Charlottesville: One Year Later

Charlie Sheen is an icon of decadence.

I lit the fuse and my life turns into everything it wasn't supposed to be.

He's going the distance.

He was the highest paid TV star of all time.

When it started to change, it was quick.

He kept saying, no, no, no, I'm in the hospital now, but next week I'll be ready for the show.

Now, Charlie's sober.

He's going to tell you the truth.

How do I present this with a class?

I think we're past that, Charlie.

We're past that, yeah.

Somebody call action.

Yeah.

AKA Charlie Sheen, only on Netflix, September 10th.

It's been a year since white supremacists marched through the streets of Charlottesville, Virginia.

A year since Heather Heyer, a young woman protesting against the march of the so-called alt-right, was brutally killed by one of those demonstrators.

And a year since America's president initially declined to condemn them.

How have those events in Charlottesville changed America?

What hasn't changed at all?

This is Radio Atlantic.

Hi, I'm Matt Thompson, executive editor of The Atlantic.

With me from New York is my co-host, my esteemed co-host, Alex Wagner.

Hello, Alex.

Matt, it's great to hear your voice.

Happy summer.

Great to hear yours, and happy summer to you.

Our other esteemed co-host, Jeff Goldberg, is off gallivanting.

However, with me in DC are two of our inestimable colleagues, senior editor Jillian White.

Hi Matt.

Hi Jillian.

Womp womp.

And our deputy politics editor Adam Serwer.

Hello Adam.

Hey Matt.

Whoop, whoop.

Hey Alex.

Thanks for having me.

It's great.

Thanks for joining us, guys.

It's great to have you.

Yes, and thank you for joining us for this light-hearted topic.

A year ago, this weekend, on August 11th and 12th, 2018, demonstrators from a cluster of white supremacist and white nationalist groups, the quote-unquote alt-right, organized in Charlottesville, Virginia for the Unite the Right rally.

Who can forget those images of the rally, its aftermath, tiki torch bearing white supremacists marching through Charlottesville, southern college town, armored demonstrators beating people with pipes and sticks, and of course, a Dodge challenger plowing into a crowd of counter-protesters, killing one woman, Heather Heyer.

And then we heard America's president, Donald Trump, equivocating, talking about, quote, very fine people and bad people on both sides.

His business advisory council disbanded as its CEO members abandoned him.

Many Republicans issued a rare criticism of President Trump.

Now, it's a year later, and I want to ask you guys the question:

How did the events last year in Charlottesville change America?

Adam, let me start with you.

You've been reporting on this question, and what have you found?

What has changed since that event?

Well, I think one thing that's important is that the murder of Heather Heyer really derailed a rebranding effort on the part of the white nationalist movement in America to sort of make themselves respectable and mainstream.

The guys who hoped that they might become

might be seen as less fringe,

you know, they

have all been dealing with, you know, public humiliation, legal consequences, and just generally, nobody was fooled because precisely because the events in Charlottesville turned bloody, no one was fooled about

what they represented.

Unfortunately, at the same time,

they see themselves as having an ally in the White House.

And Donald Trump has continued to echo their politics and pursue policy priorities that they hold dear.

I mean, when the president talks about immigrants infesting the country, that's something that's relatively commonplace to hear in white nationalist circles.

And you look at the way that the president has revoked

legal status for for hundreds of thousands, if not over a million immigrants legal

and undocumented in this country over the past couple of years.

And you see that

even though

the men who rallied in Charlottesville did not succeed in sort of sanitizing their views,

they have a lot to be happy about.

It's gotten more diffuse

and harder, I would say, in some respects to keep atop of the course and currents of the alt-right.

From my vantage point, a year ago,

you had figures like Richard Spencer, who was then ascendant and kind of make a claim to being the kind of voice mouthpiece of an ascendant movement.

And now it's scattering in a bunch of different directions.

How has the movement changed in the past year?

Well, a lot of the people that you saw getting a lot of attention have been discredited or have been marginalized or have, you know, suffered from internal struggles.

Look at Richard Spencer.

He sort of complained that

his provocative mini Nuremberg rallies are no longer fun because Antifa shows up and threatens to punch him in the face.

As you may recall, Spencer is very well known for a gif of him being punched in the face at inauguration,

which is, you know, the anti-the militant anti-leftist group Antifa has made it a point to respond to gatherings they deem fascist with physical violence, although not

armed with lethal weapons.

