Push it.
I'm Khalil Jbron Muhammad.
I'm Ben Austen. We're two best friends, one black, one white.
I'm a historian and I'm a journalist. And this is some of my best friends.
Are some of my best friends? Are you know? On the other side. In this show, we wrestle with the challenges and the absurdities of a deeply divided and unequal country. And today's episode, Khalil, we go deep, deep, deep into those divides. Yeah, that's right.
We're talking about trump Ism, We're talking about populism, we're talking about the far right Christian nationalists. We have on our show.
Jeff Charlotte.
He's a professor at Dartmouth College and the author of the New York Times best selling book The Undertow Seems from a Slow Civil War.
Yeah, yeah, this book is really powerful. Jeff's new books starts with his reporting way back in twenty fifteen. He's at Trump rallies and it continues throughout the Trump presidency. And this is the first part of the book. And he's talking with people at these rallies, the real diehard Trump supporters, and he's capturing for readers the depth of their belief and Jeff is seeing Trump really through the lens of religion. He's seeing Trump as a kind of religious leader.
And this book continues after the events of January sixth, twenty twenty one. He travels the country to explore divides everywhere, guns, militia, state legislative banning of books, and overturning of reproductive rights. Jeff really believes that we are in a slow civil war. He calls it as he sees it.
That's right. He thinks it's already begun. All right, let's do it. Let's get into this, all right, Jeff Charlotte, Jeff, thank you for being on some of my best friends. Are I spent a long time coming.
Thanks Ben, Thanks good to be with you both today.
Yeah, Jeff, it's great to meet you.
Jeff Khalil is just meeting you right now, But you and I have known each other. I was trying to do the math. I think it's twenty years.
Really that long. So, yeah, we met via Harper's magazine.
Yeah, yeah, you were doing your first piece for the magazine, Jesus plus Nothing, which becomes Your which was.
The start of my Yeah, twenty years. So I've been going around thinking about this book. I've been reporting on right wing movements for twenty years since that story. That story was in sort of the turn in that direction.
So that magazine story that we worked on together, you as writer, me as a lowly fact checker, became your book, The Family, and it also became a docu series. And I'll just sort of say, like you've always been interested in religion and power. This is sort of something that has been much of your professional life's work. And I would say that the difference between that work back then and what you've been doing more recently is that you
were looking at elites. You were looking at at least people who were approximate to power, and during the Trump era you've looked more like the people who are the masses, who are not necessarily in power, but how they've been sort of controlled or sort of what they're thinking is yeah.
And I think the pivot point really is Trump's descent on the Golden Escalator in twenty fifteen. And here he's bringing down a fascist esthetic. He doesn't have a movement yet, and the question to me is will he build the movement? So the question that becomes more interesting for me is one of reception rather than one of the production of the narrative, and that kind of pivots me toward will
this movement form? Will I watch a social movement? Because the right has social movements too, Will I watch a social movement in real time? And unfortunately, yes.
No, that's really fascinating because I know in many ways the book you've written is written for us, the undertow scenes from a civil war. And by us, I mean like people who still believe in facts, who still care about expertise, and people who read books. But you know, tell us, like, what do we need to understand about what you call the Trumpet scene to help us understand what is happening in our country from all of these Trump rallies that you've attended over the past several years.
That's the first thing that we need to understand that this is an age of Trump in the same way that I think a lot of scholars will sort of date the age Reaganism not from nineteen eighty to eighty eight, but from nineteen eighty really perhaps to twenty sixteen, such that Reagan defines a kind of a vernacular in which American politics takes place. Whether you're a Democrat or Republican, and I I think the Trump is scene is he is.
He has given his language to the age. And I think that's the first thing, is that we live in the age of Trump. And so these debates is whether Trump is finished or not, they're really missing the point.
I think of this preacher in.
Omaha, Nebraska, pastor Hank Cuneman, and he's a prophet in he or so he says, and he says Trump is coming back, whether the man himself or his spirit in the flesh of another.
And I think that's the first thing.
And the second thing is just to pay attention to that seemingly crazy you know, Trump is coming back spirit in the flesh of another. Seemingly crazy narrative, right, But it's not crazy. It's also imaginative. And I think we have to contend with the fascist movement that did arise in response to that fascist aesthetic. It is fascism is a form of imagination. And where we get stuck on saying, but what are our policies? It's not about that. It
is a utopian movement. They understand that their vision as utopin and that brings with it so much momentum and energy. And I'm not saying like it's unstoppable. I definitely don't believe inevitability, but I think as a country, both left and liberals are still trying to resist it in terms of an older politics.
