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 Donald Trump says he will bring back the president's power of impoundment that way you can't impeach him again.
We have an amazing show today.
Slate's Dahlia Lethwick talks to us about the Supreme Court's latest surprise ruling, and then we'll talk to the amazing Wesley Lowry about his book American White Lash, a Changing Nation and the Cost of Progress. But first we have the host of the Lawrence O'Donnell Show, MSNBC's Lawrence O'Donnell. Welcome back to Fast Politics, Laurence o'donald.
It is great to be back. And I have to warn you at the outside that I am scree hours behind you and everywhere. Okay, you you have a three hour head start on me today because I'm in an undisclosed location where i'll i'll just say, the sun sets into the ocean, and so I you know, I'm way behind here, as is generally the entire state that I'm in at the moment. It's basically there's like a three hour leg time at dinner sometimes if you say certain things that they aren't quite up to speed with.
Here, you know, is your governor a future presidential candidate.
He's a future presidential candidate, not this time, but next time, and that'll be quite a crowded field that he's a future presidential candidate in. You're just assuming everyone figured out California, right, Wow, you know that's that's a wicked smile audience. I have to take.
This audience is very smart.
I have to say, yeah, that's true, but.
I just assumed California because Governor Newsome has sort of sucked up a lot of the oxygen. And I don't actually say that in a negative way. I think that twenty eight is going to be an amazing field with.
Well, you know, he's he's he's matured a lot as a politician in a way that's similar to Joe Biden. If you were looking at him ten years ago, you'd be a lot less impressed. If you're looking at Joe Biden, you know, twenty years ago, you'd be a lot less impressed. And so Gavin Mussom definitely has learned a lot. He's become better at governing and better at politics.
Yeah, and I also have like this whole theory again, which is that old Biden is the best Biden.
I think we've talked about this before.
Yeah, I agree completely, and that.
Even if he misses a step verbally though. Again, there was a video of him calling Joe Manchin Jojo, and I was like, how is that a gaff?
That's what he calls Joe, you know what I mean?
Speaking of other leaders of the free world or former leaders of the free world.
There was another Trump tape.
Yeah, yeah, And the fun thing about this Trump tape is that we've known it existed for seventeen days, right, because the indictment Daltrum comes out and it quotes a tape in the middle of the of the indictment and it says this recording was made with Donald Trump's consent. So there were two presumptions, you know, guesses about the recording. One is it's the author who's there to write Mark Meadow's biography for him, because obviously Mark Meadows can't do that,
and he's recording his interview subject Donald Trump. Right. The other theory, and both can be true, is that Trump was recording the conversation. Trump's staff was recording the conversation, because that's a thing that they do to protect Trump against being misquoted, which I have to say is the funniest reason ever for recording anything. It's like, no, Donald, you don't want the recording so you can claim you were misquoted. Okay, if you have the recording, you won't
be able to claim you were misquoted. Let's just, for the sake of simplicity, assumed that it's the author's recording. And Jack Smith got it with a subpoena or or he got up with a subpoena to Trump's staff, and so we knew that there's a recording, right And I think in the back of our minds, we're kind of thinking lazily, like, okay, you know, well, we'll hear that in court. And it's like no, no, no, you're gonna hear it in seventeen days because it's gonna leak. It's crush,
it's gonna leak, you know. And it's so I felt like so dumb yesterday. It's like, wait a minute, you mean I didn't predict that recording with pele leak, Like how how did I forget to predict that? And uh, and you know, and there it is, and you know, not surprisingly they they quoted only a portion in the indictment, you know, of what we heard, and there's a little more language that sounds, you know, even a bit more incriminating that wasn't included in the indictment. But that doesn't mean.
I heard somebody on TV yesterday wondering, like, was that a mistake that they didn't include that other line. It's like, of course not. It's like, they make it very clear, you know that this isn't the whole thing, you know that they're quoting, you know, in the indictment. But it's proof beyond reasonable doubt if and I'm sure they do
have this, if they have witnesses to that event. You know, the book author, the apparently a book publisher was there, All of the Trump staff, all of those people have been subpoenaed to the grand jury. They've all gone under oath, and they've all been asked exactly what was Donald Trump holding up and they just they all described it to the best of their ability under oath, because at that point,
you know, nobody's protecting Donald Trump. And so somebody probably said something like, well, he showed it to me and it was very clear, like there's a person on there, you know where Trump says see that basically says something like you know, you see that, and the person kind of goes yeah, you know, there's a kind of acknowledgment that they're looking at the thing, right, and that person under oath told the grand jury what that person saw, and he saw the words iran, and he saw you know,
battle plan or classified you know, all these things that are there, and then you know that are basically for you as a jury, are the same thing as videotape, right, And so at that point, that is proof beyond a reasonable doubt that he was holding up and showing and as the law refers to it, disseminating classified information.
He of course said in the third person, I might add, which is always like my favorite with one of his weird affectations, that this was proof that he was exonerated.
