This is an abbreviated version of our weekly Patreon show. To access the full-episode and support the pod, head on over to http://www.patreon.com/muckrakepodcast
Co-hosts Jared Yates Sexton and Nick Hauselman welcome to the show Teddy Wilson, a journalist that reports on the radical right, to discuss the Solomon Pena case which included Pena hiring people to fire guns at his political opponents. The conversation then shifts to the debt ceiling and what House Republicans think they're doing by holding the country, and the world economy, hostage.
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Welcome to the Weekender Edition of the Montclair Podcast.
I'm Jared J. Sexton.
I'm drinking carbonated water, Nick.
I'm not drinking a beer because right now I think if I started at like 2.30 in the afternoon, I think I would be done.
I'm here with Nick Halsman.
Nick, how we doing, bud? - We're good.
I match your carb-minute beverage.
A little water is always a great way to start the afternoon.
That's why they call us the Bubbly Boys.
Okay.
All around these lands, they call us the Bubbly Boys.
Everybody, we are here for The Weekender Show.
We have a special guest with us, Teddy Wilson, journalist, researcher who reports and researches on the U.S.
radical right, also the publisher of Radical Reports.
For my money, one of the most essential places to go to understand extremism in the United States of America.
Fantastic.
Teddy, thanks so much for joining us.
Yeah, thank you for having me.
It's a real pleasure to be on The podcast, I've been a listener of y'alls for a while now, so it's really interesting to be on the other side of the mic from y'all.
Well, I gotta tell you, it's an absolute disgrace that we haven't made this happen earlier.
And in the interest of disclosure here, you know, this is the Weekender Edition for patrons, but we want everybody to hear what Teddy has to say on this important issue.
So this part is going to be free, but if you want to listen to the rest of the thing, you got to go over to patreon.com slash bunkbreak podcast.
That is my beat for the day.
But Teddy, Nick, we got to talk about something that You know, it's not surprising, but it sucks.
It just absolutely sucks.
We gotta talk about this guy, Solomon Peña, a candidate out in New Mexico who ran for state representative, ended up losing by 47 points.
That close, Nick.
That close.
Just by a razor's margin.
Still, still a chance.
Hopefully we get a recount going here.
But in the meantime, Solomon Peña, this Republican candidate, after his loss, harassed multiple people.
And then eventually, it turns out, allegedly, because we got to take care of the legal part of the show, ended up paying four separate men to go to the houses of two county commissioners, a state rep and a state senator in New Mexico, between December and January to shoot up their homes.
Apparently engaged in it himself.
Some really, really awful stuff.
But Teddy, start us off here.
What were your initial reactions when you heard about this travesty?
Well, I suppose my initial reaction was not one of surprise.
I think if you've been watching the activities of the far right and the way the Republican Party has been mainstreaming The far right.
I wasn't really surprised that this took place.
I think the most surprising thing about it was how many people were involved, right?
This wasn't just one individual.
This was essentially an assassination plot, right?
Hunt down and kill members of the Democratic Party.
And we can get into the details of that.
But I think for me, it just seems to be kind of one more step, one more escalation of what has been a pattern that has been happening on the far right and the Republican Party over the past five to six to seven years.
So that's my question.
I was going to ask you I think is would this have existed with this have happened in the absence of Trump being involved in the you know, the GOP over the last seven years or was this something that you know, we've always sort of had going into the past and this isn't something we can look at that's like societal issues that are having the last even 10 or 15 years.
Right.
And that kind of gets to the question that has often been asked is whether or not Trump is a symptom of the disease or the cause of the disease.
Right.
And I think that the most credible argument, I think, is that Trump has acted as an accelerant for Many things that have been festering within the far right and conservative politics over the last 10, 20, 30 years.
And I think it would be a mistake to think that this is something new, right?
This kind of level of violence.
I think if you go back and look at what was happening in the early to mid 1990s, We saw any number of violent actions from the far right and violent extremist from the bombing of abortion clinics all the way to the Oklahoma City bombing and Timothy McVeigh.
So I think there's always been this strain within the far right ideology.