I have a follow up question, Jeff, because this is one of the things that I would not have seen but for your reporting about this and the amount of time you spend up close at these rallies. But essentially give the anatomy of a Trump speech, and you wrap that anatomy around the sort of familiar tropes of evangelicalism
in say the career of Billy Graham. But you give this anatomy where you say, there's the call, there's the snake, and there's the bullet and maybe just sketch very quickly to our listeners what exactly you mean by those three elements of a Trump rally speech.
So this is maybe the most upsetting thing I say to a lot of non Trumpers, is I think Trump is one of the two best orders I've ever heard, and the other being Barack Obama. You know, radically different style, but in terms of the ability to work a crowd and own a crowd, and part of the way Trump does it is through a kind of awful comedy, but it is comedy. He does sketch comedy, he does voices and so on. And it so distresses me that our colleagues in the press and really don't pay attention to
this because they call it just theater. Right, Well, there's no such thing as just theater. There's theater, and it's powerful. The call is one that was one he used in twenty sixteen, and he would sort of enact the calls he was going to make as president of bringing back the industrial base, and how quickly the chieftains of industry would bow to his will, right and sometimes that.
He was making that they didn't have to have any truth to them. But I just like Grandio's promises.
It wasn't even a promise. He was in enacting it. So you saw it happen, all right, So great the companies are I just heard him. I just heard the guy on the phone. Well you didn't hear it.
But he's a good performer, all right, all right, So that's the first part of his speech. You call it the call, So, Jeff, what's the snake?
That the snake was?
He would take an old song by actually a black ceil rights activist and sort of perform it as this poem about a woman who picks up a snake and the snake bites her, and he would do voices, you know, he do the voice of the snake, and he.
Do the voice of the woman. Why did you bite me?
And you know, the snake, silly woman, you took me in. You knew that's what I was. And to him that represented the undocumented person.
The crisis at the border that we call it now, which all of this criminalizing, racist language about immigrants and the rapes and the murderers and this sort of thing. That's where the that's where that snake metaphor shows up. And now the bullet, the last part of the speech, which you say is about the neef of violence, like to protect or defend the people against those who Trump
defines as traders. You give us this crazy story, this example in the book about Trump talking about a mass execution in the Philippine.
The bullet is just straight murder.
And I was actually just thinking of the bullet to dig, which is a fictional history which he presents as real. It's general black Jack pershing and the Philippines and this Muslim rebellion and This never happened, by the way, but you know, just obviously, they capture fifty Muslim rebels and they dip fifty bullets into pigs.
Blood, and the whole thing is acting.
He demonstrates, he's swirling the bullets and the blood he's holding up. He tells the story, and he shoots forty nine of them, and he minds shooting them, and the crowd is cheering, leaves one man alive to go and tell the tale, and then he does a story again. The whole thing boom boom, boom, and the crowd cheers louder. And anything Trump says about policy after that is missing the point. It doesn't matter. He knows that that's the
power of a really scary order. And it's not a you know, people say he's not fascist because he doesn't talk like Hitler and Mussolini.
No, he talks like Trump. It is a different style, that's.
Right, Jeff. You know, as you know, I'm in Chicago, and so we have a kind of version of Trump's the bullet speech here where he's like, you know, Chicago is this hell hole, and I spoke to this tough cop, I spoke to this great cop, and it changes in every version he tells. But it's this idea of just like oppressive policing, they could solve the crime problem in Chicago if we just let him, they could solve it in a minute or a day. It's this idea of like hyper violence and justified in some form.
Yeah, that's just so interesting.
I hadn't thought of that as like the Chicago as one of his one of his sketches actually, And I wonder how many of those city sketches he's had, because I've also heard him do one for Philadelphia. You know, I've never I've never been to a Chicago rally. Of course I could watch them. It would be interesting to sort of see like the urban studies of trump Ism, to go through when he's near different cities, and what stories he tells.
About actually that Chicago story that he is not just you know, at Chicago rallies, and in fact it's across the nation because Chicago, like Philadelphia, is a stand in for like black city. You know, it invokes all the sort of like racist and they're not even like you know, dog whistles. They're just like explicit and so you know, tough on crime rhetoric. That he's able to extol. It just works wherever he is, because Chicago has this meaning of like violent place, gun crimes black people.
