Orlan.
Dear listener, it's Maria no Hossan. Now you know me as the host of this show, but I want you to know that I also co host In the Thick, which is our sister politics podcast here at Futuro Media. It's a show where we talk politics unfiltered. So as we get out of the haze of the presidential election, we thought we'd bring you this special episode of In the Thick for you, our dear Leatino USA listener. In
this episode, I speak with Imara Jones. She's a journalist and podcast host as well as the founder of Translash Media, and we also are joined by a badass, the Washington Post columnist Karen Atia. We're going to talk all about what the Democratic Party got wrong, the nationwide shift to the right, how we understand this, what comes up, and what comes next. So I want you to enjoy this episode, and please, dear listener, subscribe to In the Thick wherever
you get your podcasts. Let's go to the tape, dear listener, Welcome to In the Thick. Yes, I know, I know, but that's why we're here, because we're going to talk about it. We're one week since this election, I'm joined by two award winning journalists and it all stars. They're going to help us navigate what we're figuring out, what we're looking for, how we move forward. Joining us from Brooklyn, we have the founder of Translash, media journalist and podcast host,
yes Imaida Jones back on the show. Welcome back, Imada.
Thank you, thank you so much.
And joining us from Dallas, Texas, Washington Post opinions columnist Karen Attia.
Karen, great to have you on the show.
Thanks for having me, Maria, good to be here.
This is politics unfiltered. Let's get into it, Karen, Imaa. It's been just over a week since Donald Trump's victory. It's a night that sparked a historic right word shift in our country. The election results gave us this new insight into a changing American political landscape right and we're all sitting with it and taking it in. Republicans, well,
they had a sweeping victory. It stretched from rural America into urban centers, even one's long thought to be Democratic strongholds, even in Manhattan, for God's sakes, election night also marked a historic moment of failure for the Democratic Party. So let's look at some numbers.
Here.
Republicans won a bigger share of votes in every state in twenty twenty four than they did in twenty twenty, and won every single swing state. Exit polls showed that forty six percent of Latinos forty six percent of all Latinos voted for Trump, and Latino men specifically, they voted at a rate of fifty five percent, and that's compared to just thirty six percent of Latino male voters for Trump in twenty twenty. Vice President Harris received two million
fewer votes than Biden did. In twenty twenty, Harris only held an eight point margin among women voters, the Democrats smallest margin since two thousand and four. And this despite the fact that ninety one percent of Black women voted for Harris, while fifty three percent of white women voted for Trump. A majority of white women voted.
For Donald Trump.
For many of us on this podcast, this is a victory that has really deep implications in terms of our understanding of the country that we live in and how we move forward. You know, I mean, we're all feeling it. So very first thing is a temperature check. So it's how you're feeling today, Karen, your temperature check what's your emotional state.
Honestly, I've been spending the last couple of days, first of all, consciously uncoupling from Twitter slash x that healscape of a site, and I think I've just been in a mindset.
Of being extremely upset.
With how the election turned out, but not surprised. I'm joining y'all from Texas, right and I'm back here when week after the election. In so many ways, I'm reminded of the things that I saw here in the years that I was living here before this year, So I'm not entirely shocked at the direction this country is going.
I guess for me personally, I'm just going to be using a lot of this time.
To really deeply reflect and spend a lot more time in the gym, because I think what is happening now is a bigger energetic vibe shift that is bigger than the election, and that goes to an identity shift, an identity crisis for America. So as we're figuring that out, I think it's time to just really get grounded in community, spirituality and keeping ourselves healthy and finding joy where we can as we navigate.
This preach and Karen and I our Instagram workout admirers. MY dream is to one day work out with you like that's going. I'm gonna make that will happen. I'm gonna make that happen in twenty twenty five. Emata your temperature check my dear.
So if I was a thermometer, I think I would be running slightly hot today when most of last week I was pretty pretty even caln.
I think that more than anything, I.
Feel annoyed by the mad scramble that's happening when some of us have been reporting counseling, advising warning for years and haven't been heard like we should have been, and then now the phone is ringing off the hook, and that is particularly irritating. I would also say that I am deeply It's okay, honey, Yeah, I would say that I am deeply enraged. I think it's quiet rage, though that's what it is. At what is happening in the
mainstream press. I think the inability to hold white people accountable for white people's actions and choices and to instead say that, for example, Kambla Harris lost because of trans people, and also the rush even amongst places that are supposedly more open to conversation amongst Democrats to fall in line with the looming authoritarian regime, I think means that there's just going to be to Karen's point, and thank god for Karen's writing in the post. By the way, you
know it's going to be a massive realignment. And I think in every single way.
I'm all of that. You know, for me, the worst points right, It's just like you devoted your career to trying to give a community a complexity that would be Latinos in general, Like they're complex, you can't count on them, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, not being heard right, always being criticized by the right and the left. But you know that is what it is. On the issue of immigration, just like seeing this horror play out, which is like, this is your worst fucking nightmare in the world.