And I think you could definitely argue with that during the last five or six years, I think Trump has emboldened the people on the far right fringes.
Um, and the mainstream Republican Party has, um, done nothing to really discourage it from happening, right?
They've, um, uh, essentially made excuses or, um, explained away kind of the actions of, of the far right, um, even among people within their own party, so.
You know, I think one of the things about Trump, you know, we talk often about the 2012 postmortem of that presidential election that the Republican Party paid for.
They basically said, we're on the road to extinction.
We're going to lose our base as long as we continue down this path.
We need to become more liberal when it comes to immigration.
We need to, you know, broaden our base to like other groups of people.
And, you know, something that's really hitting for me right now is they are broadening their base.
And, you know, we can talk about, like, your mainstream Republican Party.
We can talk about your Mitch McConnell's all we want, right?
But it's also now becoming the party of your Herschel Walkers.
It's becoming your party of Carrie Lake.
It's becoming the party of Solomon Pena.
And, you know, one of the things I think Teddy and I both do when we're researching this is we look at how people are being radicalized.
How Republican voters are being prepared to do awful things.
But this thing is suddenly becoming, it's almost like a light to moths.
You know, we're suddenly seeing dangerous criminals and incompetent people and grifters who suddenly recognize that to be a member of the Republican Party is an incredible opportunity!
You can make a ton of money, you can get elected to, you know, maybe the statehouse.
But I want to point out, it's not like Solomon Pena Just suddenly decided he wanted to be a criminal.
This is a convicted criminal.
This is a person who had gone to jail before he ran for office.
And there is a mindset here that I want to get into in a few minutes about how this happens, but this is a person who not only was attracted to the Republican Party, he was attracted to Donald Trump, who we all know has been engaged in organized crime his entire career.
And to all of a sudden recognize that the sign is on the door, the Republican Party is open for business for criminal types and incompetents and grifters.
Teddy, tell me if you have the same feelings as I do, because I look at this, it's part of a larger feedback loop of how this stuff works.
These people are being prepared for violence, but then violent people are coming into the party itself, and as a result, it's only going to accelerate.
Right.
I don't necessarily disagree with any of that.
I think with Peña, he's an interesting case because, as you mentioned, he does have a criminal history, right?
He served seven years in prison prior to his involvement in politics.
And in fact, for all intents and purposes, he wasn't a political person until around 2020.
Um, there is really very kind of limited information about his involvement in politics before that.
And even once he became involved in politics.
He wasn't really kind of a big fish, right?
He wasn't donating significant amounts of money.
He wasn't raising significant amount of money, a significant amount of money for his candidacy.
He didn't seem to be too involved in kind of the Republican Party of New Mexico.
But I think that fits a kind of a profile of the people that tend to kind of Become more involved in far-right extremism, right, is these types of folks.
I think you see this kind of profile, folks.
But, you know, it's interesting the way you also talked about how this has expanded the base, right, who this kind of politics appeals to.
And you mentioned several people that are also people of color, right?
And I think there are some individuals within the far right that kind of confuse people, right?
Like the leader of, well, the kind of original leader of the Proud Boys, right?
He's a Latino, right?
And I think that confuses people when you have someone like that who's essentially leading what amounts to a white supremacist organization.
Or at least, at the very least, a far-right street gang, how they can be involved in that kind of politic.
But I think your kind of broader point about the opportunity to be involved and kind of get notoriety is where that kind of leads into.
I think within the left, and especially within the Democratic Party, There are just so many different, there's a large diversity of people that are within leadership there, right?
There's many, many people of color and a variety of backgrounds that are in leadership positions, both within the Democratic Party and kind of within the progressive movement.
And so it creates a problem where it's difficult For especially people of color, right, to advance within that system if there's so many people already on top.
With a few exceptions, I think.
Sister Song is a good kind of exception to that rule, as you've seen leaders step down and allow for other Black women to come in and take leadership of that organization.
And so where this comes in is that's why I think you see a lot of prominent, particularly Black men and Latino men, kind of gain leadership within the Republican Party and kind of the right in general, right?