Well, let me ask you both a question. That's that's something I've been thinking about. Is there actually any place now in the rhetoric for the term dog whistle or is it simply misleading us?
I think I think you're right.
Absolutely.
I mean, the explicit nature of the conversation today about saving the country in whatever context it is right now, it's the recent immigration changes by the Biden administration and the wall to wall coverage of people at the border, and the way in which the Biden administration is just
unleashing people who don't belong here. Now, I'm not using the language in which it's articulated, but all you have to do is add the filter of racist trumpst white supremacists on top of that, and that's what we're hearing. So I think the notion of dog whistle as a term of art these days is as anachronistic as even a so called culture war, which we still are using to define like what should we be saying about the truth of our history or not.
To normalize is something that's extreme. Yeah, it puts it out.
If here's the normal flow of things and here's this other thing that intrudes dog whistle or culture war, when that is the center.
I would even say on the cultural point that it minimizes it, like it's not that important. Like there's real politics and then there's these culture wars, and the culture wars are the bait and switch from the actual real thing that we're trying to get to. So to me, that's the heart of the matter at this point. For example, we just saw Maricio Garcia kill people in Texas. I believe he killed eight people and was self identified with
white supremacist and Nazi culture. You actually, unlike most Americans, have seen up close what the appeals are are within these right wing fascist movements that support Trump two people of color like, so help help more people understand exactly how that works.
Well, I you know, in the book I use this term from a friend of mine, Anthea Butler, who this great slim book that I recommend called White Evangelical Racism. And you know, Anthea Butler is a is a sort of a deep historian of churches and whack churches in America.
But this is you don't have to be an academic to read this book, and she's got this phrase like the promise of whiteness and the problem, and it's astonishing that we're still wrestling with this, given how all the promise of whiteness is.
Eric, I've just been listening to a book about Gary, Indiana and.
The ways in which the factory bosses and so on so to split Serb immigrants and black migrants, who at first had such solidarity that you'd have black workers speaking Serbian and Serbs learning English from black workers. But the promise of whiteness was they could extend it to the Serbs. Right, Hey, Serbs, we had you as outsiders, but you know what, we're going to make you insiders and you can keep expanding that promise of whiteness. And I think that's one of
the insights that Trump had. So when you go to a Trump rally and it opens again and again and again with a black or brown preacher, usually far to the right, and this is an important point. It inoculates the mostly white crowd, well, I'm not a racist. Look here, I am enjoying what this this black or brown preacher has to say. But then to go further than that, right, understand that one that's doing the work of inoculation. Two it is making trump ism and fascism I think safe
for a certain number of people of color. And I think if we understand it as having a gravitational force, of course it is fascism. White supremacy is a insidious enough disease. I think in my understanding that it can be carried by that, so that you get down to a rally in Sunrise, Florida, very blue area, and I don't even know if the crowd was mostly white. There's a Cuban American, sure, like everyone's like, okay, I get that. But then there's a Venezuelan Americans and the Nicaraguan Americans
waving Nicaraguen and Venezuelan flags. There's also folks waving Pride flags. Fascism has a gravity that can pull people in. It says, I can make you part of this movement. And once you're part of this movement, you know, and then we also like rope in the liberal lave of color blindness, and suddenly the numbers start eroding.
Jeff, because I know this is such an important and hard point to appreciate for a lot of people. I mean, they're stuck on the notion that white supremacy cannot be passed on to people of color. You have this really brilliant passage, and I'm just going to read a portion of it. You said that to a color blind crowd. Quote unquote. The implicit equation is one of themselves with the formerly enslaved. Black becomes white, white becomes the oppressed.
Just as white people took the land from indigenous people and then named themselves they're victims, so too, has whiteness always been a means of claiming the suffering it inflicts
on others as its own. And I think that goes a long way to not only telling us why this movement has appeal, why fifty percent more black men voted for Trump in twenty twenty than voted in twenty sixteen, and why we all need to be concerned about the growing possibility that a browning of America will not save us from fascism.
Yeah, and people can see this, but Jeff is nodding along to his own words like yeah, pretty good.
No, No, you embarrassed me.
I'm like saying, like, well cool, because what you do is like I'm.
Like blah blah blah, blah blah blah, and like, you know, you wrote it in like a few sentences there, and like it's a little bit like this is this is a tribute to editors, right, Like then what I said was the first draft, what Khalil read was what you know, someone like Ben or another editor much improved.
