Air Date 8/18/2021
[00:00:00] JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: Welcome to this episode of the award-winning Best of the Left Podcast, in which we shall take a look at the history of white people deciding to get their way through violence and the tradition of having the government look the other way. Clips today are from the Professor Buzzkill History Podcast, Reveal, Cape Up with Jonathan Capehart, On the Media, News Beat, Democracy Now!, The Mehdi Hasan Show, and The Holy Post.
The KKK: History and Myth - Professor Buzzkill History Podcast - Air Date 8-24-17
[00:00:28] PROFESSOR BUZZKILL - HOST: From early 1866 until the end of June, 1867, just 18 months, Klansmen in the Carolinas killed 197 people and assaulted nearly 500. Between 1866 and 1868, one county in Florida reported that the KKK killed more than 150 African Americans. And other Florida counties reported similar numbers, but they also included reports of the killings of dozens of white allies (in quotations) of freed blacks.
The KKK's campaign of murder and intimidation was particularly bad in Louisiana. Over 2000 people were killed in the run-up to the election, the presidential election of November, 1868. They were killed both as punishment and as warnings. And we can measure the impact that the threat of KKK violence and violence from other groups had on potential voters, especially registered Republicans, if we compare registrations, for instance, before and after elections.
The Republican party in St. Landry parish in Louisiana had a registered majority of a thousand, over a thousand, over the Democrats. They had more than a thousand than the Democrats did, and other parties in that county in 1868, early 1868. Now after the murders in October and early November of that year, not a single Republican voted in that county on election day.
Columbia county in Georgia also shows the effect that the Klan had in 1868 very clearly. The election for governor of Georgia was held in April of that year. 1,222 votes were cast for Rufus Bullock, the Republican candidate. By the time the presidential election rolled around in November, however, Klan violence and murder had so intimidated Republicans that only one person, a fearless white man apparently, voted Republican in that election.
But it wasn't just electoral violence or violence against freed black men. The KKK was a secret society and joining it meant that clan members disguise themselves during their raids and killings. This meant they were protected by their disguises and usually we're sworn to secrecy. So in addition to killing Freedman and attacking African-American women, destroying property and scaring Republicans away from the polls, some Klan members use the organization to settle personal scores, et cetera, personal feuds, and bring a violent end to personal grudges, and in general commit any crimes they wanted to, including rape.
I've been talking about the Klan -- the Klan this, the Klan that -- as if it was building itself into a massive organization across the whole old Confederacy, with a military-style command structure and coordinated activity. This was not the case, however. Apart from Klan groups throughout the south calling themselves the KKK, there was little organization or structure beyond the local level. Former Confederate generals, such as George Gordon and Nathan Bedford Forrest, tried to establish across-state organization, but they didn't succeed. In fact, many historians have argued that it was precisely because the Klan stayed local and didn't attempt to form state organizations that they were able to conduct their raids and terrorize African Americans and others like Republican politicians, who are trying to bring the South into the modern world.
Local Klansmen were autonomous. They could act when and where they wanted. The larger an organization got, the more communication would be needed between the local groups, and the more likely that Republican state governments in the South could find ways to attack them and eliminate them.
How did reconstructionists and others fight back against the Klan and like-minded terrorist groups? In some Southern areas where Union army veterans had established themselves after the war, anti-Ku Klux groups were founded. Again, this was very local. And since it was local, these antis were often able to find out who was in the KKK in their area. And they responded to the KKK, their local KKK groups, by threatening them directly with reprisals that weren't that different in type and ferocity than the violence that Klansman perpetuated on their victims.
Nationally also, anti-Klan sentiment became very strong. Republican state governors informed Congress what was going on. Evidence was gathered. Hearings were held. And a Ku Klux Klan act, technically the Civil Rights Act of 1871, was passed. Although it was challenging to enforce, the act did have the effect of arresting Klansman and was aided by the fact that President Grant suspended habeas corpus, and sent federal troops in to try to enforce it.
Those who were arrested under the KKK act were prosecuted in federal court. Along with local attempts at suppression, this federal action helped hasten the decline of the first Klan. By 1872, the KKK was gone, but not without leaving an awful legacy of death and terrorism in its wake.
Remembering a White Supremacist Coup - Reveal - Air Date 10-23-20
[00:05:59] AL LETSON - HOST, REVEAL: In fact, the more that Black people flourished in Wilmington, the more intolerable it became for White supremacists. By 1898, they were scheming to run Wilmington again. And Alexander's newspaper, "The Daily Record" would be at the center of their campaign.
Lewin picks up and reads one of the letters his grandmother, Caroline wrote in the 1950s.
[00:06:27] DR. MANLEY: "I'll tell you about the record, sometimes, I'm too tired now. It will bring heartaches to think about it, even to this day." She said, "I like to write, cheerful letters but there is too much sadness about that newspaper for me to tell now, so I will wait until I can find courage to tell you. I wish I could forget it."
[00:06:55] AL LETSON - HOST, REVEAL: There was an election in 1898, and White supremacists saw it as an opportunity to retake control of the city, and strip away the gains Black people had made.
[00:07:05] DAVID ZUCCHINO: They said they were not going to tolerate what they called "Negro rule." That was the term they used for it. They said, "We're not going to tolerate it," and they announced that they were going to remove the multi-racial government, and keep Black men from voting, and from holding public office.
[00:07:21] AL LETSON - HOST, REVEAL: During the summer before the election, the White elite in Wilmington came up with a plan. It started with what today we call fake news; stories in the press that stoked fears about Black men.
[00:07:34] DAVID ZUCCHINO: There were accusations from the White supremacist newspapers across the state that there was an epidemic of rapes of White women by Black men. And I looked into the crime figures and of course there was no such thing. But the newspapers fanned this fear of what they called, in print, the "Black Beast Rapist." They used that term quite a bit.
[00:07:58] AL LETSON - HOST, REVEAL: The biggest newspaper in North Carolina was the "News and Observer," owned by Josephus Daniels. Here are just a few of the outrageous headlines they ran:
"More Negro scoundrelism."
"Two Negro rape fiends."
"Black beasts continue to outrage the young daughter of a respectable farmer."
"Roped for rape."
The message to White readers of the "News and Observer" and other papers was relentless. And for people who couldn't read, the papers used racist cartoons.
[00:08:30] DAVID ZUCCHINO: They got this steady diet of Black men as criminals, Black men as rapists, Black men as incompetent, who had no right to vote. And at the same time, White voters were told that Whites will rule North Carolina, Whites will rule Wilmington, it is their god-given right. We are the superior race, and the African Americans are here for our purposes, to work for us. And that's the way it has to be.
