PREVIEW: Kwame Kilpatrick with Joe Kassabian

Hello to all of the residents of the locality.

Is that what we're calling it?

Greetings, Area Residents.

Everyone out there in Area Land.

I always think a lot about the onion kind of stock phrase, Area Man, in headlines.

And really that's, you know, we don't want to restrict it to just the one gender, but that's who we're doing this.

Yeah, we're going to do the Area Man podcast.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

But it's also for Area Woman and Area Non-Binary Person.

God forbid we ever find a non-binary mare, frankly.

I think if The Onion ever published a headline with Area Non-Binary Person, it would probably lead to like a kind of right-wing hyper-backlash.

One that would dwarf the current one.

Yeah, they'd form three more Babylon bees.

The Babylon Hive.

They would take back Infowars from them again.

And that additional sonorous voice you are hearing is, of course, our guest today.

It is the associate mayor, Lions Led by Donkeys, and Detroiter, Joe Kasabian.

Joe, how's it going?

Good, good.

I'm glad to be on the show and

with me in my local area is a fellow mayor, Rodrigo Duterte,

who recently moved out the street.

Yeah, that's right.

Here comes the neighborhood.

No,

I'm very excited to

be mayor today, and I'm continuing a little bit of a theme that Maddie started last week, which is mayors.

That's been the theme every episode so far.

I don't know if that's quite true because for the three episodes previously, it was things that aren't mayors but feel feel like mayors

it contains a spiritual man that's sure it was a border it's not my fault yeah people it was people who were in charge of localities but weren't mayors were going back to mayors and not only going back to mayors we're going back to mayors who've been labeled the worst by a scandalous mayor i i i feel like the kind of mayor who gets described as embattled you know and oh my god i love i i think once you're described as embattled your goose is basically cooked.

You're basically fucked at that point.

And let me just tell you, Kwame Kilpatrick has the ratio of

the most,

the highest percentage of a time a mayor has ever spent in office embattled.

He was embattled the whole time.

It's like one of those like weird statistics where the last mayor who was this embattled was like fighting in the Civil War.

I was going to say he was the last guy that was this embattled was sitting astride a cavalry horse his entire term.

i do have a question have you ever had a have you ever had a guest on the show that can say that i voted for this guy because i voted for him

so did my whole family yeah he was very popular

were you like disillusioned by him was he like a kind of an aoc figure um it's my mom still says he's the best mayor detroit's ever had um which to be fair is a very low bar But I will say in his first term, a lot of hope.

Like for a lot of reasons, I'm sure Riley Eileen will go into.

And then, of course, by the time somehow he got a second term, everybody was like, well, we still have to vote for him.

He's a local boy, but goddamn, that's a lot of crime.

Wait, who was not local?

He's an area man.

It's just all of the little placards, but they instead of the name, they just say area man.

I really like that you're almost like a die-hard Kwame Kilpatrick fan because it reminds me of like, you know how in Eastern Europe, everybody's grandma is still like a huge like number one Stalin fan?

Yeah.

Oh, you should go to gory, Georgia.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

But like, even if you're not in Georgia, even if you're like in Russia or whatever, you talk to anybody old enough and they're like, he should have shot more people.

Yeah, that's fair.

All of my Armenian family have very good opinions of him.

Well, in this case, it's Kwame Kilpatrick, I suppose.

The opinion is he should have paid himself more and gotten more jobs for his friends in Detroit.

That's why this will be the first mayor we covered that was paying himself a lot of money and getting his friends jobs.

That's sort of a new phenomenon.

So much money he stole from the city.

So in 2007,

we're starting sort of towards the end of his career at the Detroit Economic Club before his election.

Barack Obama praises Kwame Kilpatrick as a great American mayor.

However, the following year, he said he should stay away from the Detroit Economic Club, lest he taint the whole proceedings with his shattered public image.

Getting sort of publicly disinvited by Obama from a thing in the town that you're mayor of?

Yeah,

it's the No Kwame's Club.

They already have one.