I mean, so Trump was on CNN in this town hall, and so more people witnessed what you're describing pretty recently, and I know you must think about this a lot. You said that, like, people like us need to understand the symbols of trump Ism and the depth of belief in it. But as we saw on CNN, there's also like this this danger of giving him a platform and everyone's seeing it and like we can repeat the mistakes of twenty fifteen and twenty sixteen again. And so how
do you think about that? I mean, you you talk about this all the time you've written this book. Do you sometimes wrestle with this idea that you're like, by regaling us with stories about Trump, you're also you know, letting him speak more, your giving voice to it.
Yeah, I mean, like that's the platform question, right, But I'll say I think the CNN town hall, I thought it was obscene.
I mean, and that's not how you do it. That's part of the old politics.
One they want the ratings right, but two then they're going to answer with the liberal response, we're going to fact check him live. Well, what is the point of fact checking? There is no point. I mean, that's not how you do it. I would hope that what I'm doing here. First of all, you know, I don't have three million viewers, and I think actually that does matter.
This is a book. But also instead of sort of trying to fact check him, the more important thing is to show, I think, how he's constructing this story, what the pieces are, not to say it's just theater, but to really pay attention to it as theeter, and say, what are the elements of production here, what are the elements we can see the myth in the making.
So, Jeff, we're going to take a quick break, and when we come back, we're going to talk about your work essentially since the twenty twenty election and explore this idea of whether we are in a civil war right now. We'll be right back after the break.
We're back with Jeff Charlotte, author of The Undertow Scenes from a slow civil War. Oh, Jeff, this is really so important, I think what you've done, and the media attention to this work, I think is partly driven by this very provocative subtitle that encapsulates a lot of the reporting that first appeared in Vanity Fair and that you continue to write about, which is this whole idea that
we might actually be in a civil war. And so you're kind of like a Detouqueville traveling the country right now, looking at what's happening on the ground. And so look, give us your understanding, your evidence that we might be already in a civil war.
Take us on your journeys a little.
Bit, Okay, sure.
So the big part of the book, the Undertow is January sixth, twenty twenty one. We see this young white woman, Ashley Babbitt, an insurrectionist, and she's killed, and the cop who kills her as a black man. So right away we know what's going to happen. It's going to be a lynching story. She's made into a martinmoth. So I decide to go out to California to a rally for Ashley Babbitt, and I go to a rally and there's a brawl between Proud Boys and Antifa, And someone says,
you really want to understand why Ashley Babbitt died. Come to my church. And it's a little megachurch in Yuba City, California. There's no crosses in this church, but the pulpit is made of swords. And they explain that as saying, we are now in a time of war. Theology Tuesday night is new militia recruit night and this is not this is a suburban church is it just regular folks?
You know?
And they are armed, they are ready for They pastor talks openly with joy about the executions to come. There's people around you who have already succeeded in their imagination, you know, the slow civil war that I imagine, imagine, believe is happening right now, it's not coming. People say could there be violence? And always stunts me, what do you mean? Could there be violence? There's always is already He's already violence and there's always been violence, right, but
there's violence on top of violence. Now it is, you know, what has been a simmer is coming to perhaps a slow boil. They have already accepted the idea of civil war when that was back in the spring of twenty one when I started noticing some historians using civil war talk right and clearly, you know, like how in a way, slow moving especially historians can be right, like they're like, yeah, let's not jump to conclusions.
But so they're saying that.
Well, when January sixth happened, not only was I convey that this was possible, but I recalled that on the inauguration of Lincoln in March. It was only a month later that the South, that South Carolina fired on Fort Sumter. So the proximity of January sixth to the inauguration of Joe Biden felt eerily familiar, Like these people were doing a preemptive warfare essentially, and they essentially were so yeah, not hiberbally at this point.
Preemptive that's a good phrase.
There's a way in which I think so much of the arming up, and that was you know, then I started going to more churches. In every church I went to, you know, you would ask civil war, and people dance was always yes. It was just whether it's happening right now or it's coming, or whether it's something you look
forward to or something you regretfully accept. I mean, you know the fact that like, look, if you've got more and more, like the state of Florida, where you've got people who really think that the books in their schools are teaching white kids to hate themselves and teaching what you understand as dramatic perversion. From their perspective, they're in the slow civil war too, and we're the ones waging the assault. I'm not like saying both sides, but I think and there's casualties.