Exactly. He's going to do that with the worst stuff that comes along. Right where it's proof of guilt beyond a reasonable doubt, Donald Trump will every time say it's proof of the opposite, which is unique to him, you know, like OJ wasn't saying those little blood specs on the door of the Bronco proves that I didn't do it? Like that wasn't Ojy's idea. Oj was going for the classical notion of proof beyond a reasonable doubt, like you know, and he wasn't saying, oh no, no, the bloodstains on
the help my case. Like so, Trump is doing this thing that is purely Trumpian in the American experience, where he's going in the most you know, flat out high speed propagandistic way, you know, to the craziest position you could possibly hold. And he should because he has tested Trump voters from the first day on believing nonsense, right, so just ask them to believe a little more nonsense, and you've pulled the along this far, you know, so
so they'll they'll go along with that. I'm sure you'll hear people with all your Trump friends, you know, in Manhattan, you'll be hearing them say that proves that proves he didn't do it, right, No.
And I mean I think that that's a really good point here. I love that you brought up OJ because that's like our vintage too. And of course you're in California, so ergo OJ must be brought up. But I think that's a really good point that he has really successfully made all of these indictments not about your guy does crimes, but instead against like what kind of system punishes a person like me for crimes?
Well, I wouldn't say successfully, because successfully he has to do that to a majority of voters, and he's nowhere close to a majority of voters, and really successfully, once you're indicted, I'm afraid you have to do that to twelve voters, in particular on your criminal trial jury. And I don't think he's going to be successful with the twelve jurors.
Yeah, that we'll see, and they will be Florida jurors.
Yeah, they'll be Florida. But you know, I know it's surprising and it sounds incredibly Pollyanna, But the history of jury service in the United States is a history of people taking the oath very seriously. Yes, there are exceptions, Absolutely,
there are exceptions. But Trump himself has delivered to us the most dramatic example of this, and that was in Andrew Weisman's prosecution of Paul Manifort in the in the Mueller investigation, and I had you know, there was one juror from that case who went public, and she went public on my show, and she was a Trump voter, and she voted guilty guilty on Paul Mannofort for everything, okay, And she said on my show, you know, if Trump, you know, pardons him, that would be a problem for me.
And of course he does put us. But she also said this great line. You know, she said, when I became a juror, I left the Mega hat in the car. And it's real. You know, she went into that jury loving Donald Trump. She left the jury ready to vote for Donald Trump for reelection. But she found Trump's guy guilty because she took an oath to listen to the evidence.
That's the way it happens most of the time. Now you can easily get one, you know, in this case in Florida, who you know violates the oath and becomes creates a hung jury. But that just means you have the trial again.
Right, No, that's true. And there's still also, more importantly, another set of indictments.
Oh yeah, and boy, they're getting more interesting all the time. I'm a little surprised that the news is telling us that Jack Smith is just interviewing Georgia's Secretary of State Raffensburger. Now I would have thought they did that six months ago.
So that tells me that, Okay, that is moving slower than I thought, But at least it's a reassurance that Jack Smith has recognized what we all recognized, which is that crime of interfering in the election in Georgia is a federal crime as well as a state crime, and
they're totally different crimes. You know, there's nothing double jeopardy about prosecuting him federally for exactly the same conduct for which he will be prosecuted at the state level in Georgia, because that same conduct crosses criminal line in completely different sets of laws. It's such an obvious federal crime you know that he committed. It's the most obvious of them all,
is that recording with Raffensburger. It's great to know that Jack Smith is on that case because that case is going to be in Washington, d C. Because that's where Donald Trump made the phone call. And I can tell you right now that Washington d C. Jury is going to have no struggle unanimously arriving at the verdict that that was criminal conduct and guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.
And then you have Georgia. You have the state charges.
Georgia's separate case, and you know, Fulton County. If he committed that crime in Marjorie Taylor Greens District, he'd have a good shot with the jury. I'm afraid he does not have a jury pool tilted his way in Fulton County, Georgia, which voted seventy percent for Joe Burr. And so that jury's going to find him guilt of the crimes that Sawny Willis charges him with. I mean, that's just not a difficult predict. We've all heard the tape. Imagine a
world where we'd never heard the Reffensburger tape. But it does exist, right, okay, and the prosecutors have it. I mean, if you noticed the cable news reaction last night, there's two minutes of tape that is that is suggestive, and we're all filling in the blanks of it, you know, like a great radio drama. You know, we can see it.
Imagine if you know, at the indictment level or at some point the Georgia tape emerged when Trump is charged with the crime, and in the indictment is the quotation I need you to find me, you know, eleven votes, like we would just be you know, we would explode with guilty beyond a reasonable doubt coverage of that moment. And so we already know it, like we already know the very worst evidence against Donald Trump, the most damning
evidence against Donald Trump in the case. And the weird thing is we've known it exactly as long as the prosecutor has known it, because it became public literally, you know, on her first day on the job.
So here's a question about these allegations. The timetable on all of these seems to be after the Republican primary.