[00:09:00] AL LETSON - HOST, REVEAL: Then in August, the paper published an editorial written by an influential woman from Georgia. That editorial caught the attention of Lewin's grandfather, Alexander.
[00:09:11] DR. MANLEY: My grandfather responded to an editorial by a lady named Rebecca Latimer Felton, who made a speech called "Women on the farm," discussing how White men do not protect the White women on the farms. And they had to work with the Blacks out there, and these Black brutes were raping them at leisure.
[00:09:35] AL LETSON - HOST, REVEAL: She said Black brutes were raping White women on farms. Her editorial called for Black men to be lynched to better protect White women.
[00:09:45] DR. MANLEY: She said, if they lynch a thousand a week, it wouldn't be enough. That’s a horrible thing. My grandfather responded to that lecture, and he was irate by what she was saying. And actually, he placed Black women on the same level as White women, saying Black women were more prone to be raped than White women were.
[00:10:10] AL LETSON - HOST, REVEAL: Alexander published his own editorial, arguing that Black men and White women were having consensual relationships. And, that there was a long history of White men raping Black women. While true, these points were so scandalous that Alexander's editorial ended up playing right into the White supremacists campaign. The "News and Observer" even republished his editorial several times.
That one editorial, kind of, gave them the fuel that they need to push forward this agenda.
[00:10:44] DAVID ZUCCHINO: Yes. And what's interesting, just to show you how calculated this whole coup was, the vigilantes known as red shirts, and they were basically the KKK, and that was the vigilante and the gunmen of the White supremacy movement, wanted to lynch Alex Manley that day, the day the editorial came out.
The White leadership said, "No, let's wait. We can have a much greater political effect if we wait until November, closer to the election, and then I promise you, you can burn his newspaper down, and you can lynch him."
[00:11:15] AL LETSON - HOST, REVEAL: It looked like Alexander Manley's editorial could cost him his life. Even today, his grandson is shocked he dared write it.
[00:11:23] DR. MANLEY: There is no way I could figure out why in the world would he write something like that and not expect the world to come tumbling down on him.
[00:11:36] AL LETSON - HOST, REVEAL: As the election got closer, the conflict was moving from the newspapers into the streets. In addition to the terrorists called the red shirts, the White supremacists had two state militias at their command. Some of their members were former Confederates. These groups were heavily armed. And the night before the election, they were ready for a fight.
[00:11:58] DAVID ZUCCHINO: The leader of the coup, a former Confederate Colonel named Alfred Moore Waddell, gave a speech in which he told Whites that if you see the Negro out voting tomorrow, tell him to stop. If he doesn't, shoot him down, shoot him down in his tracks. And those were his exact words.
[00:12:15] AL LETSON - HOST, REVEAL: So what happened on election day, November 8, 1898?
[00:12:19] DAVID ZUCCHINO: They would break into voting precincts, the counting offices in the Black wards and take the lanterns, throw them on the ground. Start a fire. And then while everyone was distracted, would pull out all the Republican votes and stuff the ballot boxes with Democratic votes.
[00:12:39] AL LETSON - HOST, REVEAL: The White supremacists had started fires to create a distraction, and stuffed the ballot boxes. The Black vote was stolen.
But the conspirators still had a problem. It was a midterm election, and the local government where most of the Black politicians held office was not up for reelection. So, the White supremacists decided they would overthrow that government by force.
[00:13:04] DAVID ZUCCHINO: They made a list of what they considered the leading Black men in Wilmington. It was almost 30 men. And they sent the red shirts out to gather these people up, and they brought them into a meeting, and they laid down the law.
And they said, "First of all, we demand that you bring us Alex Manley, the editor; that you close down the Black newspaper; and then you renounce all positions of power. Or, if you don't do this by tomorrow, then we'll take matters into our own hands."
[00:13:35] AL LETSON - HOST, REVEAL: Members of the city government, and prominent men from the Black community, had until the next morning to give up everything they had.
Voices: Children ‘stripped of innocence’ - Cape Up - Air Date 4-11-19
[00:13:44] JONATHAN CAPHEART - HOST, CAPE UP: In 1954, the Supreme Court ruled in Brown vs. Board of Education of Topeka that school segregation was unconstitutional, and it mandated that schools around the country be integrated. But get this: schools in the South decided to take their time. So the court came back, reiterated its position by adding the phrase "with all deliberate speed." That was in 1955.
As a result of those decisions and pressure from the local NAACP, the school board in Little Rock, Arkansas developed a plan to integrate Central High School in 1957. Daisy Bates was president of the Arkansas NAACP and she recruited and vetted nine students to participate in the integration. And then she trained them on how to handle hostile situations. Minnijean Brown, as she was then, was 15 years old when she became one of the Little Rock Nine.
[00:14:44] MINNIJEAN BROWN-TRICKEY: You walk into the space because you choose. And the thought, so everybody's said, you were so courageous. I wasn't courageous when I signed that sheet to go to Central. My two friends and I, we said, oh, we can walk and it's simple and we're just gonna sign up and why not? So say I signed up because it was there. I really thought that going to Central was going to be a thing where they would be as excited for me to come there as I would to go to that school. And that would be sharing what teenage life is like.
[00:15:26] JONATHAN CAPHEART - HOST, CAPE UP: But Minnijean was met with a different kind of welcome.
[00:15:29] MINNIJEAN BROWN-TRICKEY: People were shouting, "kill them, lynch them," mean, horrible things. So it was, it was more frightening than anybody can ever imagine. Some kind of monsters coming at you. You don't really want to see it.
[00:15:45] JONATHAN CAPHEART - HOST, CAPE UP: On that day, all nine showed up for school. But none of them entered the school, and that's because governor Orval Faubus ordered the National Guard to block the front door. So on that first day of school, they wanted to go to Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas. They didn't make it.
[00:16:06] MINNIJEAN BROWN-TRICKEY: What happened with all that hate. It was intended to destroy us. It was intended to discourage us. It was to tell us that we were worthless. And really what it did was the absolute opposite. We didn't have to go back on this, try the second try. When we're turned away, we didn't have to go back on the third try, but we chose.
So there's where the courage kicks in later. There's no courage at the beginning, in my opinion. The courage ends up being defiance rather than courage. I'm coming back. Y'all can act all the fool you want. I will be back.
[00:16:53] JONATHAN CAPHEART - HOST, CAPE UP: The Little Rock Nine finally made it into school three weeks later on September 25th. And that was because president Eisenhower got involved. He sent in the 101st Airborne to ensure the integration of Central High School. But that wasn't the end of their struggle.