It's the reason why your father.
Didn't want to come to this country, right damn it did want to cry.
But between like that, and.
Also I'm just like, Okay, put on your big girl boots and what were you going to do in the upcoming four years if Kamala Harris had one? Were you just going to be like lounging different context because we wouldn't feel like we're moving into authoritarianism, fascism, outright racism, gestapo tactics, et cetera, et cetera. But I'm also not going to lay down. I'm just not I'm like, okay, here,
I am, I'm back. I'm waking up at six, working out, eating healthy, giving myself the pause one hundred percent, but then getting ready.
All right.
I'm so glad. I'm so glad that we had that moment to just unleash. And I think the one thing that I'm very uncomfortable it is the amount of anger and what we're going to do with that, and certainly for black women to be pissed off as hell with everyone in the entire country and world.
Well, black women have to save ourselves. Eat first and foremost, because no one cares about black women like other women.
Let's just be honest.
Yeah, So that's first and foremost, and yeah, everyone else will have to figure it out.
And that's where we are.
You know, thank you for producing this insanity, voters of the United States of America. But we are here, and we want black women to take care of themselves, especially in this moment. First, I just want to ask the both of you if you can break down how you understand this victory was his campaigning effective in terms of speaking to an American electorate. Let's start with you, Karen, and then we'll hear from you Emeta.
Yeah.
I think a lot, a lot, a lot of things are at play, right, And I have to keep in mind Trump for a lot of people, including you know, I have to say I have Trump supporters even in my family who.
Are black and live in Texas.
Just so we're clear.
Core wrets and immigrants, So okay. I think for me, my own sort of lived experience defies a lot of the perhaps myths, particularly that liberals have tended to have about about immigrants and about sort of the black and browning of America, that it would automatically lead to this conclusion that this would be bad for Republicans, right, And I have to keep in mind that Trump has been in my life as a cultural figure pretty much ever since I was born, ever since, like I don't know,
in the nineteen nineties, Home alone and Trump in the cultural zeitgeist has represented to a lot of people this idea of power, money, success, and frankly, what it means to be a completely free man, free of shame, free of the shackles of poverty. And he's less a candidate than this aspirational almost frankly, and I know we don't like to talk about it, but almost a religious figure.
And the times that I've been in the same room with him or same space, whether it's been at the RNC in Cleveland in twenty sixteen or meeting him as part of the editorial board in the Washington Post or at NYBJ the National Association of Journalists this year, which I decided to resign from after the decision to invite
him to speak. And what people don't understand is he has this sort of presence and power and charisma that he plays this character as somebody who grew up watching Monday Night Wrestling, where Trump was also on there.
He is extremely.
Good at quote unquote, as you say, playing the heel right, and America loves the heel, loves a figure that is willing to be the underdog in a sense, take on the power establishment and act on instinct and do what he wants.
He's a bully, but people like it.
Who knows, maybe I'm like burying a lot of my feelings and anger and rage, and please believe, I'm not trying to excuse people who buy into this, but I get it. And when I look at this election outcome, even when I look at how simple his slogan was, make America great Again, how simple it was for people to signal belonging to a community.
Around him wearing those red hats.
The red hat has become a signifier, right, a community builder in a way for people, and people both feel empowered by him and yet also completely the underdog, victimized by the elites, by the media, when really these are also people struggling under the economy who feel that it's okay to take out that anger, those feelings on minorities, on women, on trans people.
There's a lot of factors. I also point back to just.
The rise of right wing media and radio and right male anger is this seductive thing here in this country. The fact that the right wing has captured combat sports UFC, pro wrestling, which is where a lot of.
Men, young men, young white men.
Form communities, form this idol worship. It makes a lot of intuitive sense to me. That's the only way I can put it. I'm not saying it's right.
So the Democrats then just a quick take, Karen on the Democrats and on how you see their role.
I think the Democrats suffer from still suffer from assuming that people will be swayed by facts and policy by the head in some ways. And the Republicans have figured out how to appeal to something in the bone spirit of people, even if it's not it. And I think the Democrats kind of swinging back and forth. It's like, are you the party of civil rights and peace and diplomacy or are you the party of endless warm bombing children.
In Gaza Imada? Your take on?
The Democrats lost this and the Republicans want it. What's the takeaway?
This election revealed the deep, unresolved character flaw that haunted America from its inception, the unfinished business of dealing with the tension of being birthed as a slave republic, and the fundamental aspect of the slave republic is this notion that the way that you get free is by denying other people their freedom, that you can destroy others at will in order to achieve your means and your goals, and that that is especially and only true for people
who are white. And anytime America in its history has come close to burying that idea, not the reality.
But even the idea.
