Salman Rushdie Recovers, Republicans vs. the FBI, and Guest Ken Burns

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Hi, everyone.

This is Pivot from New York Magazine and the Vox Media Podcast Network.

I'm Kara Swisher.

Scott Galloway is still floating down the lazy river during Scott-Free August.

Today, I am thrilled to be joined by writer Roxanne Gay.

Welcome, Roxanne.

Thank you, Kara.

It's so great to be here.

Roxanne, it's great for you to be here.

There's so much news for us to talk about.

So I hope you're ready to have a lot of discussions about all the different things that have been happening in August.

But I first want to talk about what are you up to lately?

What are you spending time doing?

Well,

right now I'm working on a couple TV shows and my next book, which I am desperately trying to finish.

And I am presently in Houston where my dad recently, well, not recently, two days ago or day before yesterday anyway, my dad fell down and broke his hip.

And so we are unexpectedly enjoying some time in Houston.

He's fine.

He's doing well.

He wants to go run a marathon.

So just a little family stuff, a little work stuff.

What about you?

A lot of stuff.

I have a lot of stuff.

My mom has not fallen down and broken her hip yet, but she keeps trying.

But tell me about Texas right now.

I am from Nebraska.

So Texas is very different, but also not.

And so.

I'm in Houston in particular.

And Houston is interesting.

It's a really diverse and integrated city.

And a lot of cities are diverse, but not integrated.

And so I actually enjoy Houston.

And of course, it is also Texas and all of the conservative challenges of Texas.

But

great food, great interesting people.

So far, so good.

My son is dating a young woman from Texas right now.

He met her this summer, and he's very excited to go down there.

So he's excited.

He's excited to do that.

Anyway, she seems fantastic.

Having a good time.

Yeah, I think so.

Well, you know, he's 17, so he can, he has a good time all the time.

Anyway,

that sounds like a fun thing, but today we're going to talk about some serious things, the attack on Selman Rushdie and what it means for public figures.

We'll also get into the backlash into the FBI's search of Mar-a-Lago, although I don't think it's much of a backlash.

I think it's a misinformation backlash.

We'll speak with filmmaker Ken Burns about his new film, The U.S.

and the Holocaust.

But first, Liz Cheney's much anticipated primary is coming up, and she's got a new endorsement from Al Franken.

The former Minnesota senator tweeted, I've decided to endorse for the Republican nomination for the House seat in Wyoming.

It's my first time endorsing in in a GOP primary, but I think Al Franken's support will carry a lot of weight with Wyoming voters, probably negative weight, actually.

So what do you think about Cheney's race?

She's in a tough race against Trump-backed candidate Harriet Hagaman, who used to be her friend.

Talk a little bit about your thoughts about Liz Cheney, because she's sort of a complex figure

who most of the things she says are very disagreeable to most progressives.

At the same time, she's showing a lot of bravery to push back on Trump so much.

So talk talk to me a little bit about your thoughts on her.

I think Liz Cheney, like her father, is someone who is concerned with legacy.

And she understands that the people who did not stand up to Trump are going to absolutely, absolutely be on the wrong side of history.

And she doesn't want that.

But I think just because someone does the right thing doesn't mean that they should be valorized.

And she's wrong.

on so many issues that while I appreciate what she's doing with regard to Trump and the January 6th Commission, I don't think that we need to valorize her.

So why do people do that from your perspective

when you talk about her?

Because there's nobody standing up but her in a lot of ways.

So that is admirable, right?

Admirable to do so and at the expense of your political career, which many people don't do.

Well, you know, is it admirable?

to finally do the right thing after enabling his nonsense for so long?

You know, I think she's the only one for now, and that's that's sad.

And so, yes, I suppose it's admirable, but I also think that the bar for admiration should be a little bit higher.

And I know that makes me seem, you know,

resistant to being open to other perspectives, but it's more that so much of her ideology is so toxic to everything I am and everything I believe that because she's doing this one right thing does not mean that she is going to really benefit progressive ideas.

She's not a progressive.

She's a Republican who is deeply conservative.

But I also think the way that her party has turned on her is just pathetic.

They're so disloyal, they should be embarrassed.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

It's interesting.

She has changed her perspective on some things slowly, like around gay issues and things like that recently.

So it's interesting.

One of the things I found really interesting, and I agree with you because, you know,

she really is quite conservative and people forget that part of it because the bar is so low for the Trump people.

You know what I mean?

It's interesting.

People do progress, I guess, in some fashion, but you're right.

You know, she's probably the most person who's progressed the most, but you're right.

It's, it's a great story.

You know, I just think we have this real desperate tendency to grab onto anyone who offers us even the slightest glimmer of hope in a really dark space.

And I understand that instinct, but I also,

it challenges me.

Yeah, absolutely.

I agree with you.

So another thing, Amazon wants to show us that surveillance can be fun.

Its new reality show, Ring Nation, will feature viral content from Ring surveillance cameras.

That is frightening.

The show will be hosted by Wanda Sykes, who I adore.

Amazon takes the heat for giving Ring footage to police without owner's permission.

Now they're going to make it entertainment.

You know, I used to like America's funniest home videos as much as I hated myself for it, but these are America's funniest home surveillance videos.

What are your thoughts on this?

This seems odd.

Are you a reality TV fan?

I am a reality TV fan.