Look, every pregnant person who's dying for lack of reproductive rights is casualty.
We as journalists know that, Like we hear a case here, a case there, we know there's one hundred for every one of those. I think the wave of queer and trans kids suicides, not all of them, but a lot of them are casualties. These mass shootings, those are casualties.
I want to push back up against this a little bit to both of you, because you said, Khalil that you don't think this is hyperbole, and I don't know, but I think about the language of civil war being being alarmist language, either purposefully so, and I think about like what's to gain by using that language and also what's lost by using that kind of alarmist language, and I have no doubt, I mean, in my opinion onion that the drum beat of what's been going on the
extreme right has shifted the center right word like the things that we accept is okay that even centrist Dems are like, yeah, yeah, I'm going to settle for that, Like we're living through that right now. But that to me is different than say a civil war, which there are If we don't have North and South, we at least have like sides, and there's some like sense we don't to connect the dots of every sort of you know, semi connected act of violence and say this is evidence.
Seems like it could be a little bit loose and so so yeah, I'm throwing that back on you, both of you, like, is what's the value or and whether what's the danger of using that kind of language.
I mean, for me as a historian in this conversation, I mean, the context of our actual civil war is the context of people who try to work through these issues politically. An entire political party was born in the early days of dissolution, meaning the Republican Party, because the prior Whig Party couldn't work out its differences on this
question of expansion over slavery. The fact that the people who were combatants and in our civil war had gone to college together, had led together in political state houses and the US Capitol, reminds me, at least as a historian, that the line between normal and war is very thin.
And the thing that I think makes the future more precarious than the prior Trump administration is that now trump Ism has metastasized, and whatever governors we imagined in terms of normalcy, amongst most elected officials, people like Mike Pence, who was not too far away from being the victim of a lynch mob on January sixth, like Mitch McConnell, and like much of the Republican leadership, have accepted trump Ism as a political base of the Republican Party and
seemed to have no capacity to reverse course from that. So the again brothers in arms on different sides of this equation led to nearly a million people dying in this country. And I'm not convinced that what we think of is normal today or is not something beyond the pale isn't a reality for us all to come to terms with. So when you say hyperbole, I say, we need an appropriate early warning system. And I think that's where Jeff's work is really helpful.
Yeah, thank you for the historical context.
And that makes me think in terms of.
The sort of the nearness of people.
The other objection that I often hear is like, you know, either you had this north and the South whatever, and now we're all mixed up. And you know that the central trip of the book begins in Sacramento, California, where I mean a young LATINX couple actually who are pretty full Trump fascists, and they are leaving California. So we're talking about, you know, these sort of blue supposedly blue areas.
They are sifting themselves out. They're moving inland. They said, they wouldn't say exactly sure where maybe Oklahoma, looking for red territory. And so there's a little bit of on the one hand, this sort of centrifuging out of people sorting themselves out. And of course I just met the other day some folks who have moved from Texas to sconnecting New York. They need to get out of Texas, trans folks. I have friends who have moved out of
Wisconsin because they do not feel safe there. There's that, and I think the advantage, the advantage of the alarm is to sort of say, hey, look this is what we're messing around.
With, all right, Jeff, this is powerful stuff and despairing in some ways. That your book became a New York Times bestseller is wonderful for you, but a little bit problematic that this is where we have.
To know that's good, that's good. We wanted to be a best seller.
I have to say, there was like some hope. I'm like, what if I call it slow civil war?
But man, a year and a half from now and this comes out he thinks of just so mellowed out that people like, oh, give me a break, and instead it's like, you know you do NPR and like can I use the F word fascism? And they're like, oh yes, yes, please, we better talk about that. And that's that's not good. Better that the book be remaindered.
So when we come back from a short break, we're going to talk about the future. We'll be right back.
Welcome back to some of my best friends are We're talking to Jeff Charlotte today about his really powerful and despairing and to some degree hopeful. Surprisingly enough, study about a slow civil war. And why do I say hopeful. It's hopeful because, Jeff, you opened with this surprising tribute to Harry Belafonte. You talk about a man whose artistry was his activism and who could never separate those two things, and someone who just passed away this spring, just a
couple of weeks before the recording of this interview. I have to say I was moved.
Ninety six.