Yeah, I don't care. I don't care about the timetable at all, because criminal process doesn't care about the timetable. They don't care what you're doing. You know, it's like you're charged with the crime in Georgia. We don't care. They don't care at all. When the New Hampshire primary is any of that stuff is. It's beyond the scope of criminal process to be able to care about that. And I don't care when he gets convicted. I don't care. I don't care if it's after the election, and I
don't care what it happens. It's all going to happen. It's why I said shortly after Biden was inaugurated, I introduced the concept of defendant Trump, and I said in house that EMERSONBC, you know, to executives, we have now entered the defendant Trump phase of this network's life, and it's going to be years. And nothing was happening, right Nothing was happening. All we knew pretty much right away was there's going to be in Georgia criminal investigation of
that phone call. But what was clear to me was Egen Carol lawsuits from the January sixth attack. What was very clear to me was and I said it my first presentation of defendant Trump concept on the show, is Donald Trump is going to be a defendant for the rest of his life, and he's going to be appealing as a defendant criminal convictions for the rest of his life, possibly depending on how long he lives, but he's absolutely going to be a civil defendant for the rest of
his life, you know. And so you know, for Eging Carol to get to the end of the line in litigation with Donald Trump, it might not occurred during Trump's lifetime because there's so many different layers to it, right, Like he's going to appeal the jury verdict he's going to and if he fails at that, you then move into the collection stage of the money, and that can be dragged out by defendant Trump for many, many, many many years. So he's going to be a criminal and
or civil defendant for the rest of his life. And this is this is a permanent condition for him, it's a permanent condition for the news media and what has forced him into the role of defendant. Completely ignores election calendars and doesn't care about it.
I mean, it seems as if he's still going to win the nomination.
I don't make any prediction about it. You know, if he wins the nomination, he's going to lose the election. That I think is pretty certain. You know, there's a very simple thing in politics that every single president prior to Trump has done. Is when you win the presidency, you spend all of your time privately concentrating on winning the votes you didn't win. Let me pick up. You know, I won x percent. I'd like to win two percent
more next time, or three percent more next time. Right now. Publicly, you have to serve the people who elected you in your speech making and all of that, but privately you're concentrating NonStop on the people who didn't vote for you, because you're trying to add to your vote comps for reelection.
That's that's what you're trying to do. And no one's comfortable with the margin they win by, you know that first time, especially, so all I care about when he got elected was let me listen to him talk to voters who didn't vote for him. And I'm still waiting to hear him say one sentence to them. So this time, you know, he comes in second and the electoral College ailed the vote, and he still doesn't say a word to people who didn't vote for him, not one.
Word, actually word about this this week?
Don't you think that this is actually a fundamental Republican primary problem? Like if you look at these candidates, right, so you have this sense that Trump is perhaps running too far to the right on certain things. So in fact, DeSantis and Pence run even further to the right, like nobody is trying to. I mean, they're fighting for the base, but they're also making it very clear that they have no interest in picking up swing voters.
Well at this stage, yeah, I mean, you know, Nixon and others, you know, talked about how you have to run to the right in the Republican primary. But then then as soon as the Republican primary's over, you have to run back to the center. So Nixon was rushing back to the center as soon as he gets the nomination, you know, like let me get back into this competitive zone, you know, for November. And everybody did that, you know, Reagan did that, like George H. W. Bush did that.
Everybody did that, and that Trump's the first one who doesn't. He's stupid, So he doesn't know how I mean, he's ranked stupid. So if you said to him, you know, if Nixon was there to say to hey, well now you have to swerve to the middle, Donald Trump would not know what middle meant. He wouldn't know how to
find it. He wouldn't know, like, have no idea. And so he's just locked with the vote that he has and the only thing that could happen to that vote is that it diminishes because it cannot increase and you know the number of indictments. It won't make those people vote for Joe Biden, but it might make them not rush to the polls that day.
Thank you so much, Lawrence. I hope you'll come back.
I am coming back. You can't keep me away. You know what column I'm in there, and your guest book, I'm in the Desperately Available column. You know that.
Dalia Litswick is a senior editor at Slight and author of Lady Justice, Women, The Law, and The Battle to Save America.
Welcome to Fast Politics, Dalia. Thank you for having me back. Molly.
I'm always so excited to get to have you on the podcast, and I'm always so excited to talk Supreme Court with you. By the way, do you just have so much anxiety after what they did last last season that you know this second season.
Of super Emboldened Supreme Court makes you nervous? Or now?
I mean, I think in a weird way. I've been like Lucy footballed with kindness this season, Like I was prepared, do you know what I mean? Like it was such a disaster last year that I was fully prepared for like ten six three precedent overturning democracy, denying on stilts on skates, like middle Finger to y'all, and like that's just not happening. And so you know, we only have seven cases left and they're gonna be bad and we
can talk about it. But the fact that you know, including like Tuesday's independent state legislature theory, like it could have been so very bad, and all of these cases are coming out not badly. And then I'm just like my eyes trying to figure out, like, okay, I mean, how bad can affirmative action be to like make all these good outcomes also bad. So it's it's very strange.
I don't have a working theory for what happened to the like hashtag yar court from this time last year, but something very different is happening.
So let's talk about this big ruling this week, which was this Supreme Court rejects this independent state legislature theory.
It's a little bit complicated.