When you look at Christopher Cantwell, who is the subject of a Vice documentary, who was, you know, on TV talking about how he's going to kill all these people, he ended up being prosecuted.

He was sort of humiliated by the fact that when he found out there was a warrant for his arrest,

he put up a YouTube video of himself

crying and sobbing about the fact that the police were after him.

When you look at Matthew Heimbach, who is the head of

the white nationalist Traditional Workers' Party,

his organization is not doing so well.

He got into a fight with his father-in-law, I guess, because he was having an affair with his father-in-law's wife.

You know,

there's a lot of

real housewives-type drama in the white nationalist movement at this point.

And

a lot of those guys, you know, aren't doing as well as they did a year ago.

I mean, you look at Milo Yiannopoulos,

who was sort of a fellow traveler and who essentially allowed white nationalists to edit his big Breitbart essay on Nazis that was attempting to make them more acceptable to the conservative movement.

He sort of lost his sponsors and been discredited.

You know, a lot of these guys are not doing so great individually.

But the purpose of an ideological vanguard is not necessarily to convert everyone.

It's to lead the politics of a larger political entity like the Democratic or the Republican Party in their direction.

And I think if you look at the way that Fox News talks about race, you look at the way that the president talks about race, and you look at the way in which the conservative audiences and the outlets that they look to to give them information about the world, I think there's no question but that the alt-right has

pulled these entities in their direction.

So these individual guys might seem like losers, but in some sense they have been very successful at making the country a little bit more like them.

Adam, can I ask a question though?

As we see some of these guys driven underground, if you will, I mean, we're talking about this against a backdrop of Alex Jones being kicked off of a lot of social media, Spotify.

And I want to come back to that, too.

Yeah.

But I guess my question is: to what degree is the racial animus that is part of conservative ideology at this point?

I mean, you point out family separation policy at the border, that at its root is racial animus, right?

To what degree is that

born of the sort of alt-right flag bearers, standard-bearers?

And to what degree has that always been a strain in American politics that's finding a moment right now?

I actually think that, I mean,

I think that it's a strain in American politics that's finding a moment right now, but I think that the alt-right is a symptom of that.

You know, in the same way that Donald Trump is a symptom of this resurgence of white identity politics, the alt-right is also a manifestation of that.

And I would never say that the alt-you know, I wouldn't,

there's a chicken and the egg question here, but I would say that the

the larger structural issues that have led to the Republican Party embracing,

you know, at least in the form of Donald Trump, this kind of white identity politics.

Those are the

same structural trends that are feeding the alt-right.

My point is simply that while individually these guys aren't looking so great, you know, to a certain extent,

they succeeded at what they wanted to do, which was to make their ideas and their philosophy more mainstream

i'm curious how do you think jillian from the vantage point of someone who is steering coverage of watching how we talk about and process even in the press um the

these

variably white nationalist

uh white supremacist alt-right people and their ideologies.

How has it changed from that vantage point

to you?

What have you seen?

Have our norms shifted in how we

talk about and cover these folks?

Yeah, so I mean, I think the thing that we started seeing last year with Charlottesville, and even perhaps a little bit before that, is the need to have a conversation in the first place about kind of what Adam was just talking about, what these groups purport to be, and then what

they actually are in reality.

So had Charlottesville gone a different way, had there not been kind of this bloody and violent outcome, had Heather Heyer not died, I think there could have been the push to continue referring to them at least in part in the way that they wanted to be referred to, which was kind of just as this separate group promoting a specific type of ideology, promoting a return to supposed American traditional norms or whatever they were trying to purport to be.

But

when you come out, tiki torches blazing, racial rhetoric

becoming violent.

Jews will not replace us.

Right.

It's hard to spin that one away.

Yeah.

So it's

and I think this is part of the problem, the branding issue that they ended up having, which was that people came out there and were exactly who people feared that they were, and then someone died.

So I think in a way that has called media platforms into account more to really be specific about what these groups are trying to do and what they have done and what their supporters are doing and what they have done.

Aaron Ross Powell, what has been the role of the presidential bully pulpit in

how has it changed?

How has Trump changed how we think about and talk about these forces?

A lot of folks, as I noted in

the setup for this, a lot of folks on the president's economic council distanced themselves from him, left the council in the immediate aftermath of Charlottesville.

But some of them kind of quietly crept back in.

Right.

Right.