What did they do?
[00:17:11] MINNIJEAN BROWN-TRICKEY: Oh, kick you down stairs. Throw garbage. Spit. Drop acid -- not that kind -- off the third floor and make holes in your clothes.
Melba Pattillo got acid in her eyes and the 101st washed her eyes. The name calling, just constant. So it was designed to break our spirits. [pause] And in some ways it did, but we didn't show it. I kept thinking the most important thing for me to do while I'm here is not to cry. And so now I'll cry at the drop of a hat. I cried last night because there's that time when I couldn't cry, that they affirm now. So the idea is to make us feel unworthy.
[00:18:06] JONATHAN CAPHEART - HOST, CAPE UP: When we hear the age 15, we think of, oh, these innocent children, they have these visions of the world that are so pure. And then something happens that just strips all of that away from them.
Were you...
[00:18:24] MINNIJEAN BROWN-TRICKEY: That's true.
[00:18:25] JONATHAN CAPHEART - HOST, CAPE UP: So is that what happened to you on that day?
[00:18:28] MINNIJEAN BROWN-TRICKEY: Yes. Everything's stripped. Belief in the mythology of the country, belief in any kind of, it's a, yeah, it's stripped. And I think we each talk about what that stripping was about. Your heart, our hearts were broken and I loved the word stripped of illusions. Stripped of innocence because 15, 14 and 15, in 1957 was really innocent. And we were stripped of, I would say most belief systems. I certainly was.
The preachers were joining in about it being abomination against God. And so all the sort of safe things that you get in your life about what the world is about, it just goes away.
[00:19:27] JONATHAN CAPHEART - HOST, CAPE UP: I asked Minnijean that, what I call the "innocence lost" question, because reading as much as I have now on the civil rights movement, understanding that these were little kids. And so every time I sit down, at least I try, every time I sit down with one of these icons who became an icon at a young age, I want to know, what did that feel like? And what did that do to you?
Did your parents talk to you? Either the night before, or when you got home, about to prepare you for what was going to happen or to talk you through, what happened? Did they even, did they try to discourage you?
[00:20:08] MINNIJEAN BROWN-TRICKEY: First of all, I think we're really brainwashed in the United States about it being democracy and freedom. And even in a Jim Crow South we're still pledging allegiance and saying anthems, and there's no preparation for hatred that's going to come, that could come at us. And it was something brand new. So we couldn't have anticipated what it was gonna be like, nor could our parents.
I think the newness of it made it impossible to prepare for or to even -- I'm still trying to work it out. I still can't figure out how unbelievable it was. I can't believe hatred. I've been working on it for 61 years. So there is no logical conclusion to people's behavior in that way.
I was once -- why, I was a social worker, so I was always doing therapeutic things, just for my people I worked with, and one of the things was an exercise to go to your most basic emotion. So all along, I thought my basic emotion about Central High School was probably anger. But when it got to it, it was sorrow.
Armed and Dangerous - On the Media - Air Date 9-24-20
[00:21:40] BOB GARFIELD - HOST, ON THE MEDIA: The history of America's militia movement, as it's been called, shows that apart from guns, camo and extreme right-wing ideologies, what passes for a movement is really a grab bag of grievance.
John Temple is a journalism professor at West Virginia University and the author of Up In Arms: How the Bundy Family Hijacked Public Lands, Outfoxed the Federal Government and Ignited America's Patriot Movement. John, welcome to OTM.
[00:22:08] JOHN TEMPLE: Thanks for having me.
[00:22:09] BOB GARFIELD - HOST, ON THE MEDIA: Now, I suppose if you asked modern right wing militiamen when their movement began, they would say it was during the Revolutionary War, when civilian Minutemen would mobilize in a moment's notice to fight the British. But you believe that the political and ideological roots of the militia movement could be traced to the mid nineteen hundreds.
[00:22:32] JOHN TEMPLE: Yes, there is a lot of symbology from the Revolutionary War that they employ, wearing tri-cornered hats and waving the Gadsden flag, the yellow flag with the serpent club on it. that says "Don't Tread on Me." But it really started to coalesce in 1950 with that era's version of the tea party, in a sense, the John Birch Society. And then as the civil rights movement occurred and there was more federal intervention and different issues, you had organizations springing up like Posse Comitatus, which believe that the county-level government was the supreme authority; we should be making these decisions at the local level.
[00:23:12] BOB GARFIELD - HOST, ON THE MEDIA: And I remember rather breathless reports in Time magazine, about militia men in Michigan, in Hayden Lake, Idaho. And obviously got a lot of publicity.
[00:23:26] JOHN TEMPLE: Yeah. Very fringe in those days. But at the same time this was going on, there was this corresponding drop in trust in the federal government. Just to give you an example, in 1964, 76 percent of Americans would say that always, or most of the time, they would trust the government to do what's right. By 1994, that had dropped from 76% to 19%. So what was radical gradually became a fairly common place concept. That didn't mean that everyone was picking up guns and going into the woods and joining paramilitary outfits. But it definitely became more of a mainstream cause.
[00:23:53] BOB GARFIELD - HOST, ON THE MEDIA: There were paramilitary wannabes, but quite disparate until the 90s, and one particular event.
Can we discuss Ruby Ridge?
[00:24:14] JOHN TEMPLE: Yes. I spent a lot of time with militia people to report the book that you mentioned, Up In Arms. They talk about Randy Weaver like it happened yesterday, [CLIP]
[00:24:25] NEWS REPORT: A standoff between a man who is wanted by the FBI and a large number of federal. agents. [END CLIP]
[CLIP] Surrounding the cabin for a fugitive named Randy Weaver is holed up with his family.
[END CLIP]
[00:24:35] JOHN TEMPLE: In 1992, US marshals went to this very rural mountaintop in Idaho to arrest a guy named Randy Weaver. He was a white separatist. He'd been arrested on gun charges and he hadn't appeared in court. And a shootout ensued that left both a US marshal and Weaver's 14-year-old son dead and an FBI sniper shot and killed Weaver's wife.
And it just became this proof that the federal government was overreaching and was going to come for you and kill your family.
[00:25:10] BOB GARFIELD - HOST, ON THE MEDIA: So it was the proto-bloodbath, but it wasn't the biggest bloodbath to rally the cause. That would be Waco.
[00:25:18] JOHN TEMPLE: Waco. Yeah. A year later. [CLIP]
[00:25:20] NEWS REPORT: Under the blistering Texas sun, investigators comb the smoldering remains of the Branch Davidian compound.