Because there's opportunity there for them.
And the right in the Republican Party is more than happy to allow people of color within their kind of movement, as long as they're going to toe the movement line, right?
And say the things that white folks want to hear.
Well, and I want to point out, and I'm champing at the bit to say this, because this is one of the reasons that we have a podcast and one of the reasons why we do this.
Whiteness is malleable.
Whiteness is an incredible, malleable thing that we have seen.
And for those who don't know the history of this, it's important to know Italians were not considered white for a while.
Right.
I mean, like this thing can expand or go down.
And so what has happened in a lot of this is the Republican Party at this point, it is actually the base is both shrinking and convulsing all at once in different ways.
And it has to do with power and wealth.
And this, by the way, I think that the I think that the through line.
Because for the longest time, we looked at politics in this country and we're like, OK, Democrats want to change things and they're involved with labor unions.
The Republican Party is small business and wealthy people who find common ground and also white supremacy in its heart.
I think the through line now is similar, but also look at Solomon Pena.
Look at these people who are denying elections.
And Nick, I want to hear what you have to say about this, because you're always dead on with it.
It's also people who could never once in their life imagine that they could be rejected.
This guy was beat by 47 points.
He would have thought the election was stolen if he would have lost by 98 points.
Right?
I mean, it's the same thing we talked about with Trump.
When Trump won, but lost the popular vote, he said 3 million votes were fraudulent, which was the amount he was defeated by.
There is a mindset, an aggrievement here that the world is out to get you, you deserve more, and there's sort of a mindset.
Nick, does that check out for you?
Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of things swirling around on this that I kind of wanted to look at specifically with what happened with Salman Pena in the sense that it was a local race for the House in New Mexico.
So I don't know if we're going to look at the Republican Party as a whole as sort of culpable that they allowed a guy like this to run for this office and the vetting process.
Now, we can look at Santos, for instance, in New York.
Clearly, either they did the vetting and they didn't care or maybe they did and maybe they vet this guy, too, because my question to you, Teddy, is is there any indication of like sort of clinical mental illness involved here?
I would say you you would say clearly because of the actions he took after he lost but I'm it sounds like he was already sort of an erratic person as it was and you would think that somebody in charge would have been like yes you cannot run you cannot represent us and I'm wondering what if that even exists because we are a democracy right you anybody could run for office if they want to if they're you know a citizen so
Is there any information you might have or any insight into that notion of like, A, the vetting process, B, whether or not this guy was, you know, should have been, needs mental health, you know, versus running for office?
Well, there's a lot to unpack there.
I'll just start off with the mental health side of it, is that as far as I'm aware of, and as far as I've seen it from any public reporting, there's no indication that Pena had any diagnosed mental illness.
Not to say that it won't be revealed that he does have a diagnosed mental illness, but also to clarify that You know, mental illness in and of itself isn't a cause of these things, right?
Many, many people have mental illness and don't plot to assassinate people.
I haven't, for the record, as a person who has mental illness.
I have not.
I mostly just chill out and watch Netflix.
Well, I just have to take your word on that.
I think going to the vetting process, I think there's two interesting parts to this.
One is, I think, with as you move further down the ballot, right, there's much less money and time and resources put into various kind of campaigns than there is, say, for a Senate campaign or a Congressional campaign, right?
The money decreases as you go down to State Senate and State And in districts that are heavily one side or the other, whether they're heavily Republican or heavily Democrat, oftentimes those incumbents are running unopposed.
So I think there's a tendency probably within both parties that if somebody wants to throw their hat in the ring and be a name on the ballot and prevent somebody from the opposing party to run unopposed, I doubt there's a lot of pushback or kind of interest in to find out who this candidate is, right?
Because when you lose by 47 points, there was mathematically no kind of chance that you were going to win in the first place.
But also, I think, within the Republican Party more broadly, and this is also, to be clear, one of those asymmetrical problems, right?
That is much more of a problem on the Republican Party than it is on the Democratic Party.