They're having dinner with the president

this week.

I mean, they're having dinner with the president this week.

I mean, if you look at

if

I mean, if you look at Corey Stewart in Virginia, Corey Stewart won a senatorial primary, even though his aides are, you know,

basically fellow travelers of white nationalists.

He himself endorsed a white nationalist, Paul Nellen,

in Wisconsin and then disavowed him later once he started going after the Jews.

But as long as he was going after Muslims and Latino immigrants, it was perfectly fine.

I mean, I think the question is: you know, Republican legislators, for the most part, there are some exceptions.

You look at someone like Steve King, who regularly parrots white nationalist rhetoric.

Republican legislators have thus far resisted embracing this kind of politics.

The question is, how long can they do that while news outlets like Republican or conservative outlets like Fox are actually echoing those philosophies?

Now, if you look at the way that the Nazis look at a show like Tucker Carlson's show, they think that Tucker Carlson is a true believer, that he's one of them, and that to the extent that he moderates at all, it's just because he wants to keep his show on Fox.

But in fact,

he is priming white America for the race war.

Like if you look at the things that Carlson says, Carlson regularly regularly complains about quote unquote demographic change in America and Democrats are trying to rig elections by bringing all these Latin American immigrants in.

And sometimes you see other Fox News hosts like Lauren Gren say things like that.

And like when white nationalists see this, they recognize themselves in it.

And so my question is,

How long can we go with Fox News audiences being told that the, not crime, not labor competition, not illegal immigration, but the mere presence of people of color in this country is a threat to them.

How long can they go being told that and not expect their legislators to reflect those views?

And I don't know the answer to that.

And as long as

they continue being told these things, eventually, you know,

they're going to start wanting people in Congress who say the same things.

Yeah.

Alex, you have been traveling around the country for much of the year talking with not only legislators and policymakers and activists, but also voters and

everyday Americans.

From what you've seen,

how have the events in Charlottesville changed us?

Well,

it's interesting.

I was doing a focus group with some Trump voters in Pennsylvania earlier this week, and

the sort of talking points that I was getting from, they were women and they were young women and they were all Trump supporters.

And a few of them said, you know, the media calls this president a bigot and a racist.

They call people who support this president a bigot and a racist.

Those are the worst things you can call someone, right?

There was a real palpable sense of outrage.

These insults were being hurled at them and their president, and they felt that was really unjust.

On the flip side, they had no compunction about categorizing all undocumented people trying to come into this country and in this country as nefarious criminals, drug dealers, the sort of scourge of American society.

There was no sense that perhaps that talking point in and of itself was racist.

You know, the defense of the president's tweet against LeBron James wasn't seen as an explicitly racist dog whistle.

That was seen as, you know, a president mouthing off about Don Lemon and LeBron James, who just happened to be black.

There is a real inability to kind of connect the dots, or I would say, maybe a full-throated like denial that this is racism in any way or racial animus.

And the outrage that it could be construed as such was really surprising to me, right?

But to Adam's point, like at what,

I can't stop thinking about this t-shirt that went around the internet that said, I'd rather be a Russian than a Democrat.

And I feel like it's only a matter of time before

there is a sort of acceptance slash defiance.

Like, I'd rather, you know, I'd rather embrace sort of racial, racist rhetoric than be,

you know, snowflake or whatever the alternative,

you know, whatever the flip side of that is.

And I feel like we're getting dangerously close to that.

So

is your sense from that group that you spoke to that being called a bigot or a racist is being worse than called,

you know, white supremacist adjacent or like not supremacists?

I think

there's still a real, in sort of like polite society, if you will, among suburban white voters and women, right?

There's still a sense that you don't want to be a bigot or a racist.

But we are now nearing this sort of precipice at this chasm where the division is so steep, the sense of outrage is so profound that I can, I mean, the idea that someone's saying I'd rather be a Russian than a Democrat tells you everything you need to know about the degree to which people will go to defend.

President Trump and some of the policies that he supports.

They'll disavow their fellow citizens, right?

So at what point are they, does this sort of,

am I being like too convoluted and all this?

I guess my question is at what point, is it okay to be a racist if you think the racist policies are in fact good ones for America?

Do you know what I'm saying?

I think maybe we're nearing that point.

You know, if you look at, there's a, there's a, one of the,

you know, one of America's seminal immigration scholars, John Hingham, he,

when he wrote a book about the history of nativism, he noted that one of the things in the history of the South was that the South's historic commitment to white supremacy actually was historically a force against American nationalism because they had their own nationalism.