More than 80 people are believed to have died in yesterday's fiery conclusion to the 51-day siege. Twenty four of them children. [END CLIP]
[00:25:34] BOB GARFIELD - HOST, ON THE MEDIA: Branch Davidian's was a cult that stood accused of...
[00:25:38] JOHN TEMPLE: illegal weapons. So there was a shoot out. Four federal agents died and six sect members died, and then horribly the FBI launched a tear gas attack to try to get them out of the compound.
A fire breaks out and sweeps through all the buildings, kills 75 people, many of them, women and children, just a disastrous situation. And this became just a big rallying cry for the Patriot movement.
[00:26:09] BOB GARFIELD - HOST, ON THE MEDIA: And since then, thousands of paramilitary groups have sprung up in common cause?
[00:26:16] JOHN TEMPLE: It's not a single movement, really. It's a bunch of different movements. Some of them are fairly organized and some of them are a couple of guys out in the woods type situation. They had different beliefs. Some were racists. Some were more concerned with gun rights. Some were more concerned with immigration in recent decades, but they realized that racism, overt racism, that was it's not going to take them into the mainstream. And if there's one thing that these folks want it's to broaden their appeal. They decided to stop using as much racial language and start focusing on two issues that were more popular. One being that the federal government was overreaching and the other that the federal government was looking to take away their guns.
And they decided that the most positive being that they could give themselves was Patriots. So that's what they call themselves.
The Evolution of All-American Terrorism - Reveal - Air Date 6-27-20
[00:27:12] PRISKA NEELY: The suspected gunman, 21-year-old Patrick Crucius, drove roughly 10 hours from outside Dallas to the El Paso Walmart, right near the Mexican border. Police say he opened fire. 23 people were killed and many were wounded. And then he drove off.
[00:27:30] REPORTER: Minutes later, Patrick Crucius stopped his car at an intersection near the Walmart. He came out with his hands raised in the air and stated out loud to the Texas Rangers, "I'm the shooter."
[00:27:41] PRISKA NEELY: He's facing 90 federal charges, including 45 hate crimes.
After Guillermo witnessed what happened that day, he got in his car and went to the restaurant where his friends always gather on Saturdays.
[00:27:53] GUILLERMO GLENN: Several of my friends came up and hugged me and say that, oh, you're okay. We're so glad, we've been looking for you. We thought you would might be there. And then they showed me the manifesto.
[00:28:06] PRISKA NEELY: The manifesto. Minutes before the attack, the shooter had posted a document filled with anti-immigrant rhetoric to the online message board 8Chan. Some of Guillermo's friends showed him a copy.
[00:28:19] GUILLERMO GLENN: I had some food, had some of my regular Saturday menudo. And then I finally realized what had happened right after I read the manifesto.
[00:28:28] PRISKA NEELY: The Crucius manifesto reads like a corporate website. It has an "about me" section and parts where he outlines his warped vision for America. He matter-of-factly explains how his attack will preserve a world where white people have the political and economic power.
He says peaceful means will no longer achieve his goal. Reporter David Neiwert says this alleged shooter is the quintessential Trump-era terrorist. A man largely radicalized online, entrenched in white nationalist ideology, and fueled by the belief that white men like himself are being replaced by Latino immigrants.
Crucius wrote that the media would blame president Trump for inspiring him, but he claimed that his ideas predated the Trump campaign. Here's David:
[00:29:19] DAVID NEIWERT: Patrick Crucius especially was so filled with loathing for Latino people that he didn't see them as human.
[00:29:29] PRISKA NEELY: When David reads the manifesto, he can immediately see the fingerprints of other white nationalists.
[00:29:36] DAVID NEIWERT: Here's how Crucius opens his manifesto. "In general, I support the Christchurch shooter and his manifesto. This attack is a response to the Hispanic invasion of Texas. They are the instigators, not me. I am simply defending my country from cultural and ethnic replacement, brought on by an invasion.
[00:30:00] PRISKA NEELY: That opening line is a direct signal back to a previous act of terrorism, the shooter who killed 51 people at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, just months before. David says this is part of a trend: one terrorist inspires another, and the cycle continues.
Guillermo says he didn't understand all of the references at first, but it was clear to him that the manifesto had ties to a larger movement.
[00:30:30] GUILLERMO GLENN: I think he was trying to show that somebody had to take action. And that really angered me at that point. Why would somebody come and shoot innocent people like that?
[00:30:45] PRISKA NEELY: David says Crucius started doing online research because of the anger he felt over how the country was changing demographically.
[00:30:53] DAVID NEIWERT: But in the process of doing this research, he came across multiple white genocide theories, including
[00:31:00] PRISKA NEELY: the great replacement or replacement theory, unites many acts of hate that we see across the country, around the world.
[00:31:09] DAVID NEIWERT: And that's this idea that comes out of white nationalism, that white Europeans face a global genocide at the hands of Brown people. And that they're being slowly rubbed out of existence.
[00:31:25] PRISKA NEELY: Only a few terrorists in recent years have referenced to replacement theory by name, but it's widely popular among right-wing extremists.
It's linked to ideas that are many decades old. But one attack in Europe showed how those ideas can be weaponized.
[00:31:42] DAVID NEIWERT: Anders Breivik's terrorism attack in Oslo and Victoria Island, Norway in 2011.
[00:31:50] PRISKA NEELY: Breivik killed 77 people in a bombing and mass shooting. Before the attack, he sent out a 1500 page manifesto about how he planned to lead white supremacists on a crusade against the, quote, "Islamification of Europe."
Around the same time, a French writer named Renaud Camus refined and popularize the ideology in a book. The title translates to The Great Replacement.
[00:32:17] DAVID NEIWERT: And the great replacement essentially is this idea that Brown people, particularly refugees and immigrants from Arab countries in Europe, are being deliberately brought into the country in order to replace white people as the chief demographic.
[00:32:35] PRISKA NEELY: And the conspiracy theory claims all this is orchestrated by a cabal of nefarious globalists. That's code for Jews.
[00:32:44] SOUND CLIP, CHARLOTTESVILLE 2017: You will not replace us! [group] You will not replace us! You will not replace us!
[00:32:50] PRISKA NEELY: And in August, 2017, white supremacists in the US took up this concept as a rallying cry at the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.
[00:33:01] SOUND CLIP, CHARLOTTESVILLE 2017: Jews will not replace us! Jews will not replace us!