Of course, there's far-left folks and kind of fringe figures within the Democratic Party, but they do not have the kind of sway or influence, particularly within Democratic primary politics, that happens on the Republican side.
And I think you've seen lots and lots of evidence of far right French figures being able to get elected within Republican primaries, despite Any pushback from kind of the county Republican Party, the state Republican Party, even the RNC, right?
So I think there's a real kind of institutional problem within the Republican Party of being able to prevent French candidates from winning in Republican primaries, regardless of where it is on the ballot.
And you don't have to look much farther than people like Congressman Marjorie Taylor Greene to see prime examples of that.
So I was on... God, this is going to sound like such a jerk introduction to say this.
I was on Joy Reid the other night, and before my segment came on, she was talking to one of the people that Solomon Pena and his hired people had shot up her house.
And I got to tell you, I got really choked up about it because we forget that there are human beings who are being harassed here.
You know, the details are harrowing.
People are, you know, telling stories about how their child woke up and there was like, you know, dust on their bed from where the bullet had gone through their bedroom.
I want to say it was a 10-year-old child who's going to have to live with this for the rest of their lives, by the way.
And you know, we're talking right now at like a 30,000 level talk.
We're looking down on this thing.
We're talking about the political landscape.
And I think the phrase that we haven't uttered yet, which is important, Teddy, is domestic terrorism.
What this is at all levels at this point, whether it is a group of hundreds of people at the Capitol trying to overthrow the government and going after public officials who are not carrying out an election certification the way that these people want it, Or down to New Mexico, where people's houses are being shot up.
Nick and I talk all the time.
We have no idea why anybody would want to serve in any of these roles anymore.
Why would you want to run for one of these offices?
You're going to be put into a QAnon conspiracy theory, which I can tell you sucks shit.
It makes your life awful.
It basically puts everybody you love in danger.
Teddy, I know you know how this is.
As a researcher, you're basically putting your life on the line constantly, trying to keep track of this.
This is basically a message that if you don't go along with what we want, if these elections don't go the way we want, if we simply don't get our way everywhere along the line, your life is on the line.
And it is domestic terrorism, and it is a message.
How do you feel about that?
What do you see here?
No, I think you raise an important point about really being clear about what this is, right?
I think the importance of language is really undervalued, particularly kind of in the mainstream media.
I think it's important to kind of be accurate and be clear about what we're talking about, right?
This is far-right extremist domestic terrorism, full stop.
And I think it's not coming out of nowhere, right?
The seeds for these types of actions have been laid For the past several years, I think.
And so there's kind of 2 points I'd like to make.
1 is.
We've seen kind of the precursors to this kind of action.
Many times over the past couple of years since the 2020 election, I think when you look at the threats that were made against election workers, right, at the county level and the municipal level, right, folks that are trying to be nonpartisan and just do the work of running elections, right, I think the election worker from Georgia, right, that testified before Congress really gave heart-wrenching testimony.
about her experience in that.
And the second point I want to make is that these actions have consequences and they reverberate, right?
And one of the things that I often try to do immediately whenever cases like this break is watch how the far right is reacting to these kinds of events within far right spaces online.
Right.
And you see narratives start to form almost immediately.
You know, I think there's been so many cases of of these kinds of events where you have kind of three or four different kind of categories of immediate reactions.
Right.
The first one is always to claim that this is some kind of false flag operation, like this isn't Really happening.
There's also kind of a tendency to minimize what happened, right?
Well, this individual just shot at houses.
He didn't actually shoot at anybody individual.
But I think the scariest category is the people that either view it as kind of an inspirational kind of event or something similar.
And so I want to Just read something.
This was from a telegram channel.
A far-right telegram channel with well over 230,000 subscribers to this channel.
And there was discussion about this event in New Mexico.
And this is one of the comments that got several likes.
He's just doing what most of us are thinking, right?
He wants fair elections, violators prosecuted, borders secure, CRT out of society, and violators of the Nuremberg Code held accountable.
The way he went about it, though as criminal, someone could have been hurt or worse.
Maybe these criminals in office need the warning not to mess with we the people.