And I think to a certain extent, you could see that with the Russia thing.

you know, they feel like Putin to a certain extent represents their

quote-unquote traditional values with all with everything

implicated there

more than

the liberal opposition party in the United States does.

And

I think

that's another reflection of the way that race has historically worked in the United States.

How has the within the GOP, Adam, from your vantage point,

what are the dynamics

that you see materializing?

What have you witnessed among legislators that are sort of sharing space with

a set of ideas that maybe before Charlottesville were less common in public life?

Aaron Ross Powell,

like I said, I think that Republican legislators have, to their credit, resisted

some of this

rhetoric that seems to implicitly define American citizenship in racial terms.

I think it's, you know, I think as long as more people

in the conservative media embrace it, I think it's going to be hard for those legislators not to represent those views if those views become increasingly popular among their voters.

I mean, at the same time, you know, Corey Stewart is something like 20 points behind Tim Kaine in Virginia.

And, you know, it's possible that I think the optimistic scenario is that this kind of politics, if it loses enough times, will be seen as a loser and Republican legislators will move away from it.

And so will the conservative media.

But I think it has to lose for that to happen.

Aaron Powell, I also wonder, we're talking a lot about Republicans who have resisted that rhetoric, but are there a lot who have just outright denounced it, who have strongly denounced it?

I mean, yeah, mostly in their Republican foreign policy pundit class.

I mean, for one reason or another,

the

the the ranks of conservative foreign policy pundits seem to be have more anti-Trump

conservatives than anywhere else.

But if you look at people like Max Boot or even Bill Kristol, who

liberals are not inclined to agree with on much, those are people who are

two examples of people who have pretty forcefully denounced

the rise of nativist politics in the United States or the resurgence of nativist politics in the United States.

I don't,

you know, again, I mean, it wasn't that it

wasn't that long ago that the conservative movement was committed to a very aggressive, neoconservative foreign policy doctrine that involved military intervention all over the world.

And now they're not committed to that at all.

So, like, things can change, right?

But one of the things that changed that was that the Iraq war was such a disaster that no one wanted to be associated with that type of politics anymore.

And I think unless something, some sort of something similar happens with nativism,

you know, it's going to continue to be an influential force in American politics.

Aaron Trevor Burrus, when we talk about

where we're sort of headed on the white supremacist nativist front, you have to

You have to imagine that it will get worse given the fact that demographic change seems to be the thing that's driving or giving momentum to so much of this rhetoric and policymaking, right?

The areas of the country that have seen the steepest, most profound

demographic change in recent years are the ones that are most supportive of Trump and policies like those espoused by Steve King in Iowa.

The United States is getting browner.

And Ezra Klein has written about, he wrote a great piece about this in Vox a few weeks ago.

You know,

the browning of America is, I think, truly the thing that is most feared by Trump acolytes.

And that is only going to increase in the next two decades.

The country is going to be a majority minority, which is to say a brown majority country in 2040.

It would be hard to imagine that in advance of that, this rhetoric and these feelings of fear and loathing dissipate if I would imagine they're only going to increase.

Well, so

I want to raise two points related to that.

One is that I actually think that

America is not going to be majority brown anytime soon.

And I think that if you if the definition of white has historically expanded, It's an arbitrary definition.

Whiteness is a biological fiction.

And, you know, at one point, you know, in the 1920s, people were saying similar things.

They were like, oh, the character of the country is changing forever.

And then they passed this restrictive immigration law.

And the authors of that law said the racial composition of the country has now become permanent.

And what really just happened was that people who were sort of considered off-white, like Jews and Italians, became part, became,

they stopped being probationarily white and became like full white.

Under the American definition of the term.

So I think something similar is going to happen that is going to preserve a demographic white morality.

Right, but Adam, the other thing.

Wait, can I just interrupt you on that note?

Because if you look at the census, Hispanic is still under the rubric of white, right?

You're absolutely right.

We change and expand the definition of whiteness, but to be white is really a cultural signifier more than it is anything else at this point.

And I don't think you could say Hispanics, though counted as white on the American census, identify particularly in this moment with sort of white cultural politics.

Well, I think some of them do and some of them, I mean, I think it depends on the white person.

Like if you look at

a Hispanic person.

Yeah.