Oh my god, it's so technical, Molly that by the time I finish the next paragraph, you will be asleep. And it's also, i mean to be clear, like the most consequential or could have been the most consequential case for the future of democracy, like no joke, huge deal, and the like very short version is that this independent
state legislature theory. And I'm putting up air quotes around theory because it's not one was going to be the vehicle by which very scary conservative legislators in North Carolina. But like backed by Leonard Leo in big money and you know, all the apparatus of destroying democracy, We're going to essentially say that state legislatures thirty of the fifty are red state controlled, could essentially put in place any election practices they want and it would be unreviewable by
their state supreme court. That was the theory, and it was not to put to find a point on it. A version of that theory was the thing that was being pushed on Mike Pants right to set aside all of those contested elections.
Right, this is the theory where dan Quayle said, no, you can't do that.
Right when Mike Pants is like speed dialing the important legal thinker of our time, Dan and lands on dan Quail. But like, seriously, Mike Ludig, the guy who he talked to was you know, a sort of unbelievable conservative legal movement stalwart. You know, who worked in the Reagan White House, who worked in the Bush Justice Department, who was you know, on the very short list for the seat that John
Roberts got. It was Mike Ludig who said to Mike Pants, like, you cannot you know, refuse to certify these contested states, and that kind of saved us from a real coup, and a version of that theory, the sort of less maximalist version of that theory, was being used to say that essentially, state legislators can do whatever the hell they end.
They can't be checked. And today I'm sorry. And Tuesday, in a six to three kind of resounding majority, picking off not just the liberals but Amy Cony, Barrett and Brett Kavanaugh. The Chief Justice was like, oh no, no, oh no, no, that would be stupid.
Yeah, I want to I just want to get back to this for a second, because I do think it's it's quite interesting.
Gorsi, who's somehow.
Believes in the like sanctity of Native American, you know, personhood, but not women or black people, was the one who went along with the two Zalads.
Right, Gorsich, Alito and Thomas dissented in this case. Now there's a slightly credible argument for the descent, which is, after the court had heard this case, the North Carolina Supreme Court flipped conservative and withdrew the opinion, and essentially, by most rules of legal construction, the court the case is then moot. Right, like, there's no real basis. And to be clear, John Roberts had to do some like amazing turning himself into a pretzel to decide this case
on the merits, which he did. So the dissenter some of the dissenters, you know, objected because this case was moot, and that's probably right. But it's also right that I think the three dissenters and they have signed off, by the way, in the past on versions of the independent state legislature theory. The really interesting person, in some sense is Brett Cavanaugh, who had certainly been independent state curious in the past, but this time votes with Roberts and the liberals.
So interesting, this is good news. There were a few other bright spots. Will you tell us about the other bright spots.
There's kind of been a freakish number of bright spots, Molly, the same Roberts Court right, which gave us Shelby County, which gave us you know, Bernovich like, which has really dismantled the Voting Rights Act, the crown Jewel of voting rights gave us a case out of Alabama that was going to eviscerate what was left of the Voting Rights Act. And again resoundingly came out in favor of voting.
We had.
This court came out, as you suggested in the Indian Child Welfare Act case, resoundingly, resoundingly on the side of of course, Native American tribes get sort of a right of first refe fusal to take kids who are in foster care and keep them within the tribe.
It's hard to.
Believe the Supreme Court that last year, as you said, gave us Dobbs, gave us bruin the gun case, gave us Coach Kennedy praying on the fifty yard line, now is giving us these like pot smoking, hippie like kumbaya cases. And there's something, as I said, something is shifting, at least for Kavanaugh and Barrett and sometimes for Gorsic. And we're seeing the sentence Justice Alito and Justice Thomas dissent alone in ways that I could not fathom if this was happening last year.
So the state legislatures and federal elections that was Tuesday, then race and voting maps. Can you talk a little bit about that, because that's pretty amazing too.
This was an amazing case where essentially the state of Alabama wanted to turn the Fourteenth Amendment on its head and say that if you have any race conscious remediation of voting maps, then that's racist. That to try to fix centuries of racial bias in the voting system is itself racist. And as I said, this is a huge win.
The court bats it away. A version of that theory was the one that was being used to challenge the Indian Child Welfare Act, that it's racist to use the idea that Native American children belong with Native American custodians, because that also is racist. And so we've seen this slew of cases where the court refuses to see the anti discrimination Reconstructition Amendments to mean that the real sufferers here are white people. So that's a huge, big deal.
It feels like a very Charlie Kirk kind of logic. Right, it's racist to say racism is racist?
Try it right, or that the term of art they keep using is that the Constitution is meant to be color blind, and that means that everything that happened in the Reconstruction Amendments demands that white people not suffer. I will say one of the big losses. You know, there have been some big losses. The clean Water Act took
it to the chops. That's just unbelievably depressing if you think you know that all of this other stuff can be fixed in five or ten years, Like what can't be fixed is wetlands that are going to be destroyed. As you say, you know, we're going to have to
wait and see that. The big big biggies of the term, as always happens in the worst jack in the box ever, is at the end of the term, you get punched in the mouth by the affirmative action cases, the Biden Loan forgiveness case, and that three zero three creative case.