It's one of my favorite things to watch.

I find it to be really relaxing to watch the foibles of others and messy lives that are not mine.

And, you know, the thing about Ring, I have a Ring doorbell.

I know that it's terrible, but because I travel so much, it does really come in handy because I can talk to the UPS man and beg him to leave the package.

But I think it's a really dangerous road to go down to start to treat.

that kind of surveillance as entertainment because it's not entertainment at all.

And I think the way that we give so much information over to Amazon is not going to end well for the regular consumer.

Right.

I would agree with you.

I find the ones I find really disturbing are the police ones.

You know, it's so undignified.

People love those when they show off the cop ones.

I don't mind the regular reality shows, whether it's the people on the boats or things like that, because that's just silliness.

But when they move into like,

I would assume they're going to do package thefts and it just starts to get really,

I don't know, something, the cops ones really drive me crazy and I find them so distasteful and totally watchable is my issue is that you can't help but look at them, right?

You kind of like looking at them and it's it's a bad, it's a bad quality.

It is.

I've never enjoyed and I never will enjoy anything cop related in terms of reality TV because to me it just reminds us of how systemic so many of our issues are, racism, poverty, and so on.

And when people steal things, they generally are doing so because they have a lack of some kind and so i don't find it particularly entertaining animal stuff kids running around being cute sure give it to me all day but i don't really want to see people in people struggling doing the things that people who struggle do and then laugh at it or judge it in some way.

I think those people are having more difficult, yeah, like their lives are hard enough.

We should not treat it as entertainment because it should not be entertaining.

Yeah, it's also, but it's hard to look away from.

I have a ring doorbell too, and I

had them before they were bought by Amazon.

And I was sort of just, I just kept it.

At the same time, I find like the, when I get into their name, the neighborhood things, it feels, it does feel vaguely racist for one.

Also, making fun of poor people.

And at the same time, I don't love package thieves, right?

Like, who loves a package thief?

But it gives me, it makes me, it gives me pause.

But I'm curious, what is your favorite reality show?

My favorite reality show is probably Real Housewives of Beverly Hills,

followed by any other Real Housewives franchise, and then all of the below deck, but especially the ones with Captain Sandy.

I enjoy a good lesbian show.

Captain Sandy is hot.

She is.

She is.

She is.

Anyway, I'm going to move on.

Speaking of not hot, Elon Musk is all about free speech sometimes.

In a recent legal findings, he criticizes Twitter for defending free speech in India.

Twitter is suing the Indian government over a law that limits criticism of public figures.

Musk filing says that Twitter should stick close to the laws of the countries which it operates.

Of course, he goes on and on about being a free speech absolutist.

It's a little bit hypocritical, I would say.

What do you think of this Twitter?

This case is moving to court rather quickly in Delaware.

Also, Tesla, by the way, monitored the Facebook accounts of employees during a union push in 2017.

I'm just curious what your take is on Elon right now.

He's sort of, he sold some stock in order to deal with probably was going to be a settlement and a loss in court.

Most people feel he's going to lose.

How have you, what you're a big Twitter user.

How do you look at what's happened with him?

I think Elon Musk is ridiculous.

Just because someone is smart or thinks that they're smart and is also wealthy does not mean that we should look to them for guidance on every aspect of life or politics.

And we have this really bad tendency to think that wealth means intelligence and that these are the people who should be driving the country forward.

Elon Musk is all about Elon Musk.

He's thin-skinned.

I mean, who isn't, but he's particularly thin-skinned.

And he clearly can back out of deals just because he decides I no longer want to have that toy.

So seeing him opine about freedom of speech while really not being entirely about free speech in his own actions, I just think he's ridiculous.

Were you worried when he was going to buy Twitter?

He's maybe forced to do so, but I think he's probably will not be forced to do so.

There was a lot of pearl clutching on the left.

It was ridiculous.

There was, I thought, too.

It was absurd.

I was like just so aggravated by people clutching their pearls i was when it first happened i told myself i'm gonna wait before i write about this because i wanted to see what was going to happen i honestly never thought for one single second that he was going to go through with a sale of twitter i think that he wanted attention

and what would you do if he bought if he ended up being forced to buy it i mean

I mean, Carol, what would you do?

I don't think anyone's going to really do anything.

Nothing.

Yeah, it's like saying you're moving to Canada.

People always say, I'm leaving.

I'm quitting this.

I'm quitting that.

But, oh, I'm unsubscribing.

Rarely do they actually do so, though.

So am I leaving Twitter if Elon Musk buys it?

No, of course not.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I don't think he will in the end, though, and it'll struggle on.

But you like it a lot.

You use Twitter a lot, correct?

I used to.

I have used it a lot less in recent months.

I

it's changing.

It's not the same platform it used to be.

And at least for me, it's just incredibly toxic and frustrating.

And I feel like I always have to be defensive.

And that's not how I want to spend my free time.

So I like Twitter still.

I love parts of it, but I don't feel the need to be on Twitter as much as I used to.

Well, you get an enormous amount of attacks, I've noticed.

I watch certain people.

There's certain people that get a lot.

There's certain people who don't, right?

There are.

You know, I think when you're queer, when you're black, when you're fat, when you're a woman, when you're a combination of those things,

it can really get under the skin of certain people and they want to let you know about it.