[00:33:11] PRISKA NEELY: The next day, a neo-Nazi drove his car into a crowd and killed 32-year-old Heather Heyer. This incident had an immediate impact on the public perception of terrorism, making it clear that white nationalist violence is a serious threat.
[00:33:28] NEWS REPORT: Today the nightmare has hit home here in the city of Pittsburgh.
[00:33:32] PRISKA NEELY: At a Pittsburgh synagogue in 2018, Robert Bowers is accused of killing eleven people.
[00:33:39] DAVID NEIWERT: He went to a Jewish synagogue because he was angry about the Latin American caravans. The caravans had been in all the news in the weeks prior to that synagogue attack. He blamed Jews and went to a Jewish synagogue to take revenge for Latino immigration.
[00:34:01] PRISKA NEELY: These are the ideologies that are zigzagging across the globe. In March, 2019, the gunman who livestreamed his mass shooting in Christchurch, New Zealand on Facebook also wrote a manifesto. The title? "The Great Replacement." The New Zealand manifesto inspired the El Paso shooter to target the people he felt were replacing him.
Recent manifestos and books put a new spin on violent hateful acts. But David traces these sentiments back much further.
[00:34:37] DAVID NEIWERT: What's remarkable in a lot of ways when I read these manifestos is so many of them are expressing ideas that I read in the 1920s coming from eugenisists.
Radical Caucasian Extremism - News Beat - Air Date 1-9-21
[00:34:53] REPORTER: Tonight, the FBI looking into whether hate crime charges will be filed against an alleged White supremacist, accused of stabbing two good Samaritans to death on a commuter train in Portland.
Witnesses say it started when two young women, one of them wearing the hijab, boarded the train, and Jeremy Christian immediately went on a hate-filled tirade.
The surveillance photos of Dylann Storm Roof are unremarkable, but they were crucial in his arrest for one of the worst mass killings in South Carolina history.
I spoke with one of the survivors, and she said that he had loaded reloaded five different times, [echoing] (five different times). He just said, "I have to do it [echoing] (I have to do it)."
He said um, "You rape our women, and you taken over our country."
Right-wing extremism, uh, takes many forms, uh, in the United States. There are Neo-Nazi groups who hate Jews, and minorities, and Catholics, and others. Uh, There are sovereign citizen groups who don't recognize the authority, the United States government.
There are a variety of different, uh, organizations that have particular agendas against particular minority groups, or against liberals. A sprawling, uh, and... and uncoordinated set of fringe organizations, uh, many of them exist only online. Uh, some of them get together in person. It is fortunate that they have not been able to coordinate their activities, in part because some of them hate each other as much as they hate their other enemies.
Muslim extremists certainly get more attention than non Muslim extremists in the United States. Let me give you an example of one of the most frightening extremists you've probably never heard of: if you look him up, Eric Charles Smith is a White supremacist in Pittsburgh who had built 20 improvised explosive devices, pipe bombs, and had them in his home.
Authorities only found out about it because he was abusive towards his, uh, girlfriend. She called the police to get a restraining order. They came in and found all of these bombs lying around and also, uh, White supremacist literature suggesting-- and a podium suggesting-- that this apartment was the meeting place for a White supremacist organization.
That's frightening! And it was only local news, in the Pittsburgh area, and has since dropped out of sight. I suspect 20 pipe bombs, locked and loaded, uh, would be much greater news if he had been Muslim.
Our counter-terrorism efforts in the post-911 era began with the concept of fighting a foreign threat. So, we have this idea that this is part of national security, and this is part of our defense against outsiders who wished to do us harm.
That model has maintained itself. That model continues to this day, and the threats from domestic terrorists, from non-Muslim violent extremists in the United States, just haven't gotten that degree of attention.
For example, within the FDI, there's approximately 7,000 agents assigned to counter-terrorism duties. Of those, according to an audit from almost 10 years ago now, 335 were assigned to domestic terrorism. That's about 5% of the counter-terrorism effort in the FBI being devoted to domestic terrorism.
Yet, the numbers suggest that those 5% are making far more arrests per agent than the 95%, who are devoted to foreign international terrorism, the bulk of which is directed at Muslim extremists. The FBI does not report on a regular basis how many agents they have within each division within the counter-terrorism effort. I'd like to see them be more forthcoming. I'd like to see more data on
"Nobody actually accounts for this violence": How the FBI fails to track white supremacist terrorism - Democracy Now! - Air Date 8-5-19
[00:39:12] AMY GOODMAN - HOST, DEMOCRACY NOW!: The day before Mueller testified, all the attention on Mueller, Christopher Ray testified before the Senate. And he raised this issue, of domestic terrorism, of white supremacy. He's a Trump pick, here, for head of the FBI. That got very little attention.
So, what does the government understand, that it's not investigating? What reports have been suppressed around the rise of White supremacy, domestic terrorism?
[00:39:43] MIKE GERMAN: So, I appreciated Director Ray's statements that White supremacy presents a persistent threat in the United States, but unfortunately, their policies have actually masked how they use their domestic terrorism resources to... to make it harder for the Congress to understand how many of those resources are going toward white. Supremacist violence.
Senator Durbin, back in 2017, introduced a bill, the Domestic Terrorism Prevention Act, that would have required the FBI to document how many incidents and fatalities were result of each type of... each category of domestic terrorism, uh, in... in the domestic terrorism program, and then how many investigations and prosecutions occurred in each category, which I believe would have shown disproportionate investigations against groups that were not nearly as violent as White supremacists.
Instead of producing that data what the FBI did was changed the way they collect the data. So they grouped anarchists with antigovernment militias under a category of "antigovernment." They grouped what had been a White supremacist category with what they had previously called Black Identity Extremists, so that it would be harder to discern how many... whether appropriate resources are going to where there are actually violent acts attributable to these groups.
So, this is a problem that's longstanding. The justice department, as a matter of policy and practice, has deprioritized the investigation of White supremacists. And we talk about a rise in White supremacist violence, but the truth is, we don't know whether there's a rise, because nobody actually accounts for this violence.
The federal government today doesn't know how many White supremacists kill people each year. And they haven't been keeping these records even as counter-terrorism became its number one priority. So what they need to do is change these policies.
Recently, some former and current Justice Department officials have been arguing that they need new laws, that there aren't sufficient laws. I worked these cases in the 1990s, and nobody suggested we didn't have enough law. In fact, there are plenty of laws, and we wrote a report at the Brennan Center last year, "Wrong Priorities on Fighting Terrorism," to show that the scope of the laws, not just 52 terrorism laws that apply to domestic terrorism, but five federal hate crime statutes addressing the kind of crimes that White supremacists often commit; organized crime statutes that would prevent the organized groups that act violently and persist because their members can replace one another; and also other conspiracy statutes. So there are plenty of laws.
