being upended.
But what strikes me there is that, first of.
All the security you have as a as a student visa holder in the United States is thin. Right, You don't have a lot of rights as opposed to a Green cardholder or a citizen. But in that case, let's say, let's say we accept for the purposes of discussion that Okay, they decided that they don't want her anymore as a student in the United States.
There is a simple way to deal with that.
You call the person up that the United States has records of them, they know the phone number, they know where they're living, blah blah. That's part of having a student visa. You call them up and say you did X, Y and Z, and we're not comfortable having you here here anymore, notifying you that your visa is revoked and you have one month to leave the United States. And that's a bummer for her education and her professional future and her life in the United States. But that is
an orderly thing, right, you get a flight, Okay. The point of doing this thing where you're walking down the street and a bunch of guys who look like they've just come over from the skate park grab you, some of them masked, that that is a spectacle of terror
that is meant to terrify. Yeah, and lots of people in the country, certainly everybody here in a student visa, but also people who are here on green cards, because we know this other guy at Columbia was taken not quite in the same dramatic fashion, but relatively dramatic fashion, and then they're taken off to some other part of kind of intentionally getting them a couple thousand miles away
from where they started. Just just there's a whole there's a whole drama to that, a whole terror to that, and that is that's not just meant for that person, that's meant for anybody who is looks at all like them, has a similar immigration status to them, to walk around in a real degree of terror. And if someone says, hey, you want to come to this meeting we're holding about about the West Bank, It's like, no, I no, I don't I believe me. I'm just focused on studying, right.
So it's that aspect of it that is. The other aspects are very important. But Hill's speech.
They want, they.
Want the visuals that really make people feel like they're living in a police state, Like we have these metaphors in American political culture, knock on the door in the night, now.
Did you get them? They ran the doorbell.
Being disappeared, And in most of our lives, those those have been negative metaphors, right.
Or no, it's.
Right, right. I think it's also a couple of things that I'm struck by when we talk about this. It's obviously a war on free speech. But and I want since we're both Jews, and we're both liberals, and we're both I'm a little younger than you are, sorry, but we come from this similar we've seen and using the whole prep false premise of this is anti Semitism, that
they're protecting Jews from anti semitism. This is a crew that does not give a fuck about Jews, but they want to protect us from dangerous anti semitism which is happening by students who are expressing their views on Palestine. I want to I mean, I want you to talk about that.
Well, yeah, it's funny because I I have opinions about the about the protests that aren't the same as as as all of the American laughter, American liberals or whatever. I have kind of my my own, my own thoughts about this. But but it is absolutely the case that this administration is using Jews as a cudgel to attack
other people. And sometimes it's attack other people, to basically attack anybody from an Arab or a a predominantly Muslim country who has who said anything about the situation in Gaza last year and and and the year before, but also in the situation at Columbia, again, we were the cudgel. You see, you know, you imagine them with like a little jew stick running up and hitting people with it.
Right, which is really kind of what's happening here.
But in Colombia they're saying, all right, we're hitting you with the jew stick and all of this this this this research you're doing on rheumatoid or arthritis, and it's this kind of cancer that's over And you're sort of.
Like, wait, what you might say, because.
It's not just that that Jews may be used as a cudgel. That goes back to the whole thing about the Muslim band nine years ago.
Right, this is a long standing thing.
But it's also to attack the whole university system and to attack higher education. And look, there's some there's some level of irony here because Jews are are not unrepresented in higher education and even in Colombia. I mean maybe not historically, but if you if you are from New York City or from Manhattan, Columbia is a pretty Jewish institution, it kind of is.
Yeah. But so there there is this and look there there.