And then, of course, I write about, you know, this, I mean, as someone who has a lot of opinions as well, when you are opinionated in public, it really can rile up a certain kind of troll.

And so, yeah, I deal with quite a lot.

Do you?

No, actually.

Oddly enough, I get a lot of people lecturing me sometimes.

I don't like your take, but I don't.

I don't know what it is.

I shouldn't welcome trolls, but they seem scared.

I don't know what it is.

I'm really quite cruel when they come at me,

and maybe you're not.

I really do sort of cut them off underneath.

No, I am.

Yes, you are.

You're very funny.

Yeah.

One of my favorite things to do is to deal with them.

Yes, exactly.

In my spare time at night.

Hello, you asshole.

Let me just take you apart piece by piece.

I don't tend to get more.

Then I watch a lot of other, and they're all women, get really eviscerated, even if they're good at.

fighting back.

And I'm sort of like, wow, that hasn't happened to me yet, but that doesn't mean it won't.

In any case, we're going to get on to our first big story.

Selman Rushdie is on the men, thank goodness.

The author was attacked last week at an event in western New York, in Chautauqua, where my ex-wife goes.

And I've been there many, many times.

It's a lovely place.

This is not.

something you would see happening there.

Rushdie has lived with death threats since 1989.

For those who obviously know his background, when the Supreme Leader of Iran issued a fat ordering his assassination, that was the reaction to his 1988 book, The Satanic Verses.

Rushdie came out of hiding in 1998 with a relatively more liberal government, came into power in Iran, but on Friday, the assailant reportedly punched and stabbed the 75-year-old author, who had to be rushed to the hospital by helicopter.

To be clear, authorities have yet to establish a motive for the attack.

Rushdie's representatives say he's now on the path towards recovery after being placed on a ventilator.

The extent of his injuries is still unknown, but they're said to be life-changing.

He may have lost an eye.

There was some cuts to nerves in his arm, but it's not clear yet.

I'd love you to talk about this.

As a writer, obviously, I did an interview with Kathy Griffin.

She was a guest host, and she talked about this, the fear of performing in Florida and Texas.

Now, she doesn't want to.

You know, there's certain places.

This was not a place you would imagine an attack happening.

So it obviously can happen anywhere.

Just what are your thoughts on these attacks?

You know, these attacks are incredibly disappointing and depressing.

When I first heard the news of what had happened to Solman Rushdie, I was appalled and I was horrified for him.

He had lived so much of his life in hiding and with this fatwa over his head.

And I think, like many people, he assumed that he was free to live more of a normal life now.

And

then he wasn't because this kid runs up on stage and stabs him several times.

As a writer who's very opinionated and who gets death threats, every time I walk on stage, I wonder if this is the day that someone is going to harm me or try to harm me.

And it's a really terrible way to have to do your job.

It's unpleasant, but I know that it is magnified

by an infinite degree for someone like Salman Rushdie.

So I just think it's appalling and we have to

have ways to push back on this.

You do a lot of speaking.

Do you, you know, it's not just, it's not just Salman Rushdie, though.

It's, it's, you know, Dave Chappelle was attacked.

Obviously, Chris Rock, that was a more different kind of situation.

But how do you change that, though?

Because everybody feels like they can, you know, say anything they want, and now it's sort of the do anything they want.

It's more than free speech.

It's actually about public safety of yourself in a public place.

I don't know how we change that.

And I'm worried.

I think we need to figure this out pretty quickly because

People who are willing to do anything are literally willing to do anything.

And I don't know how you stop that how you stop that willingness to sacrifice yourself for a toxic ideology

I am at a loss for this one because

you know Trump I think this issue was well before Trump but he really I think loosened the constraints that most people feel when it comes to doing wrong And it has become quite a free-for-all in recent years.

Do you think when you're writing, do you change, oh, this is really going to get me in trouble?

Or is it something you think about more than you did before?

It is definitely something I think about more than I did before.

And I honestly hate it because I never want to

constrain myself in that way, censor myself because I'm afraid of how people might react.

But I don't change my work.

I do go through the anxiety process and I mull it over and sometimes I pause before putting something in the world.

But I don't change my work because of it because then the day I start editing myself out of fear is when it's time for me to find something else to do with my life.

Do you feel like speech has been tamped down, especially by people who talk about free speech and who talk about being censored?

Do you feel like it's that one of the biggest it's it, of course, it's ironic as sort of Josh Hawley talking about being censored when he never shuts up.

Where are we in that discussion?

Because people sort of wing it around and then don't

believe in it, except, you know, me, for me, but not for thee, kind of thing.

Yeah, you know, that discussion is mired in ignorance right now and just nonsense.

And it's incredibly frustrating because a lot of times what people are talking about is that I can't say what I want without consequences.

And I mean, of course, that's frustrating.

I wish we could all say whatever we want without consequence, but that's not reality.

And the people who are actually being censored are writers who are having their books banned all across the country, for example.

And so it's so disingenuous that so many people talk about free speech when they are clearly speaking freely.

Right, exactly.

And where are you on this sort of cancel culture debate now?

It's been going on for quite a while.

I know you were sort of, this is a lot of this is nonsense.

And some people should be, I don't even want to use the word cancel because it's not the right word.

They should get consequences like you were talking about.

I tend to call it consequence culture.

The people who are actually being canceled are rarely the people who talk about cancellation.