I mean, I think if you, the other thing is, is that I don't think that demographic change is what's driving the

thing.

It's white panic and reaction to demographic change.

And

I just want to be deliberate about that causality, because it is a choice to react to different people

as though they're a threat.

I mean, if you look at, if, I mean, if you look at American cities, there are plenty of people who live around people who are not like them, and it's fine.

What has happened is that

there is both an ideological and media market for fomenting white panic that Donald Trump has taken advantage of politically and that outlets like Breitbart and Fox News have taken advantage of.

You know, as media entities, people

make money and they profit either personally or

financially from scaring the crap out of white people about the fact that there are immigrants coming to this country who are not white.

And I think that that is the cause of that quote-unquote demographic anxiety.

I don't think that the cause of it is literally the presence of these people here.

Well, no, and I wasn't meaning to suggest

myself that it's somehow

the fault lies on

brown people.

And I also think you're right to ascribe, I mean,

the blame here, right, if we're talking about nativist policies, lies on the nativists themselves.

But I do think you shouldn't shortchange the reality of communities changing.

And I mean, I've seen it on Long Island, where

we live part of the year, which is a largely white area that has seen a very sharp increase in immigrants and immigrant labor in the last five years.

And I have no problem with that.

But that combined with the political climate and the rhetoric from Fox News and the presidency, to your point, it creates a storm.

And I have a hard time understanding as this sort of, as that change increases and the rhetoric stays where it is, if not, you know, heightens.

I don't understand how we're working in a decrescendo environment rather than a crescendo environment as it concerns what we're doing.

Yeah, I think you're right about that.

I want to ask one more question about the events of a year ago and then point forward to

what we see coming ahead.

Adam, as part of your recent reporting, you've spoken to one individual who was very deeply and personally affected by the events of last year, most notably the murder of her daughter, Heather Heyer.

You spoke to Susan Brough,

the mother of the young woman who was killed that day in Charlottesville.

What is happening in her life?

What has happened in the past year for her?

Aaron Powell, so she's since raised a ton of of money for a foundation, the Heather Hire Foundation, that has been giving scholarships to students

and has, you know, and she has sort of a bunch of other social justice stuff in the works.

But they basically, what happens is that there was this outpouring of goodwill and of financial assistance from people after they found out what had happened.

And she said, well, you know, we have to set something, we have to set up an organization to take this money and do something good with it because that's what Heather would want.

So, you know, I think she's gotten more involved in the activist world and obviously her life has completely changed as a result of the events of Charlottesville.

And one of the things she said that really

stuck with me was

last year she said that the location of Heather's grave would be hidden because she didn't want anybody to find it.

And she mentioned, you know, She mentioned the fact that Nazis might try to deface it.

So I asked her, you know, are you still hiding the grave?

And she said, well, you know, we also don't want well-wishers there.

We want it to be like a private thing, which is totally understandable.

But then she said, you know, they're still vandalizing Viola Liuzzo and Emmett Till's memorials.

That is still happening.

Someone shot up Emmett Till's memorial like last week.

And, you know, I think

her view of it is a lot like

a lot of people's view of what happened, which was that Charlottesville was really,

you know, the exposure of a wound that had been festering for a long time

and that has yet to heal.

Yeah.

So Charlottesville was less a cause and more a symptom of deeper currents running through America.

Let's talk about some of those currents when we come back.

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I want to talk about,

point this forward and talk about some of of the things that have happened around

Alex Jones and info wars.

One of the effects of Charlottesville was to kind of put Nazis right up in public life, right up in the middle of public life.

And that, I think, has been a

challenging thing for various folks to grapple with.

You know, Godwin's Law on the Internet previously was at any point in an Internet discussion when the idea of a Nazi was, when Hitler was mentioned or Nazis were mentioned, the discussion had reached its sort of natural devolution point, its natural nadir.

And then all of a sudden, there are actual Nazis in the streets.

And it's created this challenge, I think, for a lot of us of,

well, what do we do?

Now that there are actual,

given that there are actual Nazis marching in the streets, full-on, you know, swastika Nazis

walking in the streets.

What are the right ways to counteract

that extreme hatred?

One of the pieces of this has been

the question of what sort of space in public life should they be accorded?

How much of a right do platforms have to host the likes of Andrew Englin,

the founder of the site, The Daily Stormer, who was kicked off of his hosting platforms and a cluster of internet hosting providers declined to

be a source of his content.