Right, can you explain to us what the three O three creative is.
It's going to sound familiar to folks because it's in some sense a test second bite at the apple of the Masterpiece cake Shop case that the court here just a few years ago, where we had a baker who refused to bake wedding cakes for same sex couples. People will recall that case kind of was punted when Anthony
Kennedy was the deciding vote at the court. But Anthony Kennedy was replaced by Brett Cavanaugh, and then we got Amy Cony Barrett and So the case comes back, this time in the form of a web designer, again in Colorado, who doesn't actually make wedding websites, but would like to maybe think about it someday, and if she does, she'd like to be able to discriminate against same sex couples and not run a foul of the state's public accommodation's law.
So this is an entirely fanciful case. No harm has come to her, but the court was unbelievably solicitous of the pain that would be involved in being forced to make same sex website.
So that's coming right, and that sounds like they might have an opinion on that.
One important thing to say about that case, just for listeners who we're looking to see what's coming, is there's nobody on the other side of the case. At least in Masterpiece Cake Shop, we had people who had somebody say to their faces, I will not make this cake for you because I don't believe in your lifestyle. Here we have nobody, and so the only story that was told at the court was that of the website designer. There's because, as I said, there's no harmed party here.
The court when they heard this case at oral argument, were so so heartbroken about her suffering, and there was no one on the other side to evince any pain.
That seems like a weird scenario for the Supreme Court.
Well, I mean, formally, you can't actually hear cases where there's no to remediate, but that doesn't bother this court as much as it should. And again, you know, if we were talking five months ago, Molly, every single one of the cases that we've talked about thus far looked to be six three juggernauts.
So the real I think takeaway.
And I say this knowing as I said, there's a bunch of biggies to come, is that it really feels like John Roberts is back in control of his court. He is writing these big, big honking voting rights decisions. He seems to have somehow convinced, at least Kevanaugh and Barrett that maybe they don't want to make common cause with Sam Alito and the other private jet members of the Court, but it's his court.
Again.
You have forayed very nicely into what you wrote about this Alito private jet scandal, not to be confused with the Clarence Thomas private jet scandal.
Correct, so many scandals so little time.
Yeah, and also these people like they can't fly commercial, Like none of these people clearly can fly commercial.
Let's just talk about this for a minute.
You sort of scratch a foe find numerous ethics violations.
Yeah, I mean I think that when the Justice Elee story broke last week in Pro Publica, and like pause as a press person to think about the fact that he didn't wait for the story to break and he didn't respond to their questions. He just took to the pages of the Wall Street Journal Opinion section to write a rebuttal of the story that had not yet dropped, in which he justified everything that they said about him by conceding that he did all of it but it
didn't violate the rules. So like, just as a press strategist, like probably not a good way to make the story go away.
Right, I mean, it's just an amazing thing.
I also love that the crew at the Wall Street Journal Opinion was happy to oblige this, getting like there's a world where the Wall Street Journal Opinion page says, no, you can't use us.
To screw over the Pro Publica reporters, yep.
Right.
And also just to get ahead of your own personal scandal. There's nothing ideological here.
The Wall Street Journal, we should note, is the same place that before the Dobbs leap leak happened a year ago, was intimating that they knew what was happening in court discussions, right the Wall Street Journal opinion section. Also, when John Roberts in the Obamacare case, the first one was quote unquote going wobbly and looked like he was going to defect and uphold Obamacare, they also knew that in advance.
So somebody who does not have the greatest constitutional minds on the bat phone, Mike Pence, has Dan Quayle is making calls to the Wall Street Journal opinion page.
It would seem.
Right, it's sort of amazing stuff with these scandals. You have Thomas, you have Alito, you have you know, Paul Singer. I mean, you just have a cast of sketchy characters like they're Historically, Congress has been able to reign in the Supreme Court's you know, Malfeasanzas. I mean, yes and no, I think back in reconstruction.
Yeah, yes, in the old.
I should qualify that I.
Was gonna say, I think and folks should read Professor Steve Vladdock's amazing book The Shadow Docket, where he talks about all the times in history that Congress has done exactly what you said, Molly, which is, you know, change the composition of the court, strip the court of jurisdiction.
They used to force the justices to ride circuit, which meant they had to like sleep in barns like right around the country and like so yes, historically there was a lot of power, including you know, salaries, that was exercised over the court, and then this kind of freaky learned helplessness set in so that you get to the point we're at today where you know, lots and lots and lots of elected officials are like, hum, this seems bad, soone should do something right.
It was my kurrent the frog voice.