There was an essay, I think over the weekend by these two guys from Harvard talking about how one guy was canceled because some students at Milton stood up and quietly walked out of a speech.

And that's not cancellation because people don't want to listen to you talk.

That's taste.

And so I really think that we should have better conversations with more accurate language.

Yeah, I would agree.

I love when you said, call it, because you and I are on the same page on this.

I think it's become a grift for a lot of people, actually.

It's sort of a journalistic grift.

It's a political grift.

And it's sort of, it reduces things to, as you said, walking out on a speech is not canceling them.

It's saying, fuck you, I don't want to listen to you, essentially, which is the essence of free speech, correct?

In my opinion.

Absolutely.

It is.

Roxanne, we're going to go on a quick break.

And by the way, we all hope that Salman Rutschi recovers soon.

And

this attack is an egregious attack on

writers and people who speak out in interesting and often controversial ways.

Anyway, Roxanne, let's go on a quick break.

When we come back, the right says defund the police, which is interesting.

We'll be back also with a friend of Pivot, Ken Burns.

Hello, Daisy speaking.

Hello, Daisy.

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Roxanne, we're back.

Law enforcement is on edge amid growing threats of violence following the FBI's search of Mar-a-Lago, which I like to call Mar illegal.

On Thursday, a gunman tried to enter the FBI's Cincinnati headquarters.

He was killed after a standoff with authorities.

Later reports showed that the gunman was at the Capitol on January 6th, with a surprise.

In Washington, a man shot himself after ramming his car into a barricade at the Capitol.

His motives were unclear.

And in Phoenix, armed Trump supporters protested outside a local FBI office.

What is going on?

I mean, this Marjorie Taylor Greene obviously called to defund the FBI.

A lot of Republicans don't like what she's doing, but they don't seem to stop her.

So how do you look at the sort of the continuing backlash and frontlash to what's happened at Mar-a-Lago?

I am bewildered.

If you had told me a year ago that Republicans would start to co-opt the phrase defund the police,

I would have just been like, come on, stop.

That's too far even for Trump supporters.

But, you know, what happened at Mar-a-Lago was right and just, and it's absurd that the president had classified documents.

Who knows what he was going to do with them, but I'm sure money was involved and espionage.

And the fact that they would be okay with that simply because he's their guy just reveals how shallow their politics are and how corrupt.

They only care about power, and they only care about using that power to subjugate everyone they disapprove of.

And now that that power, the power of law enforcement is being directed to their efforts, they're panicking.

And they're like, oh, no, no, we don't mean that when we talk about the importance of the blue line.

We mean something else entirely.

Right, right, exactly.

It's only aimed at certain people.

So when you think about that, it was so interesting to be, to hear, well, I think it was Dan Crenshaw.

Dan Crenshaw?

Yeah, he was like, I couldn't have imagined that

Democrats could get us to say defund the FBI.

He was insulting, obviously, Marjorie Taylor Greene.

Talk a little bit about that because it's like they can't, they sort of are putting here.

You have Democrats defending the FBI and police and Republicans wanting them.

I mean, I think Paul Gozar said to destroy them on some level.

And I think that's the word he used.

It just blows my mind.

I don't even, I can't even believe that it's real.

It's parody.

And I think that this is an extension of what happened on January 6th.

We are not getting our way.

And so we are going to now break the law until we get our way.

And that's not democracy, that's tyranny.

Right.

And we are definitely hurtling toward tyranny at a really alarming rate because a lot of these Republicans keep saying we have more guns and

we have this and we have that as if that's all it's going to take.

And well, I one, reject the idea that they have more guns, but I also

it's just so dangerous because, you know, Jamal Bowie wrote about this in the Times.

You know, if we, you know, it's fraught to do something, but if if we do nothing that's even worse and we simply cannot do nothing when a president a former president decides to commit espionage we simply cannot and so right you know these are incredibly complicated times where do you see it playing out now with this i feel like they've you always think they've gone too far and then it seems like there's more to go essentially breitbart published leaked version of the trump search warrant that included the names of fbi agents you know leaking a lot of this information that brings danger to these people.

Now, the FBI has had a checkered history of opposing progressive movements, including the civil rights movements, and it's closely monitored Black Lives Matter.

At the same time, this is, I don't think anyone has done something like this, like putting them also in danger, and not something I would advocate in any way.

Yeah, this is just so far beyond the pale.

I would never defend the FBI as an institution for exactly the reasons that you've said.

But the idea that you are going to target people in law enforcement because they did their jobs is,

again, it shows how far gone these people are.

There's no point in reaching across the aisle because they're on a different planet.

And

I just, I don't think it's going to end well.

I think that these are people who will literally do anything.

And it's definitely, I think that there is going to be something terrible.

Such as, is there, is, do you have any hope that they will just pull themselves back from the brink?

It doesn't seem like they, they seem like they want to throw themselves right off the edge willingly.

I agree.

I think they want to throw themselves off the edge.

I think at least, I think somebody is going to lose their life because one of these people have decided that they're going to take care of the FBI.

And that really chills me because, you know,

anybody could be next.

Anybody that disappoints them, that irritates them, that angers them.

I think that the threats are very real.

I think we have to take them seriously.

And

I think it's incredibly chilling.

And I really hope I'm wrong.

