Latest / The Nation Podcasts / Trump v. L.A.—Plus, Rachel Kushner’s ‘Creation Lake’ | Start Making Sense

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Trump v. L.A.—Plus, Rachel Kushner’s ‘Creation Lake’ | Start Making Sense · The Nation Podcasts

• 0:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: From the nation magazine, this is Start Making Sense.
• 0:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: I'm John Weener.
• 0:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: Later in the hour, Rachel Kushner will talk about the informant and provacitor who infiltrates an anarchist eco-commun in rural France.
• 0:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: That's the central character in her award-winning novel, Creation Lake.
• 0:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's out now in paperback.
• 0:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: But first, Trump vs. Los Angeles, Harold Meyerson will explain in a minute.
• 0:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: Los Angeles is ground zero for Trump's campaign to deport millions of undocumented residents, but the city has a big alliance of immigrants' rights groups defending the vulnerable and having some success.
• 0:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: For comment we turn to Harold Meyerson, he's editor at Large of the American Prospect.
• 0:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: He's also written for the Washington Post, the New Yorker, the Atlantic, the LA Times, and he worked as executive editor at the late lamented LA Weekly for more than a decade.
• 1:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: Mostly in the nineties.
• 1:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: We reached in today in our nation's capital.
• 1:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: Harold, welcome back.
• 1:14
  [SPEAKER_02]: Always good to be here, John.
• 1:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: Trump is attacking L.A.
• 1:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: First of all, because L.A.
• 1:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: County has more democratic votes than any place else in the country, three million democratic votes in L.A.
• 1:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: County.
• 1:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: Second place, Cook County, Illinois, two million votes.
• 1:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: and Trump is attacking LA also because there are a lot of undocumented people in LA, maybe a million out of a total of almost five million Latinos in a county with ten million people.
• 1:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: Trump famously sent four thousand two hundred national guard troops and seven hundred Marines to LA to support ICE operations in quotation marks.
• 1:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: So it only has a million undocumented residents, the total number detained by ICE in Los Angeles through July fourth, they say is around eighteen hundred in comparison
• 2:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: The number of people arrested in jailed in LA County by the police for crimes in the same period is around fifty thousand.
• 2:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: More than twenty-five times as many.
• 2:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: You can see why Stephen Miller, Trump's evil head of deportation efforts, has been gnashing his teeth in frustration and demanding that ICE do more.
• 2:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: Eighteen hundred people arrested and detained by ICE so far.
• 2:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: in twenty twenty five in LA, but ice has succeeded at one big thing creating widespread fear.
• 2:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: For example, this week on Monday when dozens of heavily armed ice agents, someone horseback and protected in quotes by ninety California National Guard troops descended on MacArthur Park west of downtown LA, tell us what happened in MacArthur Park.
• 3:08
  [SPEAKER_02]: Well, they did descend and they perated through.
• 3:11
  [SPEAKER_02]: Now, as events would have it, about the only people in MacArthur park when they stormed the park were some little kids and their child care providers who were suitably terrified and scrammed out of there.
• 3:28
  [SPEAKER_02]: I guess we have to say mission accomplished because according to some army documents that the invaluable and clip and steam was able to lay his hands on, the intent of the action was as a show of force, a show of presence demonstrating that they can pop up anywhere anytime and scare the bejesus out of whoever might be in their path.
• 3:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: People who were there, called this one big perverse publicity stunt, just a show of force to take pictures.
• 4:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: Marquis Harris Dawson, president of the LA City Council, said, if the border patrol wants to film in LA, they should apply for a film permit like anybody else.
• 4:15
  [SPEAKER_02]: I should add that if they're marching through the park, the least they could do is pick up the trash.
• 4:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: Rachel Maddo on Monday night called MacArthur Park, some random park in LA, actually it's not a random park at all.
• 4:28
  [SPEAKER_02]: No, it is the center of the lower-class immigrant community.
• 4:35
  [SPEAKER_02]: In fact, since you mentioned the L.A.
• 4:36
  [SPEAKER_02]: weekly, in nineteen ninety, I did a piece for the weekly, a bedded by our great photographer Ted Soky, in which I determined that the immediate census tract around MacArthur Park was actually the most densely populated census tract in the United States.