And we're going to talk a little bit about, well, a little bit, we're going to talk for actually quite some time,

an hour and change, most likely, about exactly why

and how that happened.

That's the thing we're trying to address.

It's a little segment of the podcast we like to call so that just happened.

Yeah.

Yeah.

We were, it's where we got bought out by the Babylon B and now we have to be like this.

Yeah.

No gods, no mayors is taking on a very soy conservative.

I was curious and I texted my mom about what she still thought about Kwame Kilpatrick because it's been a while.

My mom, lifelong Detroiter, we'll never leave.

And said that the only good thing that Donald Trump ever did was let him out of prison.

And she's right.

Yeah, she's absolutely right.

So

to cut to the end, just to start at the end of the story, which I sometimes like to do, Kwame Kilpatrick is now the main booster, was like the Trump, Donald Trump's main black campaign surrogate in Detroit.

Because Kwame Kilpatrick's lengthy prison sentence was commuted by Trump in 2020 upon leaving office in exchange for you have to become the minister of like a, you know, prosperity gospel church and do all of my outreach in Detroit.

Donald Trump just does shit sometimes.

And like with the pardons, especially, I feel like this is where he has made some of his strangest deals.

And it really feels like this was one of them.

This one isn't that strange because Kwame is still really popular.

Despite his, all of his crimes which i i don't speak for all detroiters of course but i will say most of us will acknowledge he is a criminal

but he's our criminal

that's that's what it is that's civic pride you know yeah he might be he might be a criminal but he is area criminal yeah because most detroit's mayors aren't actually from detroit they're from like the white suburbs and

you know

and kwame was a detroit boy and he he he did his best

Well, he certainly did his best at some things.

We're going to talk about it, but first I want to talk about his early life and family, because Kwame Kilpatrick comes from a Democratic machine politics family.

Yeah, his mom is a state senator, right?

Well, she was a state, she was a state senator, and then she was a state representative, excuse me, and then a sort of national representative.

She was in Congress.

So his mother, Carolyn Cheeks Kilpatrick, was a career politician representing Detroit in the Michigan House of Representatives for like 20 years.

Okay, sure.

So like local power base for sure.

Yeah, these are like she and her husband were like Detroit machine.

They were like an updated James Michael Curley, basically, like machine politics.

In 96, she vacates her seat to won for Congress, where she won again, and then held onto her seat until she was successfully primaried in 2010 on the basis of her son being so corrupt that she could not be associated with the party.

It's rare for the legacy to go that way where it starts to like actually eat into your parents as well.

You know, like

your son fucked up so bad that now you get fired.

Yeah,

the reverse Nepo baby sort of

cursing

taken down by my large adult son.

Like a Nepo mom.

The only other Nepo mom I could think of is like Elon Musk's mother.

Yeah.

She's so weird though.

Yeah.

If you've got any other examples of Nepo moms right then, because now I'm curious about that.

So

his father, excuse me, was called Bernard Kilpatrick, who divorced his mother in 81.

Kwame was primarily raised by his mother, but his father comes back more into the scene as Kwame gets more like power.

Yeah, this is interesting because the impression that I got from reading about this is that Kwame Kilpatrick's dad is a gigantic piece of shit, and the worse things are going, the more he's in the picture.

Yeah, that is 100%.

Not to suggest like a causational relationship there, but it really does seem like the relative presence of Bernard Kilpatrick to how badly things are going in Detroit is

it's significant.

I mean, you could really think that what happened is Bernard Kilpatrick was so mad about the divorce, he raised a mind-blowingly corrupt son that would like whipshaw, whipsaw, and ruin his ex-wife's political career.

It's like the portrait of a leader.

You're just like, you're seeing all the seeds get popped, but it's just for like corruption.

I vividly remember people like really, really hating his dad, even probably, like, yeah, we love Kwame, but man, fuck the fuck his dad.

And I don't know how much of a piece of shit a mayor's dad has to be for us to even know what his name is.

Yeah, the mayor's like everything in town is going fine until the mayor's dad started hanging around.

Just kind of a vibe killer.