I don't quite know why, but you know, like there's no sense that anything that could be done to remediate it is possible, and of course that's wrong. Things could be done, and we're starting to see for what it's worth. You know, folks like Sheldon Whitehouse, like Representative Hank Johnson. You know, there's a bipartisan bill that Angus King is
behind you. There's now some move toward doing things to either, you know, impose term limits or add seats to the court, or at least ask them to create their own ethics rules that they could voluntarily follow. But like there is some momentum behind the idea that maybe Congress like shouldn't sit and wait for the easter bunny to fix this,
Like it's got to get fixed. But I think you're right descriptively, like there historically is a long tradition of reigning in the court, and I think we've just not exercised that muscle. And maybe if I could say one other thing, I might say this. I think part of the reason for that is that we have this fanciful story we tell about court packing, right that FDR was going to pack the court and then like he almost direct his presidency and everybody hated him and it was
super bad. But this kind of animates where we started, which is something is changing at the court right now in terms of the doctrine, in terms of pulling back from the brink of crazy. And that's exactly the thing
that happened. It's kind of known as the switch in time that saved nine, where under the threat of court packing, the justices modulated their own bad behavior and started upholding FDR's New Deal legislation, and some justices left, some justices switched, but they just stopped acting as though, you know, they
were an imperial court. And it's interesting to ask whether one of the reasons we're seeing a kind of pumping of the brakes doctrinally this month at the court is some version of the switch in time that saved nine.
Right right, so interesting. Thank you, Dahlia.
Oh my goodness, thank you.
Hi.
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Wesley Lowry is the author of American White Lash, A Changing Nation and the Cost of Progress.
Welcome to Fast Politics, Wes.
Lowry, Thank you for having me.
Very excited to have you.
It's funny because I think about what a seminal and important book Backlash was, and I was thinking about that when we were talking about your new book, which is called American Whitelash, A Changing Nation and the cost of Progress. So talk to me a little bit about where that comes from.
Sure, The way I tell the story is I had spent the end of the Obama years covering the rise of Black Lives Matter, covering the emergence of this kind of activist energy on the left. Wrote my first book about it that came out in November of twenty sixteen, and you know, November and twenty sixteen was a very newsless time.
Nothing was happening at all.
Well, it was this era where we knew that one season of our politics was ending to start another. And what happened was we just ended up getting a different new season than we thought we were going to get. And so I was very braced for listening and trying to figure out, you know, what would it look like to cover the racial justice movement under the first female president,
And suddenly was handed a very different story. And so now I was having to figure out, what does it look like to cover these issues, these issues of race injustice, following the election of an openly negativist president who ultimately,
would you know, attempt to undermine our democracy. As I did that, I remember just watching story after story and covering story after story of cases of violence, whether it was a Muslim woman being attacked on the train in Portland or Charlottesville, and the rally.
Of What's premises the shootings in El Paso.
Or Pittsburgh, and it became really clear to me that on my beat, the story of this moment was going to be a story of white racial violence, and trying to figure out how to explain, how to contextualize what we were seeing and the reality that the Trump administration at the era we were in, had empowered these type of people who who wanted to commit this type of violence.
Explain a little more about what that empowerment looks like.
Well, we want to.
Think about a few things, and I want to clarify, you know, for a moment, I'm talking about like the white supremacist movement.
I'm talking about a vowed racist.
I'm not talking about like people who like make a bad joke about immigrants at Thanksgiving, you know, I'm talking about actually the people who want to see a race war and want to see America become the whiteth no state.
I want to I just want to add later on the people who made the bad jokes did in fact storm the capitals so well.
The mixture of both, right, right, So what happens? Right, So let's think about it. We're living in a world of a black president and of.
Assive demographic change that is changing the way the country looks and works, and our white population is extremely anxious about this. By the end of the Obama administration, fifty five percent of white Americans believe that white Americans are racially discriminated against. In America, white people believe they are a racial minority. This is where we are and t Donald Trump, and what Donald Trump does is he plays to these anxieties and the movement that he builds is
nothing starts with him. Right. We see this building with the Tea Party movement. We see this building with the anti immigrant movement prior to this, even back in the Bush administration, in the Obama administration, but Trump engages in an openly nativist rhetoric, and that rhetoric and that engagement, that pivot is something that's very welcome by the avaled white supremacist. Trump is doing it trying to reach the average white person who now thinks.
That they're a black person, right.
But what he's doing is he's using the rhetoric, he's using the talking points of the event racist and what he has sent in what he ends up doing is he ends up sending a ton of these white Americans into the arms of this really dangerous movement.
And that results in people losing their lives.
Your thesis here is that this is a kind of last gas, sort of backlash to progress.
The way I think about it is I think about our history as a tug of war that on one side you have white supremacist forces, on the other side you have anti racist forces. And every time there is a tug and a pull and what feels like a victory on behalf of multiculturalism and multiracial democracy, the white supremacist forces tug back.
And so we've seen this.
We see this following emancipation and reconstruction. We see the rise of the New Klan and reactionary movement. We see this following the Civil Rights movement. We see the rise of conservative reactionary movement, and now in this moment where we elect a black president, where our country is changing demographically, and where for the first time as a country we've
really had to be a multiracial democracy. People get to vote that, it would only make sense that we would have that type of tug back from these forces, and it helps explain a lot of what's.
Been going on.
Donald Trump has no historical precedent, right he has no understanding of the kind of Nixonian sort of George Wallacey racism of that generation, or does he.
I don't know that he has the understanding of it, although I would be surprised, you know, I actually wouldn't be surprised if he did have some broad knowledge of it.