Now we're grappling with the question of InfoWars, Alex Jones' outlet, which has recently been

suspended or limited in various ways by various platforms, including Facebook and YouTube, although notably he retains a presence on Twitter.

I mean, I think one of

the clear lines that people have started to draw, and quite frankly, one of the easiest moral lines to draw, and this has happened recently with Alex Jones and InfoWars, has been whether or not you're spreading actual falsehoods, whether or not you're spreading disinformation.

And that, as opposed to, I think,

rhetoric of hate speech and how we actually deal with that and the violent implications that it can have, I think the spreading of disinformation is the thing that has actually led platforms to say, you can't hang out here anymore.

You know, saying that Newtown didn't happen when that is demonstrably false is a thing that people have now decided, okay, that that is actually not true, that is demonstrably false, and we will not allow that on this platform.

However, on this platform, if you want to say that immigrants are a scourge and should not be allowed here, or that black people are intellectually inferior, or whatever it might be, I think the rules around that remain very murky, despite the evidence of what can come from those,

from that type of rhetoric, as demonstrated by Charlottesville last year.

Aaron Powell, I just want to point out that someone from InfraWars this week had perhaps the greatest tweet ever, which was where they pointed out that Facebook is a publicly traded company, so liberals need to shut up about Facebook being private.

That was just one of my, it just tickled me so, so deeply.

But I do think there is, you know, there's a, there's a complicated free speech question here, which is,

you know, on the one hand, you don't have a right to be on a private platform.

Twitter is privately owned.

Facebook is privately owned.

You know, just like you don't have a right to a show on Fox News or a column at the New York Times, Twitter doesn't have to host you on its platform.

The problem is, is that we are increasingly in a situation where very powerful corporations control essentially

what we hear and say and see.

And I think that there is actually not an easy answer to that as far as free speech is concerned, as far as like, you know, what happens when, you know, what happens if

you know, the country decides that,

if outlets decide that like Bernie Sanders is too radical or whatever, like that's not likely to happen under current circumstances.

But I do think there is sort of an interesting question of, you know, with corporations having increasing power over the avenues of communication, to what extent,

you know, is some kind of regulation necessary in order to make sure that you have an actual marketplace of ideas and not just what corporate America wants to be heard and said.

Aaron Powell, I think there's another insidious effect of all of this here in terms of large corporations and to some degree, large media corporations, which are particularly under fire to be more even-handed and more accepting or less judgmental of quote-unquote the other side.

And so in trying to sort of

approach whatever fair and balanced means, and I don't mean that in the Fox News sense, but in the sort of corporate speak,

to

in a part, they play a role in sanitizing some of this stuff.

for fear of overly alienating people who support racist policies.

So, I mean, I worry about that as we all are in the media.

And my question, Jillian, is

when we talk about kind of eradicating the poison, right?

And we're looking at the Alex Joneses of the world.

Even if you kick people off large platforms, don't they ultimately find a home somewhere?

And if that home has enough viewers or supporters or users or whatever,

can't they make a legitimate home somewhere else on the internet?

Like, is it not just a cancer that moves through a body?

How do you actually get rid of it?

Yeah, I mean, I think the issue now is that there is no real way to actually get rid of it, and there is no way to actually squash it.

Because so, I mean, the benefit of something like Facebook or Twitter is just the massive size.

It's access to, you know, 2 billion people all at once.

So if you kick them off of that platform, I think it definitely has the effect of squelching it, making it harder to disseminate a certain type of rhetoric or ideology, but it in no way actually eradicates it or removes it from the public discourse.

You know, even with Facebook at this point, part of the question is, if you kick someone's official page off, they can still have a personal page.

There can still be a million and one different host sites that are just republishing that information in a different form.

And it would be nearly impossible to keep track and keep up with all of those things and ban them sufficiently.

So I think you're absolutely right.

The issue right now that we're having is no one knows how to handle this.

A lot of these platforms are trying to correct or overcorrect or maintain some semblance of balance, but they don't really know what that means.

And I think are more concerned with

being seen as violating free speech rights than necessarily adhering to some of their stated platform norms.

And there just really is no answer for anyone right now.

Aaron Powell, Jr.: And even to put the platforms to the side for a second, even organizations like the ACLU, dedicated to

free speech, I mean, among other things,

have really struggled with how to respond to the presence of hateful and

misinforming, disinforming rhetoric in American life, the sudden presence of

these

falsehood spreading,

conspiracy theory-mongering, and hatred festering forces.