It's a matter of policy. And as a matter of policy, the Justice Department takes hate crimes and defers them to state and local prosecution, and only 12% of police departments across the country even report hate crimes. So we know that the state and locals aren't responding to this appropriately, and the federal government just defers to them.
Tucker Carlson Doubles Down on White Supremacist 'Great Replacement' Theory - The Mehdi Hasan Show - Air Date 4-13-21
[00:42:46] MEHDI HASAN - HOST, THE MEHDI HASAN SHOW: The great replacement -- a bigoted morally bankrupt conspiracy theory that has spurred White supremacists on multiple continents to murder nonwhite people. A dangerous conspiracy theory that is now getting a platform on prime time television in the US.
[00:43:06] TUCKER CARLSON: Now I know that the left and all the little gatekeepers on Twitter become literally hysterical if you use the term replacement, if you suggest that the Democratic party is trying to replace the current electorate, the voters now casting ballots, with new people, more obedient voters from the third world. But they become hysterical because that's what's happening, actually. Let's just say it. That's true.
I have less political power because they're importing a brand new electorate. Why should I sit back and take that?
[00:43:38] MEHDI HASAN - HOST, THE MEHDI HASAN SHOW: Sick stuff. Sickening. And I know it's Fox News and we on this show have chosen not to focus too often on the lies from Fox News, because you could do an entire episode on them every night, but this is different. This is really, really shocking and unacceptable. This is the mainstreaming of neo-Nazis hatred in America. So what can be done about it? After Fox's Tucker Carlson embraced the "great replacement theory" on his show last week, the Anti-Defamation league sent a letter to the leadership of Fox News. "Given his long record of race baiting" ADL director, Jonathan Green Blatt wrote, "we believe it is time for Carslon to go." In a response yesterday, fox CEO, Lachlan Murdoch, son of Rupert, stood fully behind Carlson. He said the Fox host wasn't really espousing the "great replacement theory" and added to the ADL had once given Murdoch's father an award. Perhaps Lachlan Murdoch just doesn't watch his own channel. Here was Carslon last night.
[00:44:37] TUCKER CARLSON: Demographic change is the key to the Democratic party's political ambitions. Let's say that again for emphasis because it is the secret to the entire immigration debate. Demographic change is the key to the Democratic party's political ambitions. In order to win and maintain power Democrats plan to change the population of the country.
[00:45:01] MEHDI HASAN - HOST, THE MEHDI HASAN SHOW: 21 minutes. That's how much of his show Tucker Carslon devoted to doubling down on the "great replacement theory" last night. To convincing his viewers that they are being replaced by immigrants, spurred on by one particular political party. He said this on the same day that a Washington Post analysis showed that domestic terrorism has reached highs not seen since the data was first collected in 1994. That rise was driven chiefly by White supremacist, anti-Muslim, and antigovernment extremists on the far right. Extremists who love Tucker Carlson.
Don't take my word for it, I'm just a Brown immigrant. Take the word of Derek Black, a former white supremacist whose father founded the neo-Nazi website Stormfront. Here he is in 2019 talking about his racist parents TV viewing habits.
[00:45:56] DEREK BLACK: My family watches Tucker Carlson's show once and then watches it on the replay because they feel that he is making the White nationalist talking points better than they have, and they're trying to get some tips on how to, how to advance it.
[00:46:10] MEHDI HASAN - HOST, THE MEHDI HASAN SHOW: Wow. Wow. Tucker Carlson is the highest rated host on one of the most watched cable channels in America. He's even been mentioned as a possible GOP presidential candidate in 2024. And he's using his huge platform to mainstream racist lies that get people murdered. Just think about how many people every night are being told by this guy, who they trust, that Black and Brown foreigners, people like me, are being brought in to replace them. And the powers at Fox News apparently have no intention of stopping him. The Murdoch's, in fact, are enabling this bigoted rhetoric. So what can be done? This is scary stuff. And how long would it take before Carslon's nightly, incitement is consigned to the dustbin of history, where it belongs with every other White supremacist theory, trope and mantra.
Southern Shame Culture & How to Fight Racism w/Jemar Tisby - The Holy Post - Air Date 1-20-21
[00:47:05] PHIL VISCHER - HOST, THE HOLY POST: The Lost Cause narrative developed in the aftermath of the Civil War and it was large... I was just reading up on this, I did some research over the weekend, Christian. So Ken Ham was really upset about the Civil War -- no, sorry, wrong research. It was largely developed by Southern women as they were burying their husbands, their fathers, and thinking about their grandfathers, later on, as generations went by, and this desire to honor them, to repaint the war dead in an honorable light, because the notion that they had died for a dishonorable cause again, this is the honor/shame dynamic, was more than they could bear.
So this is where all the Confederate monuments came from, which started out in cemeteries, but then moved all over the place, all over the south. The desire to recast the narrative of the Civil War into, we didn't lose because—and this is the fundamental message of the Lost Cause narrative—we didn't lose because we were wrong, we lost because we were out numbered. We were fighting for a noble, virtuous, and Christian cause, which was the cause of state's rights and the historic life of the South. Because we lost, we need to reshape that to make sure that we were the noble ones, that we were the noble ones.
So now this has carried on through the years, through Confederate monuments, through textbooks, it became, in most states, illegal to paint the Confederacy in a negative light in a textbook. So you could not tell a negative story about the South when talking about the Civil War.
[00:48:51] CHRISTIAN TAYLOR - CO-HOST, THE HOLY POST: So I just want you to know that I have come armed with something today. So I've been reading The Four Loves by CS Lewis. And I found it fascinating because in the chapter where it says likings and loves for the subhuman, he takes on love of country and he talks about how love becomes a demon when it starts to become a God. Well, he talks then about exactly what you are saying, that one of the ways that our love for country can become perverted is if we begin to idealize the heroic deeds of the past.
And he talks about, this is basically a quote, what does seem to me to be poisonous is that it breeds a type of patriotism that is not likely to last long in an educated adult, but is perfectly serious indoctrination of the young in knowingly fault or bias history. The heroic legend drably disguised as textbook fact.
[00:50:00] PHIL VISCHER - HOST, THE HOLY POST: You got it. Okay, then we get the first blockbuster movie of all time, The Birth of a Nation, which is a recasting of the Civil War as the noble South rising up against Northern carpetbaggers and dangerous Black men.