And I, you know, the reality is the one person who could pull them back is simply not going to do so because he's happy that they're doing this.

He wants them to, just like on January 6th.

Yep, absolutely.

And that weird exchange with the FBI that he had, and I want to turn down the heat, and then he turns it up, was really, really quite repulsive on every, you know, it's interesting if this will be the one.

There's people are always like, is this the one that's going to get him and stop him?

And it seems like they go one after the next, and it doesn't seem to work.

But this is really as far, they just seem to want January 6th over and over again.

That's what I feel like.

I agree.

Speaking of difficult topics, let's bring in our friend of Pivot.

Ken Burns is an Emmy award-winning filmmaker of documentaries, including The Civil War, War, baseball, and jazz.

He joins us today to discuss his latest work called The U.S.

and the Holocaust, which looks at the links between German atrocities and the American legal and social movements of the 1930s.

Welcome, Ken.

It's good to talk to you again.

It's great to be with you.

Thank you.

So last time we talked, it was about, I believe it was jazz.

Vietnam.

Right.

And Muhammad Ali, actually.

So I want to talk to you about this.

I don't know if you know this.

I was a Holocaust studies minor at Georgetown.

I went to the Foreign Service School, and I studied propaganda.

And so I obviously this was one of the most disturbingly important propaganda events in his one of them, one of the many.

But I was curious why you wanted to make the film.

I love this

framing of it through American history through the lens of the Holocaust because it's often painted entirely on the Nazis.

Obviously, that's the angle most people take.

Can you walk us through why you went in this fashion?

Sure.

This film, I have to say, right from the outset, is co-directed by Lynn Novick and Sarah Botstein and written by my oldest and longest collaborator, Jeffrey Ward.

You know, after our World War II series called The War came out in 2007, a lot of people came out of the woodwork to say, you know, why didn't you do this?

Why didn't you say that FDR was an anti-Semite?

Why didn't the St.

Louis get picked up?

Why wasn't the rail lines to Auschwitz?

And you sort of collected a sense that even though we treated the Holocaust as part of the larger World War II, there was more to talk about it.

And kind of an idea went off.

And then after the Roosevelts that only Jeff and I were involved in, Sarah and Lynn were working on other projects with me in Vietnam mostly,

the same sort of questions happened.

And so we began to think at the 2014, end of 2014, that maybe we should do a film on the U.S.

and the Holocaust.

And at that point, we were approached by the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., and said, we're launching an exhibition called Americans and the Holocaust, and we think it might be something you'd be interested in.

And we said, yes, can we work with you?

Can you point us to scholars?

Can you point us to archives?

Can you help us understand and lead us to survivors and be there?

And they said, yes.

And so, in association with them, seven and a half years later, Lynn and Sarah and I have our film, The U.S.

and the Holocaust, three episodes, which will be on PBS starting September 18th.

But it was an attempt to look at it through what we knew and what we didn't know and what we perhaps should have known, what we did and what we didn't do, and what we should have done.

And also, as you said, the echoes between,

you know, that is endemic to all human beings that are racist and xenophobic and nativist and

anti-Semitic.

Right.

Which was heavy in this time.

People forget.

People, one of the things that drives me crazy is the, it's usually framed that the Holocaust was some discovery that they had no idea.

If you had just read anything of Hitler, she'd be like, oh, I see what he's going to do.

Same thing, you know, with even Trump, with immigration.

It was like, this is what he's going to do.

And I used to argue with tech people about what he was going to do.

But it is framed that way that Americans

had no idea this was happening or could happen.

Can you talk a little bit about that?

Yeah, well, we, you know, we take a great deal of time and trouble to talk about what we knew when we knew it and what the public opinion was.

And,

you know, the tendency to focus on the bold-faced names and to just gravitate everything over to some very simplistic question about whether FDR is an anti-Semite or not just totally helps shut down the whole thing.

You know, we have bold-faced names in American business.

Henry Ford, you know, who is promoting eugenics and promoting, you know, the protocols of the elders of Zion in his racist newspaper, The Dearborn Independent, which is the second highest circulation in the country, which is, you know, that's an old Russian hoax.

And it helps to reignite in a way because of how important he is, anti-Semitism.

We're involved in eugenics.

We think that you can control how people are born and what happens after they're born.

Even Helen Keller, who would probably be

put to death under the very death panels, to borrow the phrase from the anti-ACA people,

is nonetheless for that.

And talking about actually making a decision about the life of a now-born child,

you have Charles Lindbergh, one of the great heroes in American life, who is not just anti-war, which is a perfectly legitimate position after the First World War.

We're not going to get involved in Europe's troubles, but he's actually fairly pro-German and most importantly, he's anti-Semitic to the core.

And so you have, we had to put a date stamp on some color footage of Nazis parading around because it's in New Jersey, not Nuremberg.

And so you have, we have to, it's not complicity.

I mean, the Germans went and studied our Jim Crow laws to understand their earliest,

you know, anti-the exclusionary laws against the Jews.

There's not a cause and effect.

It's just that these things exist in the breast of human beings, this nativism, this anti-Semitism, this, you know,

the anti-immigrant sentiments.

They're all there.

And we wanted to be able to draw it.

And I think paradoxically, Kara, by focusing on the United States, it actually let us see the event of the Holocaust in a little bit more clearer light.