• 4:56
  [SPEAKER_02]: Wow.
• 4:56
  [SPEAKER_02]: I went block by block through the neighborhood.
• 4:59
  [SPEAKER_02]: There are no buildings there that are taller than seven stories.
• 5:02
  [SPEAKER_02]: So we're not talking about high rises.
• 5:05
  [SPEAKER_02]: We're talking about an incredible concentration largely working class immigrants.
• 5:10
  [SPEAKER_02]: It's sort of the lower east side port of entry.
• 5:13
  [SPEAKER_02]: So, you know, the ice agents essentially were trying to, you know, saying if you if you dare poke your head outside, we're going to get you.
• 5:21
  [SPEAKER_02]: That's sort of the message they were trying to convey.
• 5:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: And Ice was active elsewhere in LA on July fourth in West Hollywood Channel four showed the film of Ice Agents in Bulletproof vests at the Santa Palm Car Wash where they detained two people.
• 5:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: A man whose father was detained told Channel four, quote, he's not a criminal.
• 5:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: He wasn't doing anything he wasn't supposed to.
• 5:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: He came into work on the fourth of July.
• 5:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: And also on July fourth, LA Times reported that ICE agents detained a food vendor with a cart in front of the target store on Eagle Rock Boulevard.
• 6:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: This is a Buria stand.
• 6:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: Buria is a stew usually made, I think, with goat meat.
• 6:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: This apparently is a long time beloved spot for residents of Eagle Rock and Highland Park.
• 6:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: For this one, a go-fund me was started by the vendor's brother that's raised more than twenty-six thousand dollars in the last two days, seven hundred thirty-six people gave money.
• 6:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: He wrote, at the go-fund me site, we are trying to raise money to get a lawyer for Luis.
• 6:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: He's a hard-working man.
• 6:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: He needs to feed his family and three kids.
• 6:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: I will appreciate a lot, your help and support.
• 6:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: Close quote.
• 6:47
  [SPEAKER_02]: You know, there is a study out from the Libertarian Cato Institute, which was able to get records of all, two hundred and four thousand detentions that ice agents perform between the beginning of last October, the beginning of the fiscal year, and mid-June.
• 7:08
  [SPEAKER_02]: And what it found was that the percentage of the folks that iced detained who were convicted of violent crimes was seven percent.
• 7:18
  [SPEAKER_02]: And when you add property crimes to that, it only goes up to ten percent, which means ninety percent of the folks that iced detains aren't guilty of anything except in case they aren't documented.
• 7:32
  [SPEAKER_02]: That's all they're guilty of.
• 7:35
  [SPEAKER_02]: We know of a number of cases where ice is simply arresting Latinos and seeing if they're documented or not.
• 7:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, tell us a tell us about the rate on that big swamp meat.
• 7:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: I think was in Santa Fe Springs.
• 7:48
  [SPEAKER_02]: They sent in somewhere upwards of fifty agents to swarm a swamp meat.
• 7:54
  [SPEAKER_02]: It doesn't follow that the attendees at swamp meats are necessarily people convicted of violent crimes.
• 8:02
  [SPEAKER_02]: It's almost like the agents themselves have a swamp, you know, have kind of a shopping mentality.
• 8:07
  [SPEAKER_02]: They'll pick up whatever is there.
• 8:09
  [SPEAKER_02]: If they bother to ask questions, they will have to relinquish some of the people they pick up, although
• 8:18
  [SPEAKER_02]: when they can't find any particularly violent crime or property crime convictions.
• 8:23
  [SPEAKER_02]: They are happy to deport those folks anyway if they don't have documentation.
• 8:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: Well, I want to talk about the resistance here.
• 8:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: Of course, Governor Gavin Newsom has the highest profile.
• 8:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: He filed an emergency legal challenge to block the use of national guard troops in immigration raids and
• 8:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: One an initial decision by the Federal District Court, which ruled that guard deployment was illegal and exceeded Trump's authority, but that was quickly reversed by a three-judge appeals panel consisting of Trump appointed judges
• 9:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: That block that order and has allowed the Trump administration to maintain control of guard troops while this lawsuit wins its way through the courts.
• 9:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: Then there was a new lawsuit filed last week by the ACLU of Southern California.
• 9:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: the, and the group's public council in sheer let's see, H-I-R-L-A.