But Donald Trump is very smart.
What I mean by that is that he is someone who is intuitively smart about people, what they respond to,
what they react to. He as understands the way that nativist leaders across societies and cultures have understood that there is nothing more compelling than convincing people who are scared and anxious that the enemy is at the gate, and that you are the one who will protect them and keep them safe, that all of your problems are not your fault, that it's because of some other people who are different than you, who are scary, who are bringing disease, who are bringing.
Crime, and I am going to save you from them. And we have seen across all of human history leaders who rise by doing this.
But again, here's the danger. It's very The reason people do it is because it's effective relective, right. But what happens is when you dehumanize people, people in your society start treating those people like they're not human because they've been dehumanized, right, and that necessarily leads to violence and
to backlash and beyond that, think about it. I think sometimes those of us in the media and the political media, we're like in on the game in this way, right, we're like, oh, we know that all these people don't actually believe everything they say, and X, Y and Z.
Let's think about it. If the President United States is telling people.
That the country's southern border is being invaded by dangerous disease carrying criminals, if he was telling the truth, it would be our responsibility to show up with guns to defend the border.
Right, Like our president is literally.
Telling us what the country's renovated, Right, how many people we are country?
Millions of people, tens of hundreds of millions people.
How many people have to build take him seriously to imperil somebody's life. A small portion of people taking him seriously creates a very dangerous environment for a lot of people.
I want you to explain a little bit about this idea that sort of the trigger for some of this was the election of Barack Obama.
I think that certainly within the actual white.
Supremacist movement, the election of Rock Obama was very major. I do think that within our mainstream.
Politics, a lot of these things were boiling long before.
Barack Obama's election.
I think secondarily, though, sometimes there's a way in which the election of a historic figure actually creates a permission structure for people to live out their prejudices.
So we've seen studies that's interesting.
Where there are countries that say, elect their first female prime minister, and open expression of misogyny actually goes up following that.
Right among the people who voted.
For they feel they have a pass.
Now, yeah, well, I can't be a sexist.
I voted for Kathy right, right, right, Like it's I voted for Obama twice.
But and then here we go, right, it's the character doesn't get out.
And so we see in this moment, right, and we see this in the polling, is that white Americans far outpaced Black Americans in the significance that they imbibe in Barack Obama's election insomuch as it suggests progress. Right that after Barack Obama's elected in the polling, white Americans say that they believe it means that there's been much more racial progress since the fifties andies.
Than what Black Americans believe.
In that there was this desire, and we saw this in the framing all the time, there was this desire for a quote unquote post racial America where if we just like say it enough, maybe it's true that people wanted to be able to say no, no, no, we move past all of this. We have a black friend, his name is Barack Obama.
In the White out right.
So therefore, all these things I feel about immigrants, and all these things I feel about this, and all these things I feel about this, those things can't be racism or they can't be racial prejudice.
Because like already established, and I like black people. I voted for Barack Obama.
Right's Y and Z.
And so I do think that that certainly factors into our politics in this moment. I think the factor in the politics not just that lead to Donald Trump, but into this moment too, where we're seeing a lot of reaction very centrist politics.
We're like, oh no, no, George Floyd was terrible. I support me too, but and then bought blah blah blah blah blah, and we're seeing a ton of right.
I think that's a really, really good point.
Can you talk about some of the sort of violence that you have have written about in this book?
Sure? You know.
So what I try to do in this book is I try to look at different cases and tell the stories of different individuals who fell victim to the violence of.
This era, and those are different types of violence.
I tell the story of Marcelo Lucero, who is an Ecuadorian immigrant and beaten to death in patchav New York and so Long Island right after Obama was elected. I tell the story of the Sikh temple that was shot up in Wisconsin and anti Semitic.
Attack in Kansas.
Richard Collins who is killed in Maryland during the Trump era, Charlottesville, and so what I'm trying to do is collect stories that are different types of racialized violence, anti black violence, immigrant violence, anti Semitic violence, anti Muslim violence, and anti sek violence, and showing how even as there are unique histories, there is an overlay in an overlap, right. I think that sometimes in our desire to categorize, we miss the
bigger plot. So, for example, we just saw the sentencing of the shooter.
And the Tree of Life Senagogue shooting.
In Pittsburgh, and he said this at the time, and he said this now in the sentencing in his trial as well, that the reason he targeted that synagogue was specifically because he believed it was helping resettle refugees in the United States of America and contribute to the Great
Replacement right. So it is anti Semitic violence, right, but that anti Semitic violence is tied in very specifically to this anti immigrant segment in a phobia to this where we see this with the shooters in Charleston and in Buffalo, right where they are this is anti black violence, but they are also anti Semitic.
They believe in a great replacement right, that white.
Supremacy is this conspiracy theory that implicates all of these other groups. And that sometimes if we're just so hyper focused on the one we miss how all these stories are actually connected together.
Right. That makes a lot of sense, And ultimately I think that the sort of message is important, which is that you know you're opening Pandora's box and so you know you don't get to choose who gets subjected to the violence.
Correct.