It wasn't sort of bulging at the edges.

You could understand, oh, wow, two million are killed before anyone mentions gas, the showa by bullets.

This is important to distinguish and understand the difference between a killing center in Nazi-occupied Poland and a concentration camp.

I've been thinking a lot about that relationship between Jim Crow and the various laws in Nazi Germany, and we always wonder which came first.

But I'm curious, like, what can we take today

from what we have learned from that period of history to not go back to those kinds of laws in any part of the world?

That, Roxanne, is the question.

You know, I don't know.

You know, we

the Germans did study our Jim Crow laws.

You know, racism has been endemic in the human breast for as long as there have been human beings, and we find this manifestation.

In fact, when we would protest to the German government in the early and mid-30s, before the real horrors began to happen, it was horrible enough for German Jews, they would look at us and go, Mississippi, like you can't talk to us.

You consider these people inferior, and you've designed these laws that proscribe their lives in lots of different ways.

And,

you know, there's laws that don't really protect them against the evils that you do.

We feel the Jews are inferior.

Don't talk to us.

Mississippi, Mississippi, Mississippi.

And so what happens is we have to, I assume, is just tell stories about this.

If you make arguments, nobody listens, right?

Richard Powers said, you know, the best arguments in the world won't change a single person's point of view.

The only thing that can do that is a good story.

And, you know, I'm just, I'm sort of involved.

Lynn is involved.

Sarah and I are involved in trying to tell a good story about this period and hope that maybe around the edges where changes always take place,

something can move because this is intolerable.

And our film comes right up to the present and grabs the bull by the horn and says, we're not going to leave when the limited immigration law of the Johnson-Reed Act of 24 gets kind of changed in 65 by LBJ.

We got to come right up to the present, which we do.

Right.

So when you were talking about when they point to Mississippi, were they also inspired by American racial segregation?

So she was saying, chicken or egg kind of thing.

Inspired is probably

the right word,

maybe the right word.

I mean, Germans study our Jim Crow exclusionary laws and actually pass discriminary laws laws against the Jewish, which are actually, in terms of the definition of a Jew, a little less rigorous, shall we say, than the Jim Crow laws.

You know, the famous saying that one drop of Negro blood.

And in the German case, the Jews were distinguished between Jews and mongrels of a couple orders and then the Aryans.

So presumably you could be one-eighth Jewish and kind of get away with it.

But in the United States, one drop of, as they said, the statute said, Negro blood, and

that was it, it enough to discriminate against you.

Not that people didn't pass, but I just think they came to that.

Hitler was a great admirer of what we'd done to Native peoples, and I think it's very important to go back to that and say, you know,

the killing of and the corralling into reservations, slash, you know, he would say concentration camps was a really good thing.

And then all of a sudden, America went to hell because it was under the sway of Jews and blacks in music and in culture and all sorts of things.

And we had dissipated ourselves.

And we find this, you know, constant presence in our history.

It dates well back from the period I'm talking about, to the very beginning.

My last film was on Benjamin Franklin, and he was lamenting that the German immigrants, who he called swarthy, were coming into Pennsylvania and disturbing the lovely white and the red, by which he meant in a kind of romantic way, and also a Quaker tolerant way, the native populations that were being continually displaced and pushed forward by settlement and by his and others like George Washington's land deals.

It's super, super complicated.

And there's not a kind of clear,

it is a chicken and an egg.

There's not a clear delineation of who started it.

I've got to assume it started at the very beginning when we made someone the other, when we are in fact all us.

You know, one of the things that I've seen over the years is that Germany has in some ways tried to reckon with the events of World War II.

What kinds of things did they do to acknowledge the Holocaust and the wrong they had done?

And do we need a similar reckoning here in the United States?

Reparations perhaps for the Native American genocide and certainly for practices like enslavement?

Yeah, I would love to know your thoughts on that.

Yeah, it's a really good point.

Not to downplay a resurgence of neo-Nazi sentiment within Germany today, but the Germans really handled it well.

They accepted responsibility.

They had a reckoning, as you say.

There are places you walk around Berlin and you can see little plaques on the ground that commemorating a particular life, right, embedded into the sidewalk.

It was a way in which you can't take a few steps without understanding that we've got a history that we have to deal with.

We have a history we have to own.

We have a history we have to come to terms with.

And that's something that Americans just don't do.

We want a sanitized Madison Avenue version of our past that looks good and smells good.

And now the tendency is to say we can't even talk about slavery because that will make students uncomfortable about our past.

Well, our whole country is founded on the idea that all men are created equal, articulated by someone who owned other human beings.

hundreds of them in his lifetime.

And he didn't see the contradiction of the hypocrisy and more important, didn't see fit in his lifetime to free any one of those human beings who had the equal rights to him.

And so we are waiting, I think, for an American opportunity.

I mean, part of what we're talking about is

this is a story, our just relationship to the Holocaust.

I mean, we did more, Roxanne, than any other sovereign nation in letting people in.

But if I believe, this is just me speaking, if we'd done 10 times that, we would have failed.

We needed to shout louder.

We needed to help more people.

And so it's a history that I think we need to reckon with ourselves.

And maybe by reckoning with that, we might look back and perhaps pull out the sort of unfortunate fuel rods of binary politics to get at the idea of reparations or reconciliation or recompense or something that addresses the long-standing issues that Native peoples have and that obviously African Americans, blacks, brought not as willing immigrants, but as kidnapped, as free labor to build our country.