• 9:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: We've talked about them here before the coalition for humane immigrant rights, Los Angeles.
• 9:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: This was a federal lawsuit accusing Trump of systematically targeting brown skin people that was joined on Monday by all of the blue states, seven, eight, twelve, eighteen states, including California.
• 9:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: What do you know about that case?
• 9:44
  [SPEAKER_02]: That too is now in in district court.
• 9:48
  [SPEAKER_02]: What struck me about what clearly is the racial profiling that ISIS is now doing, particularly since Stephen Miller told them they got to make three thousand arrests per day.
• 10:01
  [SPEAKER_02]: This runs against what is ostensibly the drive of the Trump administration to have what it alleges a race neutral opposition to DEI policies.
• 10:16
  [SPEAKER_02]: So on the one hand, the Trump administration professes that it wants to get back to a pre affirmative action, pre DEI
• 10:26
  [SPEAKER_02]: legislation.
• 10:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, and if I may insert cuts the funding for any college that refuses to eliminate racial distinctions.
• 10:34
  [SPEAKER_02]: Exactly.
• 10:36
  [SPEAKER_02]: And the same time, they're most visible employees of the Trump administration visible, though, masked the ICE agents and other deportation agents.
• 10:47
  [SPEAKER_02]: are relying increasingly on race specific criteria.
• 10:50
  [SPEAKER_02]: Hey, he looks Latino for their detention.
• 10:53
  [SPEAKER_02]: So there's a slight contradiction there.
• 10:55
  [SPEAKER_02]: Although it's once you realize that opposition to DEI basically means we favor whites, then it all kind of comes together.
• 11:05
  [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
• 11:05
  [SPEAKER_02]: On Hispanic whites, I should say.
• 11:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: And it's not just the immigrant rights groups and the democratic state attorney generals,
• 11:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: Six Republicans in the California State Legislature sent a letter last week to Trump imploring him to refocus the ICE arrest, so it would be limited to convicted felons only.
• 11:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: Tell us about that.
• 11:28
  [SPEAKER_02]: Look, what the ice rates are doing is wreaking havoc among California Latinos.
• 11:36
  [SPEAKER_02]: And these Republicans, like every other California legislator, has a lot of Latinos in their districts.
• 11:44
  [SPEAKER_02]: A lot of the small businesses that are really the base of contributions to Republican state legislators.
• 11:52
  [SPEAKER_02]: A lot of the small businesses are Latino run, are immigrant owned,
• 11:56
  [SPEAKER_02]: That sort of thing.
• 11:57
  [SPEAKER_02]: And the patronage at all of those businesses has shrunk to virtually zero since Latinos have been afraid to go out of their homes.
• 12:08
  [SPEAKER_02]: So you can understand the level of disruption of normal life writ large that Trump's actions in California are causing.
• 12:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: We've talked here about the immigrants' rights groups, the ACLU of Southern California, Public Council in Chirla, they're joined by the immigrant Defenders Law Center in Death, which provides volunteer attorneys for people who have been detained.
• 12:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: And they cooperate with several other groups, and something called the LA Rapid Response Network Hotline, which monitors and puts out alerts about ice activity,
• 12:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: They put out an alert for the MacArthur Park raid, which is the main reason I think when MacArthur Park was basically empty when ice arrived.
• 12:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: Also active on this front are some of the key labor unions of L.I.
• 13:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: County in particular, S.E.I.U.
• 13:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: service employees local seven twenty one which has over ninety five thousand members.
• 13:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's the largest public sector union in California.
• 13:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: What has their role been in this round of immigration protests.
• 13:22
  [SPEAKER_02]: The president of that local David Huerta was alerted to an ice rate and went there and apparently stood a thwart.
• 13:30
  [SPEAKER_02]: One of the cars they were ice was pulling up in which to put it's arrested folks who were garment workers and was pushed down by an ice agent.
• 13:43
  [SPEAKER_02]: It is said was hospitalized and then was indicted for obstruction or for having to be hospitalized, whatever the cause of
• 13:50
  [SPEAKER_02]: This indictment may have been.
• 13:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: And he remains charged with felonies and it's out on bail.
• 13:57
  [SPEAKER_02]: And there's a host of unions in the LA area in particular.