The ACLU of Virginia, notably, had initially lent its support to the Unite the Right rally's right to the demonstrators' right to gather in Charlottesville last August.

And after that, they really had to wrestle with that decision.

They had

members of the organization leave,

board members resign from the board.

Waldo Jakewith, one member of the ACLU of Virginia board, said, quote, I won't be a fig leaf for Nazis.

Don't defend Nazis to allow them to kill people.

Adam, how is the ACLU, how have other organizations advising on free expression dealt with that in the years since?

Aaron Powell, Jr.: Well, I mean, you look at the ACLU in particular, and they've said that they're no longer going to defend, they're no longer going to represent groups that want to protest while bearing arms because they feel that that it goes beyond speech.

So they, you know, they'll defend Nazis, but they won't defend Nazis who want to show up with guns.

But I want to go back briefly to something that Jillian said.

I mean, I think we have to recognize that fake news predates the term fake news.

I mean, if you look back at

during Reconstruction in Louisiana, where the most violent things happened, there was, you know, one of the ways that the White League and

the Knights of Camellia and those kinds of groups, one of the things they did was they were like, there's a black league and the black league is going to run across the state with guns, ravaging everyone and raping white women and killing white men and stealing your babies.

And like, you know, eventually, like,

when Congress investigated, there was never any black league.

It simply did not exist.

The black league was fake news, but it was important because it was how white terrorist groups,

white paramilitary groups, justified arming themselves and then killing black people.

So this problem, issue of fake news, particularly weaponized, racialized fake news, certainly predates our current conundrum.

But as Jillian points out, the technological advances have made it possible for fake news to be disseminated instantly all over the place, and they have increased the quality of those hoaxes.

So I do think it's just a really complicated issue.

And I don't think there are any easy answers to it.

And I don't think it ends here.

Aaron Powell, Jr.: And beyond just the fake news piece, the bifurcation of the media landscape, I don't know how you get, you know, I don't know how you get a certain portion of this country to agree on a set of facts again

in this day and age.

I mean, I was doing these interviews for CBS with Trump supporters and they said, you're fake news.

And there was nothing I could say to convince them otherwise, right?

The question is, like, when this president is out of office, at what point do we get back to a national conversation where there's an agreed upon set of data?

And, you know, it's interesting that you bring up that story, Adam, about the, you know, Congress investigated and found there were no black leagues.

Well, that was a time when Congress could say, this is truth and this is fiction, and people would accept that.

I worry that we're getting to the point where it doesn't matter what institution says this is truth and this is fiction.

People seek validation and information from their own social media networks and their people.

And if the facts that they're given don't sort of

meet the standards of their community, then they reject them.

And that seems really deeply troubling.

I want to bring this conversation to a close, but I have one more question.

And Jillian, I'll point this one to you, which is,

do extremists

occupy too much of a space in our national dialogue at the moment?

The platforms have grappled in their own way with how much of a role are we playing in proliferating these messages, but

how do we,

members of the media, grapple with their presence?

Is it good of us to focus as much as we do on figures like Alex Jones?

Yeah, I mean, I think too much is the difficult measure here.

Do they occupy an outsized space compared to probably the size of their population?

Absolutely.

But

I think that's also because

you can have a small but powerful and influential extremist group.

I mean, that is why they're called extremists,

who can

change a national dialogue, who can go out into the streets and cause, you know, violence and fear and disruption.

And I think part of the reason that they are getting attention now is because there is the concern that a small but extreme group of Americans have the ear of the highest office in the land and are able to, in some way, influence that platform and influence the policies that are coming out of that.

So I think that is the actual difficult thing that a lot of media organizations are struggling with.

Though they might be a small group, though it might be

an outsized amount of coverage in direct correlation to the number of people who perhaps believe this way, if they are actually able to influence policy or the national dialogue or national or sentiment or, as Adam has said many times, an entire group of one of the two political parties in the country,

that is noticeable and we need to be covering it.

All right.

With that, let's turn to our closing segment.

What have we heard, read, listened to, watched recently that we do not want to forget?

Alex, let me turn to you first.

What have you heard recently that you do not want to forget?

I finally have a keybird that dovetails with the themes of this podcast.

So we've been talking a lot about racial animus.