So that's just kind of an example of some of the things you see in kind of far-right spaces after that, after these kinds of events.
And I think people should take that kind of rhetoric really seriously, because as I think I made the point at the beginning of our conversation, I see this as just one step, you know, from You know, less escalating acts of violence, extremist violence.
Yeah, and it's that with the hold over the politicians and the threat, which is probably the biggest reason why people like that want the Second Amendment, because it's not like they want to have arms to protect themselves or go hunting.
It's because they want to be able to fight against the government.
It's sort of what it seems like.
And so here's my interesting question, because we talked about this in the last five years.
The 2020 election seems to have been spurring a lot of these things.
wasn't there's always been this element in our society it feels like we've always had people you could probably go back to 1778 and you'd find people who are already like training and ready for the you know to go against the government even further you can go back to the overthrow of the government of Maryland like prior to the founding of the country yeah Yeah, so it's like it's in our DNA to some degree, I suppose, and the people have always been there.
So we've talked about this before, where it seems like the Republican Party in particular, as they were dying and losing a base, the base was getting smaller and smaller, and they realized they really couldn't win any more national elections unless they figured out another way to get more people to vote.
So it seems like they activated this area of the country, people who probably weren't political or didn't participate in the political process before.
So do you feel, Teddy, that this is some sort of like natural byproduct, all the violence coming out of it now, because of the inclusiveness of the GOP to actually actively seek these votes, because it's the only way that they can remain competitive in any kind of race?
Well, that's kind of a complicated question, right?
And I think You can look back in the history of our politics to see the roots of all this.
You can go back to the weaponization of negative partisanship by Newt Gingrich in the 1990s.
You can go back to the Southern Strategy by Richard Nixon in the late 1960s.
And you can go back even further.
I think a lot of kind of the usage of, well, the modern kind of incantation of this, of the usage of extremist violence, I think.
Can go back all the way to the 1930s and the violence that was used to stem labor protests, particularly in the Pacific Northwest, right?
So there's there's a long history of of kind of this violence being used for political aim as for kind of the Republican Party.
I think.
Once you make the decision that you're going to be a Republican Party, a political party that is essentially.
For white people, right?
To arguably kind of maintain a system of white supremacy.
While the demographics of the country are changing to such that the number of white folks that live in the country is decreasing every year, right?
You have a shrinking electorate that you have to appeal to.
I think that just kind of creates a byproduct of you become more extreme in your politics as you're trying to appeal to a smaller and smaller base.
And that gets me to another point that I think, Jared, you mentioned earlier about the aggrievement, right?
And how important that is, a component of all this.
And I really think that one of the things that highlights that is the role of Christian nationalism in all this.
You know, so many people within kind of the far right and within kind of Republican right-wing politics subscribe to that idea that America was founded as a, you know, essentially a white Christian nation, right?
This belief.
And I think That's why anything that pushes back against that notion, anything that challenges that notion that this country isn't something that's only for white Christian Protestant men, you're going to get that kind of reaction, that kind of aggrievement, that kind of victimization, right?
They are always going to feel like under threat.
And so that plays a big role in all of this too.
And all that feeds into kind of what you're talking about.
I've been wanting to ask you this for a while, and I'll go ahead and lay my cards on the table.
base of voters.
Yeah, it's always funny.
We're talking about this country being founded by white Christian mailsmen, founded by deists and Freemasons, but that's neither here nor there.
Teddy, I've been wanting to ask you this for a while, and I'll go ahead and lay my cards on the table.
Every time that people ask me what I think needs to be done, inevitably they move towards, do we need new law enforcement guidelines?
Do we need new laws?
And I always tell them I would rather not give money to law enforcement anymore.
Also, on top of that, my God, we have more than enough tools on the books.
In my opinion, the problem is that because it is a white supremacist domestic terrorism problem, people do not take it seriously.
We do not call it what it is.
We do not make it a priority.
For anyone who knows the statistics, they know that white domestic terrorism and right-wing terrorism has always been a worse problem than Islamic fundamentalists in this country, and we took our eye off the ball.
there.
Wow.