You don't have to be there are there are There are certainly Jews, even even Jewish liberals who who felt some discomfort over some dimensions of the protest last year. But again there is we are a cudgel being used by people who are either very indifferent to the well being of Jews or actively hostile in a lot of cases. I mean we saw I don't. I just noticed it this morning. But they have Tim Poole, he's part of
the press school. Now like what okay, like your your this isn't there's as in everything else with Trump, there's this this through line of gas lighting, through everything he does. We're kind of like, we're we're not going to take We're not going to take these these mean things to the jew to the Jews. Meanwhile, I'm gonna go grab a coffee with Nick Fuentes, you know, like what are we talking about here? So it's it's it's it's the
whole it's the whole gas lighting of trump Ism. And again it's it's just the idea of kind of like we're a we're being you, we as Jews being used as a convenient battering ram by people who do not care about our well being but see us as having a certain tactical a certain tactical use in a much larger game that again is not tied to our well being or safety or anything.
Else at all.
Yeah, and it's also it's just, yeah, they don't give a fuck about us.
But that is a more distinct way of putting what I said, very worthily.
Sorry, I just I just as it's just a fucking shit show. Sorry pride. But yeah, it's it's pretty dark. And and I do want to say again, I do get a ton of strength from my grandfather who was jailed by who back I do. If he can do it, we can do it. Well.
That's there are a lot of Look, there's a lot there.
There's definitely stuff right now that is unprecedented in American history. But there are as you said, that is one of them. Late nineteen forties, early nineteen fifties, and threw it into the nineteen fifties with the kind of.
Extended red scare.
There are analogs in our in our past that people who feel frightened.
Or a sense of we're in a new don.
We're not totally in a new don, because there are the presidents and there are people.
This is other people who.
We'd lose our mind every couple decades.
Yeah, yeah, well we have.
It's good to have traditions, right, It's like everybody goes to the Yeah.
Thank you, Josh, thank you, thank thank you. Anthony Walton is the author of the End of Respectability and Mississippi and American Journey Welcome Back, Too Fast Politics. Anthony Walton, It's great to be here.
Thanks for having me on.
I'm so happy to have you here. Let's talk about the End of Respectability, Notes on a Black American reckoning with his life and his nation. You just publish this book and already the world is completely different, right, I mean, talk to me about why you decided to write this.
First of all, I'd like to say that I think that actually the world has come more toward the book in the time since the publication and what's going on now. When I finished the book, I couldn't help but wonder is this too strong? Am I pushing too hard? And if anything, now I think folks would say that it's kind of timid, given what's happened in the last couple of months. To go back to your specific question, I wrote the book because I had started noticing things happening
the last ten years that were starting to trouble me. Now. I have written a lot a long time about race in the United States and the various sorts of issues and contrademps things that come up, but I had had a view that things were kind of getting better and better and better. And with the election of Obama as we saw in two thousand and eight, I even thought, hmm,
maybe we've turned a corner. And I should also add that I was someone that thought Obama could not win, so I was very pleasantly put in my place, and I thought that that was a kind of moment of achievement and even triumph that was a marker in American history.
What I didn't understand at the time, and what I think a lot of Americans who would agree with me about various things didn't understand at the time, was that that would set off a backlash which would he have seen really since twenty ten and since the Tea Party, which has kind of snowballed since then into this what we see now, this kind of trumpest attempt to almost erase not only Black achievement, but in some ways black presence.
So as I thought about that over time, I decided I wanted to gather my thoughts, and I gathered essays that I had written as early as nineteen eighty nine, and then I coupled those essays in the way that say Joan Didion would with essays that I wrote just last year, and put them together in a book that I think kind of works as a narrative, even though it is individual essays, but it shows a progress of thinking.
And one of the big ideas that I came up with was this idea of the title the End of Respectability, in which I thought that it was time for African Americans to begin to think about who they were, where they were, how things were working, including our history in a different fashion, and the kind of headline way of
thinking of that is. I think in the past, particularly from Martin Luther King days, we thought achievement would equal acceptance, and I think that we are now seeing that that is not going to be the case, and that we have to decouple.
Them so interesting and important and also just this idea, right that we could uncouple these two things. I'm using scare quotes here, but the quote unquote war on woke is actually just kind of a war on people who are not white men. Ultimately right, Yes, I would agree, and this orwellian removal of black people and people of color from history, from websites and books.
You know.