The response has been ferocious and extreme, and just to bring that forward so that we don't think that this is, you know, ancient history.
You know.
Professor Carol Anderson from Emmer University, in her book White Rage shows how every single year that Barack Obama was in office, racist sentiment and then timpathy in the United States increased, which means that just the sight of a black man and a black family occupying the highest office in the land unearthed the reality of the ugly beast that is literally right below the soil in the country.
So I think Donald Trump at his core understands that that's how he was raised by his dad, and the fact that he is a master marketer and brander, and the fact that he lives at a time when, as Christaph Friedland said in her book Plutocrats, that we see CEOs as the hero of our time. Corresponding with what Karen said, I think is almost a toxic and irresistible mix in America.
It's catnip.
And you put that person against a black woman who people do not want to see on high.
People do not want.
To wake up every day and see a black woman who is powerful and grounded be commander in chief.
Regardless of her policies.
By the way, we all know that President Obama's policies were fairly conservative, ironically, so this isn't about the policy content. This is really a battle over the ideas and the fundamental character of the country. And the nation failed its character test.
So my thoughts and I have a lot on what the Republicans did and the Democrats, right, So the Republicans again, they have a clear message, it's not just make America great again, it's build the wall, and build the wall means stop it all. Stop the immigrants, stop the refugees, stop people speaking Spanish, stop immigrants from moving into my community, stop black people from being out there marching, stop trans people, stop Gabe, Like build the wall, I want to be
behind my wall. The horror is that the level of missing from and disinformation, which we've reported about at Nauseam and please listen to our work on Latino USA, is that, you know, witnessing how latinos and latin has actually bought into I'm going to vote for a guy that's going
to start mass deportation. But speaking of the Democrats, You know, people get very upset still when I criticize the Democrats because they just think I'm a Trump supporter, and I'm just like, no, if they had listened, what I was trying to say was you need to give a different narrative. You cannot out Trump Trump on the issue of immigration and what's happening at the border. You need to take
a completely different take on this. And in terms of the economy, the same thing you could have said, the reason why economic growth is happening is because we have immigrants here. They were scared and they fell into you know what's easiest for them, which is, well, what does the white man say. What is the straight white male, heterosexual Ivy League educated policy analyst, public relations, marketing executive, what does he say?
That's what we're going to do.
So.
Imara, you are the host of several podcasts. You also just finished up season three of your investigative podcast it's called The Anti Trans Hate Machine, and this season your investigation focused on the links between the rise of political violence in the United States, far right paramilitary groups and anti trans hate. Imara, at this point, what does this victory mean for the trans community?
One?
What is the threat and how do we respond to it? And then how do you see this threat as a manifestation of a threat on democracy based on the backs of trans people.
I think that the combination of Donald Trump and the fact that the largest single at by the entire campaign nearly a quarter of a billion dollars and anti transads
the biggest advice. They spent more money on that than on anything else with prospective advertising, the failure of the Democratic Party to respond, and the way in which Democrats and the mainstream media have acted in the wake of the loss by saying that it was trans people's fault, telegraphs to Donald Trump that his desire to put trans people on the day one target list means that it will be open season on trans people on day one,
alongside immigrants. The entire rationale for the man's campaign was that he would go after immigrants and trans people literally the whole campaign, and the country said damn right, we will.
Stop the indoctrination of your children and we will not let them try to change your kid's gender.
So I think that what it means is there's going to be a slew of anti trans administrative actions on day one. I think the administrative agencies are going to go right to work to try to erase trans people from an entire slew of equal protections, including healthcare and housing, employment. They can't really do that because there's a Supreme Court case, the boss Dot case, which ruled that trans people can't be discriminated against. But they can just stop enforcing the
law correct. And I think trans people are organizing and responding, relying on community. I mean, I think that I've been warning through four years of reporting. Now this issue was teed up by the Christian nationalist movement for the past ten years to work exactly how it worked in this election, and it did. They know that it works in really close elections. They've been teeing up this conversation through an entire apparatus. They've spent hundreds of millions of dollars on
it to bring us to this point. And their strategy worked and paid off. And so now we are about to usher in authoritarianism in the United States and see mass pain like no one alive has witnessed on this scale, undoubtedly mass civil instability and unrest because this operation figured out how to use trans people and trans issues over the past decade to usher in authoritarianism.
So, Karen, you know we're hearing about this specificity of the attacks on the trans community and how much fear there is there. You know, you write for the Washington Post, right, it's all about Washington politics. What do you think this victory means for the future of our democracy?
Yeah, Look, I think this country is a young democracy. I don't think a full democracy is anything but a country that gives protections and voice to the most marginalized. I mean, I think you know, as a journalist, we're seeing definite attacks on the press, We're seeing attacks on organizers.