Teddy, for you, what is it that's going to turn the tide here?
In your opinion, what is it that, what type of sea change or what type of different sort of mode of operation is going to make this thing actually start to figure itself out?
Wow.
Well, I mean, I would, I guess I would focus on two things.
I think the defining feature of most kind of far-right authoritarian movements, which I think all of what we were talking about is kind of part of that larger project that is kind of a transnational which I think all of what we were talking about is kind of part of that larger project that is kind And And I think the essentially the solution to that right is to.
Advocate and push for a more robust democracy, right?
That means supporting democratic institutions.
That means supporting organizations that support democratic and progressive movements, right?
Fostering movement building organizations, right?
I think there is so many different organizations Within the United States, just in general, kind of grassroots movement building organizations that are doing amazing work on the ground in places that you wouldn't necessarily expect, right?
Whether it's indigenous activists in places like New Mexico or the Dakotas, right?
Or it's Black and Hispanic activists doing reproductive justice activism in the South and in Texas, right?
It's so many different organizations around the country.
Lobbying for expanding access to the vote, right?
Whether it's eliminating old white supremacist legacy, Jim Crow era type bans on formerly incarcerated people, right?
Allowing them to vote.
There's just so many kind of different movements that are happening around the country, I think.
Putting this same, at least on par, the same level of resources, particularly financial resources, into those movements that the right puts into their movement would go a long way towards pushing back against far-right authoritarianism.
And I think The reason I said just on par is because we see how popular these movements are and how successful they can be with minimal support, right?
I think a prime example of that that I often point to is the push for the increase in minimum wage, right?
That has happened state after state, grassroots organizing with a lot of pushback from corporate America and right-wing interest, but It has essentially passed in every place that has been put on the ballot because it's popular, right?
And people want that.
And I think, you know, investing in kind of the broad scope of kind of democratic movement building organizations would go a long way to pushing back against authoritarianism, far-right authoritarianism.
As for the second point about the involvement of the justice system and federal and local law enforcement in all that, that's a really difficult question.
As someone that has come to think of myself as a prison abolitionist, I think even in the case of Solomon Pena, There's some things that have happened that I find myself uncomfortable with the fact that he's been You know, jailed without bond, right?
He's going to be incarcerated in a county jail until his trial day and may that make may feel make us feel comfortable and we might think that that feels justified.
But if you have serious problems with kind of the prison industrial complex and wouldn't have felt comfortable if that had happened to somebody else, it should really kind of.
making the question kind of your commitment to those kinds of things.
And so, I mean, I don't have a good answer to kind of how we change like federal law enforcement and how we attack the problem of specifically far right extremist violence, right?
How much money and resources should the FBI or DHS or whoever whatever law enforcement agency be given to combat far-right domestic terrorism?
It's a difficult question to answer.
It's something that we have to grapple with and we can't Ignore kind of unpleasant facts, like the fact that those agencies have a long history of overstepping their bounds, right?
And violating civil liberties.
And anytime we give them extra tools, the people that most often are harmed are marginalized communities, right?
It's almost like they've worked with these same exact people.
And if we took the funds that are supposed to take care of these problems and gave them to the communities, it might help the problem a little bit.
Right.
A great example of this is the so-called constitutional sheriffs, right?
There's this group of far-right county sheriffs that think that the county is essentially, should be the top level of government and the federal government doesn't have any jurisdiction over what takes place in a county or state.
Many of these far-right sheriffs have trained local law enforcement or held seminars for local law enforcement, right?
So there's a lot of problems with the kind of infiltration of far-right ideologies within both local and federal law enforcement.
Well, I just want to ask a really quick question to clarify the first part of your answer about what we could do to solve this.
And part of me feels like what you're describing is a way to activate more people who are not radicalized who are progressive to get out and vote versus trying to somehow figure out how we can stop The growth of the radical, violent, you know, extremism, right?
And so what I'm sensing, perhaps, is that there's probably a huge segment of that part of the country that you're not going to change and will not ever be able to understand reason.
Does that sound fair?
Maybe, perhaps.