One of the things I spend a lot of time thinking about is like, what are the historical parallels to this? And I'm curious, because you are an academic and a really smart writer, what you think the historical parallels.
Are to this. I think that first of all, we have to look at the history of our own country, and in some ways this has been going on in various manifestations since as early as, to use a buzzword, sixteen nineteen. But we certainly saw it in the time of the Revolution, when blacks were set aside and declared three fifths of a person enslaved people were We saw it all through the first half of the eighteen hundreds
leading up to the sol War. We saw it particularly in the Crisis of eighteen seventy seventy eighteen seventy eight when Rutherford B. Hayes, in order to assume the presidency, agreed to take the Union soldiers out of the South and end Reconstruction what I and others would think of as the first Reconstruction, and let the forces of white power, white supremacy reassert themselves. And that led to what we
commonly referred to as Jim Crow. We've seen, for example, just little things like the lack of acknowledgment of black soldiers in World War One and World War Two. We have seen denial of medals. That's one of the things that is most interesting to me, is trying to deny
the heroism of black soldiers. We see this again. I mean, we kind of saw the preper of this the last four or five years with some of the things going on in places like Florida and Oklahoma, where that trumped up issue of CRT critical race theory was brought to four to try and say that black history couldn't be taught and in a different way and on a lower kind of intellectual plane, this idea that white children should not be made to feel guilty, so nothing should be
taught about what happened in the past, because it's too distressing to young white children to look at a more broad issue. I mean, of course, you have saw that in the Soviet times, where people would be taken out of photographs, you know, if they fell a stray of Stalin or whoever was in power in the Communist Party. We saw the kind of actual physical erasure, not just cultural RACI physical erasure of people during the Holocaust. I mean,
this is not anything new. I think that you even see it now in Hungary, for example, and I think that it's the sort of thing that it is really frightening, It's really kind of unfair. One of the things I'm talking about in the book The End of Respectability is what else could African Americans have done to illustrate their loyalty, their desire to participate, They're wanting to be part of
the mainstream. In that title essay, I write about the story of my parents who did everything that they could do to participate in society and taught me and my siblings to do the same. And then my parents, I think that might be the event that got me most thinking about all of this was my parents both died in a two thousand eighteen and they died under Trump.
And it particularly bothered my father because he was a Korean veteran Air Force he had been in a strategic Air command and he felt and this is someone that was born in Mississippi in a great depression and he had been very proud of his life and what he had done and then to be kind of psychically assaulted by the sorts of things that were going on even then that we now see a kind of full blossom that just got me thinking of this is not adding up.
Yeah, I mean, I think that's a really good point. And it speaks very much to this idea that the game was always ragged, right, So it was always this thumb on the scale when it came to the African American experience in this country. What I'm struck by is this idea that we are living in these incredibly tight little back backlashes to periods. Right, so Trump gets elected me too, Like you could see how the second Trump
administration is largely a rebuke of me too. Right. I think of the head of the Department of Defense, right, who had a subpoena from his sister in law, Right, his ex sister in law saying that the wife had a safe word, right. So we are in these accelerated cycles of backlash. I wonder if you could sort of talk through how you see that it doesn't feel like there's a president For.
That, I would have to know a little bit more. You'd have to tighten up a little bit on the word precedent, because I think there has always been backlash to any African American advance. I think of, for example, the backlash after the Civil War. You could look at things that were happening in Boston in the eighteen ten in eighteen twenties, things that have a kind of residence and residue until today. You could look at what happened right after World War Two. First of all World War One.