[00:50:17] CHRISTIAN TAYLOR - CO-HOST, THE HOLY POST: I didn't even know about that movie.
[00:50:20] JEMAR TISBY: That was the first movie we had to watch in my film class as a college student, and I didn't know what it was. And then when I realized that the birth of the nation they're talking about is the Ku Klux Klan, I mean, it's stunning. And that won, I think that was the first academy award-winning movie, wasn't it?
[00:50:34] PHIL VISCHER - HOST, THE HOLY POST: I don't know if it was the first, but yeah, it was best picture, it was the highest grossing movie ever, at that time. So that movie we launched the rebirth of the Ku Klux Klan. The Ku Klux Klan's most successful era was the 1920s.
[00:50:48] JEMAR TISBY: Which is also—it's a rabbit trail—that's also when the US changed its immigration policy to make sure nonwhite people couldn't come in.
[00:50:57] PHIL VISCHER - HOST, THE HOLY POST: Yes. There's a couple of phrases that I want you to compare and contrast. Here's phrase number one: "the south will rise again". Phrase number two: "we need to take back America". And here's the first thing I want to point about those two phrases, those two phrases were primarily spoken by Christians. Very few Jews, Muslims, atheists ever said "the south will rise again", and very few Jews, Muslims, atheists say, we need to take back America.
[00:51:33] JEMAR TISBY: They never had it, how they take it back?
[00:51:39] PHIL VISCHER - HOST, THE HOLY POST: So what we're looking at is the relationship between those two phrases. One is born from the loss of the Civil War, and then the Lost Cause narrative that said our way of life was honorable, our way of life was biblical, our way of life was good, and it was destroyed by interlopers from the North. Liberals and, well, they couldn't say communists yet, but that would come later. The same thing is said about, "we need to take back America". Our way of life is being destroyed by northerners, by liberals, by communists, by non-Christians, and we need to take it back.
Those are almost identical statements and they're born out of shame, honor, self-identity that my tribe has been wronged, but we will get even. We will get back.
[00:52:32] CHRISTIAN TAYLOR - CO-HOST, THE HOLY POST: And then it's cloaked as this is our mission from God, because our Christian point of view and our people are right, and God is on our side.
[00:52:47] PHIL VISCHER - HOST, THE HOLY POST: Or in danger, or oppressed, or all of the above.
[00:52:52] JEMAR TISBY: I haven't studied this enough, but I'd be really curious to compare how the Confederacy in the South psychologically dealt with their defeat, with the lost cause narrative that came out, compared to how Imperial Japan or Nazi Germany psychologically dealt with their defeats after World War II.
[00:53:12] PHIL VISCHER - HOST, THE HOLY POST: I guarantee you Nazi Germany didn't put up statues of Hitler after World War II.
[00:53:17] CHRISTIAN TAYLOR - CO-HOST, THE HOLY POST: Yeah, but after World War I.
[00:53:18] JEMAR TISBY: Exactly, that's the difference. After World War I, Germany -- this is exactly what the Germans did, is they felt like we were wronged, our cause was righteous, and Hitler came in and basically preached that message and stirred up all this nationalistic fervor, and then added into that this eugenics, kind of pseudo-eschatological vision of the Aryan race as "we were meant to rule the world and that's been denied to us and we're going to take it back." and it led to World War II.
And Japan also, obviously, was defeated in that war, but they rose back after World War II and became an economic superpower, but they also did not deify the cultic worship of the emperor that existed during World War II.
So they both managed to, I don't want to speak for all germans or all Japanese, but they managed to admit that what they did in World War II was wrong and needs to not be repeated and not celebrated, whereas the Confederacy in the South, they did the complete opposite and said, "yeah, we were defeated, but," as you put it Phil, "it was a righteous cause, and we're going to save face and honor ourselves despite losing." and that's why this narrative has still got a grip on so much of America.
Summary
[00:54:30] JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: We've just heard clips today, starting with Professor Buzzkill explaining the origins of the KKK. Reveal remembered a local government violent coup. Jonathan Capehart on Cape Up spoke with one of the Little Rock Nine about the violence she experienced while attempting to integrate a school. On the Media discussed the history of so-called patriot militias. Reveal explored the eugenicist origins of the Great Replacement Theory and its role in multiple mass shootings. Newsbeat looked at an overview of white violent extremists and how little attention they get. And Democracy Now! Explained how the FBI has made it structurally difficult to understand the prevalence of white supremacist violence. That's what
everyone heard, but members also heard bonus clips from the Mehdi Hasan Show demonstrating that it's no longer only extremists who are pushing the Great Replacement Theory, because Tucker Carlson has gotten on board with a full-throated endorsement. And The Holy Post dove into the great shame that lies at the heart of Southern culture and drives it to metastasize into toxic patriotism.
To hear that. And all of our bonus content delivered seamlessly into your podcast feed, sign up to support the show at bestoftheleft.com/supportsupport or request a financial hardship membership, because we don't make a lack of funds a barrier carrying more information. Every request is granted. No questions asked.
And now, we'll hear from you.
Response on remix climate episode - Alan from Connecticut
[00:56:04] VOICEMAILER: ALAN FROM CONNECTICUT: Hey, Jay it's Alan from Connecticut calling in on "1434 Climate Drive." I just finished that. I always live for these type of climate episodes.
In your introduction, you noted that you had a wealth of stuff going back to 25, and this mainly dealt with a flashback between current day and 2014. So, I was a little disappointed in that.
I do think it was a good episode. I think the only thing missing at the end was, you know, a clip from Al Gore telling us to go change light bulbs, or something.
But it was interesting to go back and forth with some of the politics and changes. But maybe I'm more up on this than most people. I didn't get a lot of takeaways from this.
And one thing I think might be helpful on a climate episode, usually, are political aspects. You know, we can get angry, and have a call to action, to call somebody. But when we're talking climate, I mean, part of that may also be true, but maybe it's time we start to talk about what people can do.
And I've done a lot of things myself, as you know, I try to offset heating my house with an oil furnace with wood, which is renewable. I have 26 solar panels. I drive an electric car. So, I've done a lot, I think, myself, individually, but there's always more that can be done.
And maybe an action that people could take home, similar changing light bulbs, but, like, in looking at other aspects of where people can make an individual change, in addition to pushing for a call to action, somehow.
That's my initial, just finished listening to it, just, kind of, shut off, had to rewind to listen to your introduction again, but that's my initial takeaways.
Thanks. Stay awesome. Wear your mask. Get vaccinated, and tell someone else to get vaccinated.