And again, it's this interplay between these things, right where we have to understand that it can be easier to think, Okay, well, this person is prejudiced against those people over there or this person, but the reality is everyone ends up becoming implicated in this because these prejudices play.
Off of each other, right.
And I think that's a really good point. Where do you kind of go from there?
You know, I think that a.
Big thing for us, and I think there are a few, but I think a big thing for us first is that I do think we have to be honest and will to be honest to grapple with these anxieties. I think sometimes in our polite political society, we have people who are attempting to cause plays more liberal or progressive than they are, but then in the privacy of their homes and in the privacy of the ballot box, they express much more anxiety and frustration and scaredness.
Right.
I think we see this around and I think we're seeing a lot of that in the kind of moderate reactionary backlash we're seeing right now, how our institutions are suddenly very concerned with appealing to Republicans and not letting the wokeness go too far right. And I think that is a reflection of kind of a white moderate politics, where people really are concerned about, well, what is happening with crime, and what will happen if the country becomes majority Hispanic.
And will that mean I lose out.
I think that pretending as if those concerns don't exist doesn't help.
Us, right.
I think we have to be willing to live in the world as an exist. We saw this a lot with the eyes of Trump, where it was extremely clear from the very beginning that this was a nativist candidate running on an explicit appeal.
To white Americans, that he was in the country the way it was We're.
Going to build a wall and keep the criminal Mexicans out, I'm going to ban Muslims from coming here, X, Y, and Z. And yet our institutions bent over backwards to pretend as.
If that wasn't what it was. This must be about these other issues, and you're just trying to say they're all right. None of those was what anyone want to say.
It was just very clear that we had a very open and proud bigot running for president, and the people whose job it was to tell us what the weather is refuse to say what the weather was. And I think that we have to be willing to be honest about that. We have to be willing to be honest about when Ron DeSantis, as he did yesterday, announces that he would ban birthright citizenship in the United America, a thing that he can't even do as president, we have to be honest about what that is an appeal to
what he's saying. I think that sometimes there's a refusal to do that. Some of that is because we don't want Republicans to say we're biased against them or that we're being mean. Right, So it's all these different reasons, But fundamentally, I think journalism we've got to be willing to tell the truth.
And I think in all of our liberal.
Institutions, whether it's our speech groups, whether it's our public platforms, right, we've got to be willing to defend multiracial democracy.
If someone is actively.
Trying to change the way our multiracial democracy works to have it not be so, I think it is the job of our institutions to stand up and do something about that.
I'm really glad you brought that up, because I wonder and we're almost out a time, but I just was wondering, if you go quickly, do you think that the sort of lie that the conservatives have told the mainstream media for so long that it's too liberal has really been this sort of most successful lie in American life.
I mean, I think it's a massive, extremely successful the way that they've been able to work the refs. I also think that it speaks, though, to the idea that so much of the media says is about telling the truth and about representing things as they are, but in reality, it is about creating a commercial product.
Right.
If you don't actually have to sell a single newspaper, if you don't actually have to have a single person tuned in, then you can just tell the truth no matter who it offends. What you're worried about is your ratings.
If what you're worried about is subscribers and advertisers, suddenly you're having to factor in all these questions about how what you're doing and what you're saying is being perceived by these people, whether or not it is actually true or not. So I think we see a lot of that. But beyond that, I think even most importantly though, right we have to remember how young.
Our multiracial democracy is. That it's only existed at the end of the sixties.
Our media institutions were not created to defend a multiracial democracy.
They were created before it existed. That they have never, as part of their mission, seen in as central to uphold because when their missions were crafted, it didn't exist. And so what does it mean.
To be the press and the media in a free multiracial democracy, and what does it mean to be defenders of that and supporters of that as a value? And some of that means constructing guardrails that when someone look the press in Germany would not quote someone ranting about the Jews.
The reason they wouldn't is they've.
Been there and they've done that before, and no one would argue that there's not.
A free press in Germany.
Right, It's that we understand that our job is to be facilitators and curators of the public square. And then as we do that, we have to decide what we allow it or what we don't. Not that no one could ever find it or not on the internet, but when you hand some on a microphone in primetime and give them a town hall, that's you inserting them and their ideas into the bloodstream of American life. And I think we have to be better stewards of what we do with that and.
How we do it.
Wes Lowry, I hope you'll come back anytime.
You know how to get hold of me.
Oh, Jesse Cannon, Miley, junk Fast.
If I was a betting man, I don't know that I would bet that Donald Trump shows up to any of these debates. But he's got a new excuse on why he may not show up.
This is like the trumpiest Trump is. I'm right, you know, like the debates, they're not happening yet, but they're coming ergo. He says he might skip them. After all, he's leading the field by forty points. Sorry, Fox News Life does it work that way? The former president added, I think he will certainly be back and forth and back and forth and back and forth until the debate starts. And for that that is our moment of fuckeray. That's it
for this episode of Fast Politics. Tune in every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday to hear the best minds in politics makes sense of all this chaos. If you enjoyed what you've heard, please send it to a friend and keep the conversation going. And again, thanks for listening.