Thus there was the riots and conflicts in nineteen nineteen in all the major cities. World War Two, an especially kind of plangent incident was Isaac Woodard, black soldier who had come back from World War to very proud wearing his uniform, and he was attacked and blinded by white supremacist as a kind of way of saying, no, we don't have to respect you, we don't have to honor you. I think that we saw it in the Nixon campaign, particularly of nineteen sixty eight. We saw it in nineteen
eighty Reagan announcing his campaign in Philadelphia, Mississippi. You know what happened there, Schwerner, Cheney and Goodman. So of all the places in the United States for Ronald Reagan to start a presidential campaign, why would he go there. We saw it with Willie Horton. We saw it certainly Charlottesville. There is always a backlash to any kind of black advancement,
and I would add women advancement. There's this kind of boiling hostility all the time against Jewish people that comes to the fore and recedes from time to time to time. And I think that in the end it becomes an indictment of the Republican Party Beyond Donald Trump. The Republicans have been doing this in a kind of organized manner, at least since nineteen sixty four, I would say, and you know, Rick Perlman has laid this out in his
books great profound detail. I think that what we just have now is just kind of the apotheosis of this thing that has been growing. And I would direct folks to the last paragraph of my essay Willie Horton and me the first essay in my book, which was in the New York Times in nineteen eighty nine, where I talked about how if we don't do something about this, it is going to haunt us our dreams, referencing doctor King wherever. And I think that we've just seen this.
I think it has political salience to the Republicans. There is a certain group and I don't know what percentage it is, but they're base, as they're always referred to. They want this, they need it, and it allows Republicans to kind of start with a certain amount of votes and they feed it and accelerate it. And it's just part of American society now, I should say. On the
other hand, we can't oversimplify. And that's something else I talk about in a book that I I mean, the way I think of it is hashtag not all white folks, because I don't think all white people are part of that. But I do think the white people who are not part of that are kind of going to have to decide what side they're on and are going to have to join. And in some ways that's the Obama coalition if you think about it. And I think that might be part of the violence of the backlash after Obama.
But it's something that's just kind of been there. I mean, one more thing, sorry to drone on about this pot. If we think about even going back to the thirties, the attacks on Social Security when it was put in the way that farm workers and domestic workers were left out of it, who was that In the thirties, we think about the various kinds of attacks on minorities and quote unquote foreigners by the Coughlin, the priests and Joe McCarthy.
You know. I write about William F. Buckley in the book and talk about his thing, including some things he did in the fifties that were overlooked when he became the man about town of the seventies and the eighties. It's just kind of always been there. And what we see now, I think is Obama coupled with a sense of demographic change that is frightening to people who don't
live it. If you're sitting out in a small town in Kansas, you don't see that what's going on in Chicago or New York City or Los Angeles for whatever. It is basically kind of working, you know, it has its problems, but folks are getting used to it and even kind of enjoying it. But you know the other thing, I would add Fox News, and so it's just kind of a perfect storm of jinning up this kind of backlash. And I'd also point to Professor Linda Anderson at Emory.
Her book White Backlash goes into this in great detail and as a way of learning about it. It's just kind of always been there, and I think we've just come to a kind of crisis moment that is extremely difficult. I'd be the first person to admit that.
Thank you so much, Anthony. I hope he'll come back.
Oh, I'd love to. It's an honor to be here and a great pleasure.
A moment.
Jesse Cannon Molly, It's wild this type of stuff that Trump has gone after so early in his first one hundred days, and so much of it seems to be let the corruption run wild. And for some reason, also what the human trafficking run wild? I thought this was the Qann president.
Yeah, you really do see me. Look in their defense, they're very into child labor, so they love to get kids working. So Trump cuts in sixty nine global programs tackling child labor and human trafficking. They are very unseerious about human trafficking, but they really do. There are a lot of Koch Brothers style companies that love to employed children. They're cheap, they're small, they can get in the chimneys
really well. And so the Washington Post obtained an email detailing how the US Department of Labor Bureau of International Labor Affairs will immediately end grants totally more than five hundred million dollars that support labor standard enforcement over forty countries. And again, these are like these dumb things where they're cutting money, just like with the NIH grants, they're cutting science that could help us later for a little bit of money for a tax cut for very rich people.
And it's just dumb. It's full, it'll end up costing more later, and it's just exactly what you know. It's what these people do. It's who they are. You know, when people tell you who they are, believe them. That's it for this episode of Fast Politics. Tune in every Monday, Wednesday, Thursday and Saturday to hear the best minds and politics make sense of all this chaos. If you enjoy this podcast, Please send it to a friend and keep the conversation going. Thanks for listening.