I was moved by what you said about Harry Belafonte, not just because I think people don't really appreciate the life of this giant, but also because I knew Harry Belafonte. I was at the Schomberg Center in some of the last productive years of his life before he sort of retreated from public life. I got to know him and his wife, Pam. I've been in his apartment, and Harry never mister B as we call him, never stopped moving
chess pieces on a board. He was always thinking about where people needed to be on the battlefield racial justice and social justice in this country. And I had just taken a job at Harvard's twenty sixteen, and he sits down with me in his apartment and he says, I need you to take over Sankofa, which is an organization that he started that Dina Belafonte's dart is leaving now.
It's a cultural organization committed to sort of building the cultural muscle and infrastructure of social justice warriors and of the left more generally. And while we're in the middle of this conversation, I'm like, oh shit, like I just got this job at Harvard. I can't turn mister B down, Like what is happening right now? That was one of the hardest knows I ever had to give to somebody, to turn mister be down for an opportunity to help be part of his legacy.
But oh boy, what a guy, what a.
Person, what a human being? And tell us, like, why do you tell us about Harry Belafonte in this book? What is the message about the future you are trying to impart from someone who just left us.
I wanted to start the book, which I was writing partly because I have a fourteen year old non binary trans kid who is despairing and I was looking for some hope, but not cheap grace. And I thought, Okay, that's what mister B is. And I think about all these tributes since he died.
And I've done.
There's someone who wrote about him.
You do some interviews and so on, and there's a certain kind of folks who's sort of really surprised to hear that he was angry.
Right, I'm like, oh, yeah, that guy was angry all his days.
Yeah, he cursed a lot, he did not miss words.
Yeah, they want him to be a sweet old man. And the hope is that anger In that line he says that I think is really powerful. It says where your anger comes from doesn't matter as much as what you do with it.
Now.
It matters where it comes from, but not as much as what you do with it. And that transformation. The other thing that you said is that the culture is his art and his activism are one and the same. So to those of us urging us to see culture as somehow a separate issue, not for this guy in ninety six years in the struggle who transformed American.
Life, Jeff Hope, but not cheap grace is a beautiful line. Maybe I'm being more of the e or in this conversation again, but he's dead, he died, and you're you're you're talking about a kind of activism that is a thing of the past, literally like he's he's a relic, and you know, so I worry about that of like whether this continues. And so then the question is, how do you see sort of the Belafontes today doing this work, Like who is carrying on that legacy that we're supposed
to see this work still happening? Where do we see the resistance? Where do we see the fighting? Where do we see the protest?
I mean partly, isn't it what this show is supposed to be?
Right here?
Kid, right here? That that's what we're looking for? A ding ding ding you are now you are now one of our best.
Well actually, like let's think about this like cultural historians and always astonishes me. I don't know if historians are doing it, but I'm in an English department and there's nobody paying attention to podcasting as a text of our times, which is astonishing to me because it seems really relevant and there's a lot of challenge, you know, and we could each little podcast, we could say, oh, is that really making the difference?
No?
And each fundraiser mister b did whatever, Did that really make the difference?
No?
In fact he was defeated. Right, that's part of the hope not cheap grace. And that's why it ends with this other line that I always knew the last line of the book was going to be this line from this guy, Lee Hayes, a songwriter who was broken by the Red Scare.
And he says, from the nineteen fifties.
Nineteen fifties, and you know, people know HI from me if I had a hammer like the American Songbook. He's Pete Seeger's songwriting partner, and he's got this line, for a while, it was possible not to be scared even And he's describing seemed very much like one that mister b endured of being chased through.
For mister b it's being chased by the clan.
Through the Mississippi Nightsissippi. For Lee, it's being chased in Arkansas.
He's in a car with union organizers and gun thugs are on their tail, and they're singing hymns, and he says, for while, it was possible not to be scared even then. Let me put this in the context of an activist named Suzanne Farr, who I met some years ago, a very sweet, old white Southern grandmotherly lady. She had built a lesbian separatist commune in rural Arkansas, I believe it was.
And then these these these his head women start showing up, running from their violent partners and said, will you take us in? So they took them in, and then the partners come with their guns, and Suzanne and her comrades stand the ground, and I was with Suzanne and a younger activist, and the younger activist says, oh, that's so wonderful you built us.
And Suzanne's sweet old grandmother puts her hand on the younger activist's hand and says, oh, honey, noah, no fucking safe spaces.
But there might be these safe moments.