Part of that is is class animus.

And I have been watching Succession on HBO,

which is a riveting exploration of white privilege, especially the final episode of season one.

I mean, if you need a primer on how the rich and specifically the white rich in metropolitan areas think of themselves,

this is an incredible show.

I mean, it's also an incredible show just because the writing's amazing and it's both like tragic and hilarious at the same time.

I I don't really know how the show manages to do that.

But against the conversation that we're having nationally, we often talk mostly about race and that's hugely important.

But class is also a huge part of like what's separating us and what's going to exacerbate the separations already, the schisms that are already showing themselves.

So the show is great and it's entertaining and we're only in season one.

So it's not like you have to lose an entire weekend binging to catch up with everybody else who's already started watching it.

All right.

Succession.

It's on my list.

It's on my list.

Watch it.

It's so good.

Adam Serwar, what do you want to keep?

There's a book that came out recently called Southern Nation.

It's by David Bateman, Ira Katz Nelson, and John Lipinski.

And it's about Congress after Reconstruction and how Southern legislators, by voting as a bloc, influenced

public policy in the United States for generations.

Something tells me we're going to be talking about Reconstruction a lot again.

Yes.

Next.

I certainly do.

I never stop talking.

You don't.

You stay on that reconstruction.

How was breakfast this morning?

He's like, you know what?

Reconstruction.

Let's talk about reconstruction for a minute.

So I was reading Eric Foner.

This is actually what it's like at the Atlantic, folks.

Chili and white.

What do you not want to forget?

So unsurprisingly, my keeper is also TV related.

But I am late to the Handmaid's Tale Party.

And

yeah.

And I just finished season one.

And it kind of dovetails with this conversation.

And at the end of every episode, I was just filled with angst and wonder about how quickly things can change and kind of at what point you do you realize that the country that you live in, that the society that you live in has taken a turn that can't be kind of quickly undone.

And I think that was the question that I was grappling with all the way through that, you know, I think a lot of us are grappling with as we see kind of this different time in America.

So that is my depressing keeper.

You just finished season one.

Just brace yourself.

I'm going to need to take like a month off before season two.

Yeah.

It's heavy.

My keeper

is

also pop culture media related.

I recently had the experience of watching

re-watching Call Me by Your Name and Moonlight back to back.

I started re-watching Call Me by Your Name just because I was in the mood to see it and then finished it and

some voice inside my head was like, you have to watch Moonlight again.

And so I did.

I watched those movies back to back.

That was one of my, both were my keepers recently, Matt Thompson.

Could that voice in your head been me and my keeper for that?

I think so.

I think that was part of it.

I mean,

the keeper was not uninfluential

in reminding me what a good film it was and how much I needed to see it again.

Part of the sensation that it left me with that I very much want to hold on to

is

the enormous extraordinary pleasure and privilege of watching pieces of my story told by the world's best storytellers with the just absolute highest standards of the craft

to

the just

simple but completely extraordinary pleasure of feeling represented, deeply represented, having parts of my story told well.

I want that to linger with me for a long time.

So there it is.

And with that, we have

wrapped up

another Radio Atlantic.

Adam, thank you very much for joining us.

Jillian.

Thank you for having me.

Thank you so much.

Thank you guys.

As always, Alex,

it's always a pleasure, and I look forward to seeing you next week.

Bye, Alex.

Bye.

It's a delight and a a pleasure, even when we're talking about the end of days.

Thank you, guys.

Even when we're talking about the end of days.

All right, y'all.

Bye.

Once again, that concludes another week's Radio Atlantic.

As always, this episode was produced and edited by Kevin Townsend.

Our executive producer for Atlantic Podcasts is Catherine Wells.

Special thanks to David Herman and A.K.

Adams for engineering help, and ongoing thanks to our colleague Kim Lau.

Our theme music is the Battle Hymn of the Republic, as interpreted by the one and only John Batiste.

What is your keeper?

Call us at 202-266-7600 and leave us a voicemail message with your contact information.

Let us know what you do not want to forget.

Once again, that's 202-266-7600.

Check us out at theatlantic.com/slash radio.

Catch the show notes in the episode description.

And if you like what you're hearing, rate and review us in Apple Podcasts and subscribe in your preferred podcast app.

But most importantly, thank you for listening.

May whatever hatred and fear you encounter in your daily life be vastly outmatched by love and empathy.

We'll see you next week.

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