Aaron Powell, Ken, one of the things that you talked about, this idea of cleanliness of American history, I agree with you.

I'm sort of always referencing things that people have, you know, they've moved along.

I think the resurgence against critical race theory, for example, was exactly that, making it uncomfortable to talk about.

things that happened.

You talk about that we brought in more people from those countries during the Holocaust, but there was a real role of American business in the Holocaust and collaboration with the Nazis, business collaboration.

Can you talk a little bit about that?

Because one of the things I've noticed is, you know, tech companies like Google and Amazon worked with the Trump administration on immigration crackdowns.

There's a lot of, I don't know how it does to say it, but red-pilled engineers in Silicon Valley these days that

you can't talk about racial and gender diversity.

They've moved very significantly to the right in Silicon Valley, I would say.

Yeah, well, this is the plus a change.

It's there.

Let's start where it hurts, right?

The Associated Press was willing to fire all their Jewish employees as a price of doing business in Germany.

I mean, you want me to talk about Henry Ford, which I will, you know, the aviator Charles Lindbergh, who's, you know, just loves the Nazis up a lot and his virulent statements as part of the America First Committee are, you know, blatantly.

patently anti-Semitic things.

Henry Ford, as we said, published the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

He turned down a British contract, potential contract, to make things for the German army.

So it's, you know, it's all there.

Everybody's involved and in a business.

Hollywood, for example, the vice consul in Los Angeles had a kind of a green light control over scripts if it had to do with anything German.

And nothing,

and many of these studios were run by Jewish immigrants.

You know, nothing went out for years and years and years that said anything wrong.

The only studio that was different was the Warners, also Jewish Warner Brothers,

and they did.

The first outwardly anti-Nazi film was about spies.

And so in every way, shape, and form, the almighty dollar trumped the

conscience of the people.

At what point do you say, no, you know what?

We're not going to do business with this sort of thing, the kind of things we're wrestling with when certain industries remain in the former Soviet Union and some

get out and do that.

It's the same old story.

This is why history is so valuable because it gives you at least a little bit of distance, but it's talking about exactly the same things.

Right.

No, the pushback is astonishing when you say in Silicon Valley, really you want to be doing this business?

Don't be so woke.

I'm so exhausted by listening to them.

I'm like, it seems.

Well, this is what happens.

Everything gets co-opted.

Critical race theory, as everyone knows, is just in some remote corner of legal college discussion.

Nobody's teaching it at elementary or middle school or high school level.

You get co-opted.

You say black lives matter.

Like, please, can we do that?

That gets co-opted.

Well, what about other lives?

You know, you're going, all those other lives don't get killed by the police every other day, you know?

So, you know, everything gets co-opted by

that

right-wing media machine, and it becomes impossible to say even anything

without it being corrupted and turned as a weapon against you.

And that's what happens.

Yep.

Is there anything we can do as consumers to push companies to do better, to not repeat history's mistakes, because so often we see these companies do the same things that we saw Henry Ford do, Charles Lindbergh, and so on.

How can we encourage these companies to do better and to do different?

And also, how can we encourage ourselves to do better and to do different and get somewhere closer to recompense and reconciliation?

Yeah, that's the key, Roxanne.

I think, you know, we're always saying, well, you know, and Cara's complaint about Silicon Valley notwithstanding completely legitimate is that I think the corporate corporate community has in recent years exerted some force on Arizona with regards to MLK and showing that there might be a price in Indiana for Dobbs and their enthusiastic endorsement of that.

So I think that they haven't gone completely enough, but I think it's we have to be involved.

It cannot be separate.

We cannot say, well, the answer to the question is just if corporate America would do this.

Actually, I don't do enough, right?

And

maybe maybe you do, but I don't do enough.

And so, how to do this?

My particular area is to subscribe with the novelist Richard Powers and realize if you just tell stories, maybe some people.

We accelerated, I, you know, much to Sarah and Lynn's chagrin, this film that was going to be comfortably released in 2023, I moved it up a year ago and said, we're going to do it in 22, because I just felt there was an urgency to what was happening in our country, the fragility that the writer Daniel Mandelson says, that

our institutions are as fragile as they were.

Look, I mean, let's maybe rephrase it and say, if you wanted to go to the hippest, most artistic, most vibrant, most cosmopolitan city on Earth in 1930 or 31 or 32, you would have no better choice than to go to Berlin in architecture, in cinema,

in painting, in music, in all sorts of ways, ideas and the discussion of ideas.

And then it wasn't.

And he said, and Daniel Mendelssohn says in our film, don't kid yourself.

Just because these people are in sepia pictures think that they are not like us, they are exactly like us.

And human nature never says.

The Bible told us that.

You know, there's nothing new under the sun.

History doesn't repeat itself.

That's kind of a nice little thing we go off on and then satisfy ourselves.

It's just that human nature remains this.

And within us is this incredible capacity for racism and for anti-Semitism and for nativist thought and making the other of people rather than understanding there's only us and there's no them.

And when anyone says there's a them, run as far away as you possibly can.

Them.

One of the things I've really noticed is the complaint I would imagine you're going to get from this, from that group is, why do we need to feel bad about ourselves?

We fought World War II.