Right for a while, it was possible not to be scared, even like, where is that work happening? It's not happening so much in a space as in moments. Maybe the moment is a podcast, maybe the moment is there. But you're right, I can't point to anyone. I mean, Harry, I think ninety six years he ran the good race, Like who is the next mister b. We don't know. We'll know after they have lived their ninety six years. I'm like, God, damn that person. We didn't realize all
that they were doing. They are there among us. That doesn't mean we win, but it means we could.
Yeah, we need to expand those moments. We need to expand those moments so that they become our reality.
Jeff Charlotte, it was amazing to have you on today. You've shared a lot with us that we all need to pay attention to. Go folks, go out there. Continue to keep this book on the bestseller list for the New York Times. Jeff Charlotte, The Undertow. We're just grateful for what you've done and what you'll continue to write about.
And Jeff, we've been on this journey alongside one another for twenty years. Let's keep it going another twenty all right, take care, Thank you.
Oh man, this was a really powerful conversation with Jeff ben And I don't know, there's something that stuck out to me at the top of the conversation when Jeff described this book The Undertow in terms of like a
social movement on the right. I mean, often we hear the words populism, but this notion that it could be a social movement, you know, it doesn't hit our ears the same way that we often think about social movements as always being about the expansion of democracy, justice, truth, And because where he's.
Thinking about social movements on the left, you mean, like, yeah, and that's right, he's talking about it on the right of this this rising tide, that it's organized. Yeah, that's right.
And the extent to which he's right makes perfect sense when we look at the grassroots mobilization down to local school boards fighting for misinformation and censorship, and like, when he talks about fascism as a mass movement, it reminded me of this essay that Tony Morrison wrote in nineteen ninety five.
Get Literary. I love it. I love it Getting Literary.
Yeah, it's a really powerful quote, and I think it speaks to this moment so clearly. She said, fascism can only reproduce the environment that supports its own health, fear, denial, and an atmosphere in which its victims have lost the will to fight.
Okay, break it down.
Well, I just think that what Jeff is telling us in this book is that the other side is mobilizing to fucking fight, like that's what they're doing. And he talked about casualties already, you know, even including victims of reproductive injustice and talking about of course the proliferation of guns on the right and the mass killings.
And his own child, like his fear for his own child who is non binary. Yeah, that's right.
And so I think as we move forward in this moment, I think part of the challenge on the left is to meet the challenge of a social movement, which is to say that a lot more people have to be mobilized to stand up for the democracy that they claim to believe in.
Yeah, yeah, that's interesting. I mean because then it's also why to give a bigger platform to these issues is because we have to figure out how to confront them. We have to organize, we have to have a social movement that matches in some ways what's actually going on. We have to know the other side much more, much better.
That's right, And I mean then thinking about like how do you do that? I mean, part of it, even having this conversation about Harry Belafonte, is also about the power of culture to mobilize people, meaning that the symbols, the sound, the music, then stories we tell are all part of the infrastructure that you need to build a social movement. And the right is clearly mobilized to do that. The Left seems to be still trying to figure this out.
Yeah, yeah, I mean, you know, you talk about bringing a knife or a pen to a gunfight, and you know that's part of what's so scary about this is that the proliferation of guns, of bringing automatic weapons just holding them on the street. I don't think the answer is to respond with the same. You know, we have this disease of guns in this country, and certainly, like what he is witnessing by travel the country is seeing the sort of cult the religion of guns. Yeah. I mean,
there's a way we have to confront that. And what you're describing I don't think is like, you know, matching weapons to weapons, which is not a slow sive a war, but a fast one. But there is some deeper kind of organizing and even cultural movement which has to happen.
Yes, And when Tony Morrison says the victims have lost the will to fight, listen, the world is a violent place. There are one hundred and ninety three countries in the world.
Conflict happens. There's a war in Russia and Ukraine. The Ukrainians didn't sit around and wait to have a debate when bomb started dropping and when violence occurred, and so I just think we have to be really honest about what's happening in this country, and we have to use all the tools at our disposal, including culture, including the right to self defense, including the right to stand up for truth and justice wherever it is necessary, in all
the places that is required because the other side is not playing games.
I'm hearing you by any means necessary, And I just want to say I'm glad if we're not on the front lines, I'm glad we're on the second lines together. So I love you, rel love you too.
Some of My Best Friends Are is a production of Pushkin Industries. The show is written and hosted by me Khalil, Jabon Muhammad and my best friend Ben Austin.
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