I think it's not a coincidence to me that after platforms like Twitter were so instrumental in making so many of these issues, whether it was racism, police brutality, me too, so visible and forcing those issues of America not holding up to its promise for black people, for women, for trans people.
To me, it's not a.
Surprise that the tech brologarchs came in bought up these platforms. We now have zucker Birds saying we're not going to
do politics, We're not going to do news. And to me, it is also I think this question, you know, not just of our elected officials, but again of our ruling class, which yes includes the Elon Musk, the Peter Thiels, the Mark Zuckerberds, who have an insane amount of unaccountable power over what we see, over what we consume, over what we believe to be real, who have leaned to the right, who have, I mean, Elon tried to tilt this election in favor of Trump, And I think this is going
to be something that we're going to have to really figure out and grapple with as we're moving in this increasingly mediated space. I mean, what does it mean for a handful of men of white men, a couple of South African immigrants who have decided that they want to reshape this country into a country that silences the press, that wants to elevate high testosterone.
Men, white men into power.
Right, when I look at democracy, it's not just about elected officials, but it's about the class of wealthy, ultra rich billionaires that we have actively working with the fascist government and org caving. So what does it mean for us to fight back against that. There's a lot of news deserts right. This media environment is now less diverse
than it was in the nineties. It is not an accident that newsrooms have been slashing their news staff of people of these different backgrounds, Black, Latino, trans So the fact that everybody's dumbfounded about what's happening, I'm like, yeah, no shit, because the people whose job it was to interpret and to give voice to these issues, y'all let them go because you want to quote unquote appeal to your core slash white audience.
You know, one of the things you mighta obviously the reason why in the thing came into existence was to have an independent analysis of the politics from a non white perspective. Right, we were all the three of us basically yelling and screaming, this is not a normal election, this is not a normal party, not a normal candidate. So final question, what has been the role of mainstream media and helping to make this all happen?
Oh boy.
I think that if you see yourself as a part of the establishment, then your role is to preserve the established order. If you see yourself in the role of preserving the established order, that any perceived threats to that order will be marginalized, period, full stop. And I think that one of the issues is that a part of the established order is that there are two parties, you treat them a certain way and you don't actually listen
to the content of what they're saying. You know, there's a president, whoever the president is, you report on them in a certain way, so you're just actually publicizing and lifting up the conversation that the established order tells you. So when you have a major party that's captured by an extremist movement, you just keep doing the same thing. And what you've end up doing is to legitimize those extremist views because you just cover them like everything else.
I don't know if you, Emara or Karen are of the Birdwatcher team, but before I came to record, there was a golden eagle circling in front of me over this lake, just circling. And I didn't call anyone. I didn't say to my family, come and look. I didn't take out my phone. I just sat and I watched her, and I was like, you're telling me something. I don't know what, but I guess the joy was to be able to witness that I feel joy just from the
power of nature, Like that's basically keeping me going. Start with you, just a quick take on what's bringing you joy, what you are actively doing to find it how you have found it.
Hopefully this weekend I'll be going out into nature. I've rededicated myself to movie time martial arts. It brings me a lot of joy and grounding. You punch and kick things and not to stop, but frankly community Like right now I'm working on feeling grounded spiritually and physically and yeah, actually dancing like kind of like cranking up the music and dancing in my pajamas to I remembery myself once
in a while. I actually think right now, creativity artists, people who are tapped into something deeper than just kind of the intellectual politics.
I feel like they're.
The ones that the profits the astrologers.
I think the.
Creatives who are unbound are going to be the ones who are going to help us and see us through.
Oh my god, I love that so much.
Take us out, my dear lovely sister, something that is bringing you joy.
One of things I just.
Want to say is that when you mentioned that you saw the image of an eagle circling, it made me think of the emblem of Mexico and the ego eats the snake on the Mexican.
Flag, drop in the Mike, Yo, there's Karen all like y'all need to be spiritual, and there's Amara like, well, hello, it's right in front.
Of you, Yo, it's right in front of you. The ego eats the snake.
I got chills just now.
I'm really into science fiction and speculative fiction and fantasy, and those worlds and those imaginings are really really helpful at times like this because there's so many ways in which a lot of things that we're going to be facing are modeled into that. And so I think that one of the things I was thinking about last week was, you know, all of the challenges.
What we could have done, what we couldn't have done, And.
I was like, but you know, at least, one of the things that I think is really helping me right now and stay grounded is that I don't have a failure of imagination. And what I mean by that is that I didn't have a failure of imagination beforehand in terms of what's possible and where we could go, and I don't have that failure now, and so it's oddly grounding.
IMAA, my sister Imada Jones of Translash Media, thank you so much for joining me on in the Thick, thank you and the fabulous Fighter in the Washington Post, Herenatiya, my sister, thank you so much for joining me on in the.
Thick, of course, thank you, dear listener.
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No de Mayes Tao.
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