We beat the Germans, right?

And now Ken is coming along trying to make us, this is a tactic they use for everything.

Trump is using it right now.

Like, they're in my, you know, I didn't break the law.

Well, if I did, it's okay because I can break the law, et cetera.

How do you deal with that reaction?

Why should we feel bad about how we handle the Holocaust?

We consider ourselves the greatest country on earth.

We talk about American exceptionalism.

The historian Nell Painter in our film says we are an extraordinary people.

We do have an extraordinary country, but sometimes we're not.

And what makes something extraordinary in athletic, say, the best athlete, is that you are rigorously self-disciplined.

You are constantly critical of your last performance to make your next performance better.

We don't do that in the United States.

We go best?

Okay, fine.

Let's go to sleep and let's pop in more, you know, soda into our mouth and let's just go on from there.

So what we require, I mean, look at Texas, which is trying to change and sanitize this history.

Their religion is football.

And off on Friday night, the high school coach and on Saturday afternoon, the college coach doesn't say, you know, we sucked on defense, but we were really good on offense and that's what got us through this thing.

And now we have to go to work and we have to make better.

The coach would not last.

So why can't we do that about ourselves and look and have some reckoning with the things in the past that we've done well?

And this film, as you know, is filled with the points of light and the heroism of the Joint Jewish

Distribution Committee, the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, Varian Fry, a writer who went to southern France and with a WASPI consul, Hiram Bingham III, got unbelievable artists and just so-called ordinary people out.

Or there's the um the war refugee board created by a bureaucrat in the treasury department john paley that helped create uh save more lives than anything else the united states did in terms of the jewish refugees while the holocaust was going on that gets told too and so what we're saying is this is not all bleak this is not a bummer this is just what it is it's like walking out and it's raining well why ken are you telling us that it's raining because it's uh effing raining that's what yeah i get that we get that Me and Roxanne get that.

In any case, this is a really terrific film.

And as someone who's studied the Holocaust quite a lot,

over many, many decades, it's a really great thought of how you think about our responsibility here, which we had a great responsibility.

As you say, the U.S.

and the Holocaust premieres September 18th on PBS.

Ken, thank you, and I'm excited to interview you in New York about this.

Great.

Can't wait to see you.

Thanks, Ken.

Thanks.

Thanks, Roseanne.

Thank you, Ken.

All right, Roxanne, one more quick break.

We'll be back for predictions.

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Okay, Roxanne, I need a prediction from you.

I predict that the midterms are going to

bear fruit for the Democrats.

I think that there are a lot of good signs of democratic movement, and we have seen a lot of really positive indicators, both in the economy, in terms of job reports, in terms of movement on Biden's agenda.

And I'm feeling really encouraged.

And I know that Democrats like to be pessimistic, but I think it's important to

express a little bit of optimism.

And I'm not an optimist, actually.

I'm a realist, but I think that there's a lot of potential for the midterms.

And do you see any one issue?

Is it gas prices are down?

Is it abortion?

Is it this mar-a-lago stuff that looks disturbing to average people who don't feel like screaming and yelling at all points in their lives?

Partly, it's all of the above, but mostly I think it's abortion.

I think that conservatives really, conservative men really, really underestimated how many people value the right to abortion, whether they admit it publicly or not.

And so that could be the thing that pushes it in a more positive direction for Democrats.

Yes, I think that might be the tipping point.

But I could also be wishful thinking.

I don't know.

But I think it's the tipping point.

I would tend to agree with you.

You're right.

Democrats should be more optimistic than they are.

They tend to look at everything as if it's going to fall apart, which it often does.

Yeah, because it has.

Yeah, it has.

That's true.

Anyway, we want to hear from you.

Send us your questions about business tech or whatever's on your mind.

Go to nymag.com slash pivot to submit a question for the show or call 855-51-PIVOT.

Okay, Roxanne, thank you so much.

That is the show.

Where can we see you next?

You can see me in the New York Times and my podcast will be returning for a fourth season in the fall.

So you'll see me there and

hopefully on your bookshelves next year.

What is the name of that podcast?

My podcast is called the Roxanne Gay Agenda.

Oh, I love that name.

You know, you have a name of your substack, The Audacity.

That was one of the names.

I have a new podcast coming.

And we were like, The Audacity would be a great podcast name.

And they were like, oh, Roxanne has it.

We're not wrangling with her.

It's a wonderful name.

It's a wonderful name.

I was really excited to find it.

I was like, I don't have the audacity to go up against Roxanne on a podcast name, but it's a great name.

We love it.

And you should also read that too.

It was funny.

I would happily share the audacity.

You're audacious.

No, I know, but I think I'll let you keep it.

I think you are more audacious than I am, but I appreciate it.

We were laughing so hard about it.

Anyway, we'll be back on Friday for more, and I'm going to read us out.

Today's show was produced by Lara Naiman, Evan Engel, and Taylor Griffin.

Ben Woods engineered this episode.

Make sure you subscribe to wherever you listen to podcasts.

Thanks for listening to Pivot from New York Magazine and Vox Media.

We'll be back later this week for another breakdown of all things tech and business.

Roxanne, I'm a huge fan and says hi to your lovely wife, Debbie.

I will.

And she says hi back, and I say thank you for having me.

This has been a real fun because I love talking about current events.

Thanks, Roxanne.