I think, you know, I'm not an expert on de-radicalization.
There's plenty of people that I know of that do that kind of work, that focus on that, and I think that's admirable, right?
But that's not something that I've ever focused on.
But I think the reason I think it's important to focus on those movement-building organizations To push back is that I think a lot of the folks that do get radicalized, if you look at who they are, they feel isolated.
A lot of them feel kind of economically insecure.
You know, they are radicalized by conspiracy theories or, you know, various other types of far-right politics.
And I think one of the byproducts of investing in movement-building organizations, particularly kind of within the progressive movement on the left, is they are kind of by their very nature community-oriented, right?
And I think that's another part of this is a lot of these folks, they are looking for a community, right?
That's why a lot of people get involved with things like everything from QAnon to white supremacist neo-Nazis.
It's A big element of it is to feel belonging, right?
And to feel part of a community.
And so when you invest in community building, you know, movement building organizations, you are building more and more communities.
And so I think the byproduct is a lot of folks might, you know, not feel so isolated and not feel so disconnected from their communities.
But yeah, like I said, I'm not an expert in de-radicalization.
There's plenty of people online that I know of that do that kind of work, so I'm not sure I can really speak to that.
Well, I think that the point the also making is that if more progressive policies get enacted governmentally, in theory, that will help them in, especially if they're marginalized economically, for instance, and that that might actually have a little budge there, they might move a little bit more toward that.
And that I think that makes sense to me.
Well, there's one caveat to that, though, and that's that, as seems to be a theme in some of our discussions, whiteness is a hell of a drug, right?
It's hard to underestimate the power of white supremacy within people.
There's so many examples of this.
I think one kind of perfect example is that it's often overlooked, and I don't think it's really ever taught.
High school history classes is kind of the racist history within the New Deal, right?
The New Deal is often kind of portrayed as like this really progressive milestone of so many things that were accomplished, right?
And that's true, but more than one thing can be true.
One of the reasons the New Deal was able to pass and get support, particularly from Southern white members of Congress Is because the way it was implemented was racist, right?
When you look at how, like, the Rural Electrification Act was implemented and what communities benefited from that.
Same thing with kind of the GI Bill.
What communities who benefited from the GI Bill more than anybody else?
It was white members of the military.
And so I think, yeah, progressive policies will go a long way to, like, I think, building that kind of community and people seeing the government actually work for them.
But it's hard for me to kind of not underestimate the power of whiteness and white supremacy, because if those Black folks across the street are benefiting from it, there's a lot of white folks that would be angry about that, too.
So that's still part of our society and culture, unfortunately.
Daddy, I'm so glad you brought that up because, listen, if we are dedicated to anything, it's not having saviors and messiahs.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt, I think, one of the greatest American presidents of all time, but the New Deal was essentially a white bailout to pay off fascism in the United States of America.
That being said, Teddy Wilson, a researcher of extremism, the publisher of Radical Reports, I think one of the most essential voices out there.
Your work is something that I turn to constantly.
I am so happy to have had you on the podcast and call you a friend.
Thank you so much, Teddy.
Where can the good people find you?
Well, first of all, thank you so much for that glowing recommendation.
It means a lot coming from someone like you.
So yeah, but for folks that are interested, you can find me on social media.
I'm often on Twitter.
My handle is Report by Wilson.
Every other social media platform I have the same handle.
If you have migrated over to Mastodon or something else, I'm over there too.
And you can find my newsletter, Radical Reports, if you go to radicalreports.substack.com.
I have a free and paid version of it, and so subscribe, free or pay, doesn't matter.
Just glad to have people support in producing that newsletter.
But yeah, thank you so much for having me on.
I feel like, you know, even though we've covered so many different topics, I bet we could discuss this for another couple hours. - I think so too.
And there's a standing invitation that every time shit goes sideways, Teddy, we're gonna have you on here to talk about it.
We're going to return in just a second.
And speaking of paying and not paying, you're going to want to hang out because Nick and I are going to talk about the debt ceiling crisis and also the crisis happening in France and what those two things have to do with one another.