Final comments on the arguments against individual climate action
[00:57:53] JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: Thanks to all those who called into the voicemail line or wrote in their messages to be played as VoicedMails. If you'd like to leave a comment or question of your own to be played on the show, you can record a message at 202 999 3991, or write me a message [email protected].
Now first, just a few quick thoughts on climate activism, personal actions versus systemic, as Allen was talking about. And, I don't have a hard and fast rule on this, but, over the years, we have really, really been steering away from individual based actions to encourage on climate change.
And there's a few reasons for this: there's a couple of psychological phenomenon that, you know, of course they're going to impact everyone differently, maybe not impact you at all; there are people who, sort of, get pulled in with one small action, and then excitedly move on to the next, and the next, and the next; but there are other people who get pulled in other directions.
So let me explain: the first is, the... the "single action bias." And this is when a person thinks to themselves, barely even consciously, "Well, I've already done something on that problem. Therefore, I'm not going to do the next thing." When you get the second ask, if you're asked to do more than one thing, especially close together, a person will often think, "Well, I already recycle," or, "I already got a fuel efficient car. I'm not going to then do the next thing, which is, you know, contact Congress and demand that they take action on climate change or something like that."
Now, as I said, other people may go in the other direction; one action leads to the next, and the next. But, if we're only going to ask people to do one thing, it's going to be the thing that makes the most difference. And that is on the big policy level. Speaking structurally, that is the only way we're going to solve climate change.
Which actually brings me to the next psychological element that... that we deal with, with climate change, which is: the sort of inherent understanding, that everyone has, that small solutions are going to be insufficient to solve big problems. And so, if you suggest, as Al Gore, sort of, did, in his documentary, "An Inconvenient Truth" that we have this massive, humanity-threatening, global problem, and then some of the solutions you may want to take part in are, like, changing your light bulbs; people perceive that as, whether consciously or mostly unconsciously, clearly insufficient, that, that can't possibly be the answer to the problem you're discussing.
And so you either do the small actions, and then fall into the single action bias, and think, "Well, I did my one action. He said I should just change my light bulbs, and if we all do that, then that solves the problem and I've done my part. So now I'm going to sit out."
Or, you might think, "Well, that is clearly not the answer. So, I'm being lied to, this is being misrepresented; if changing your light bulbs is the answer, then it clearly must not be that big of a problem." Or, you know, people will begin to spin out into all these ways of, sort of, justifying inaction, because people are impacted by inertia, not just physical, but mental, emotional, inertia that, we just would prefer to do the same thing. And so if we can give ourselves an excuse to not believe terrible predictions of climate change, then we will take it.
And so people will sometimes latch onto, "Oh, well, if all... if all we have to do is change our light bulbs, then it must not be that big of a deal."
So, for all of these reasons, we have steered away from the sort of call to action that Alan was referring to the, this, sort of, "And now, here's what you can do in your own life to make a change."
We did that, for decades, and decades, and it, sort of, gave cover-- well, now I'm going to detour into saying that it... it gives cover in a similar way that the plastic polluting industries got, when we turned the issue of plastic and litter into a personal responsibility issue. "It is your individual responsibility not to litter. It is your individual responsibility to clean up after yourself. And if you don't, and if our world gets messed up and full of plastic, well then, that's just your individual fault. And it has nothing to do with the companies that are producing the plastic." And, oh, by the way, producing the commercials with the crying Native American, to convince you that it's your fault.
And so, we have gone down, basically, that same path with climate change. We have convinced people, by and large, that it is individual actions that are going to be the solution. And, if we are not seeing enough progress, it's because you haven't changed enough of your light bulbs, you didn't get the most fuel efficient car, you could have, you took one too many flights...
And, the reality is, that even though all the, all of those things, collectively, could make a small difference, they could not possibly make the size of difference we need. And that requires policy.
So we've spent decades talking about individual actions, which has given Congress the cover they need to do nothing, just like the plastic producing companies, and the fossil fuel companies have had the cover to do nothing about the pollution that they are helping to create. Because even the environmentalist have focused too much on what individual consumers can do.
This is all, I would argue, a by-product of a neo-liberal mindset, of our economics, for the past several decades. We've had some of the worst timing possible for the real spike in understanding about climate change, to have coincided, almost perfectly, with the spike in neoliberal thinking about our economics, and about the nature of, or the argument for, hyper-individualized actions, as related to massive systemic social problems.
Neo-liberalism says there's no such thing as a collective solution. All solutions are individual actions, and they just add up naturally to the best possible solution. That's what Ayn Rand would have us believe. Climate change, among many other issues, but climate change, first and foremost, puts the lie to that idea more starkly than anything else.
So anyway, that... that's the reason why we don't talk about individual personal actions to be taken against climate change, because the answer is, so clearly, so much more than that. And we'd rather focus on that big picture idea.
Now, on the topic of remix episodes, I would love to hear more comments on... on the remixes. When a super fan like Alan from Connecticut calls in and says that he was sort of disappointed with the episode, that certainly gets our attention. Was it a fluke? Was it not? Maybe climate change wasn't the best topic for a remix, who knows?
We have another one already in the works. Afghanistan, of course, is a topic very much I hope, at the top of most people's minds right now. And we thought, "That sounds like a good topic for a remix episode." And so, we're going to keep doing at least a few more of those, on a variety of topics, to give people a sense of what they are, and how they work, and give you a chance to decide whether or not you like them.
But, as I said, I would love to hear your thoughts now and... and, you know, as we continue with this experiment, because we certainly don't want to give you all something you're not interested in. And we thought that this was an interesting idea, but that doesn't mean we're right.
So let us know by calling, or emailing, or whatever you like to do.
As always keep the comments coming in at 202 999 3991, or by emailing me to [email protected].
That is going to be it for today. Thanks to everyone for listening. Thanks to Deon Clark and Erin Clayton for their research work for the show, and participation in our bonus episodes. Thanks to the Monosyllabic Transcriptionist Trio, Ben, Ken, and Scott, for their volunteer work, helping put our transcripts together.
Thanks to Amanda Hoffman for all of her work on our social media outlets, activism segments, graphic designing, web mastering, and bonus show co-hosting. And thanks to those who support the show by becoming a member or purchasing gift memberships at bestoftheleft.com/support or from right inside the Apple podcast app. Membership is how you get instant access to our incredibly good bonus episodes, in addition to there being extra content and no ads in our regular episodes.
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So, coming to you from far outside the conventional wisdom of Washington, DC, my name is Jay, and this has been the Best of the Left podcast coming to you twice weekly thanks entirely to the members and donors to the show from bestoftheleft.Com.
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