• 14:01
  [SPEAKER_02]: SCI whose janitors, HRIs, hotel workers, and so on.
• 14:06
  [SPEAKER_02]: And the building trades that are composed heavily of immigrants.
• 14:11
  [SPEAKER_02]: And so this really affects the rank and file of a lot of California labor.
• 14:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: There's something called the Summer of Resistance, underway now in LA, which involves the immigrant's rights groups, the big unions, clergy, and the laity united, CLUE.
• 14:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: I think you know something about them.
• 14:32
  [SPEAKER_02]: Well, this is an organization that rose alongside the LA Alliance for a new economy and has been an economic justice organization for a long time.
• 14:42
  [SPEAKER_02]: What I also know about them was that about four or five years ago, they gave their annual awards to the great Jim Lawson.
• 14:50
  [SPEAKER_02]: It's leading figure in the civil rights movement going back to the nineteen fifties.
• 14:55
  [SPEAKER_02]: It was
• 14:56
  [SPEAKER_02]: minister in LA and my aunt Harriet who had had turned out and testified for them well into her nineties before some city council hearing so yes I'm certainly aware of of clue as it is called clue runs weekly prayer visuals
• 15:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: the downtown LA outside the federal building they represent the mothers of the disappeared and our constant presence at these demonstrations and they're running a big nonviolent training program at the convention center I think it's next in the best tradition of Jim Lawson who had studied nonviolence in the nineteen fifties and even the nineteen forties in India under Gandhi himself
• 15:41
  [SPEAKER_02]: and then was instrumental in instructing Martin Luther King in the tenets of non-violence, beginning with the Montgomery West boycott.
• 15:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: I want to look at the political side of all of this.
• 15:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: These raids on long time residents who have jobs and families, this is not popular with anybody, except the Republicans.
• 16:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: You'd think that Trump's attacks on Latino communities would be especially important in reducing his support among Latinos.
• 16:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: We were all alarmed to see the results from the twenty twenty four election, where Trump did frighteningly well nationally among Latinos.
• 16:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: He won, Pence, which Paul, you're looking at forty five or maybe forty eight percent of the total Latino vote.
• 16:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: Trump had gotten only thirty two percent in twenty twenty.
• 16:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: Apparently, it was Latino men, especially switched to support Trump in twenty twenty four.
• 16:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: I think this was not true in LA County as much.
• 16:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: The figures that I've seen are about thirty four percent of LA County Latinos supported the Trump.
• 16:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: And the latest national poll, which was just last month in June, found only nineteen percent of Latinos approve of the current ice raids.
• 17:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: sixty-two percent disapprove.
• 17:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: So where does that leave us on what we were told is a major realignment in American politics?
• 17:11
  [SPEAKER_02]: It puts a lot of that realignment up for grabs, as does the budget bill, the reconciliation bill, which is also very damaging to the working class that the Republicans are now trying to claim.
• 17:24
  [SPEAKER_02]: There's things in the Republican DNA.
• 17:26
  [SPEAKER_02]: always create economic policies that benefit the rigid, the expense of everyone else, the white nationalist, you know, these things are part of traditional Republican positions with the white nationalism.
• 17:39
  [SPEAKER_02]: It certainly gets intensified under Trump as the reconciliation bill intensified it.
• 17:45
  [SPEAKER_02]: But does not play well with the, a lot of the constituency that has been swinging Republican in recent elections is, you yourself, just noted,
• 17:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: Trump himself.
• 17:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: You have to wonder, what is Trump going to do with himself every day now that the hundred days of shock and awe executive orders have come to an end.
• 18:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: His big ugly budget bill has passed.
• 18:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: As Simon Rosenberg reminds us at the Hopium website, Trump needs a constant daily diet of spectacle and bread and circuses in order to feed his desperate and pathetic need to be the center of attention
• 18:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: to prove he's not weak and unpopular that he's not a loser.
• 18:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: And also to keep his base, you know, mobilized.
• 18:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: On Monday in LA, we got a glimpse of what seems to be next and Trump's agenda, the spectacle of National Guard troops in full combat dress riding in armored personnel carriers.
• 18:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: into a park in L.A.
• 18:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: Looking for Latinos, but thanks to the rapid response network, they didn't find any.
• 18:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: I guess that's better than bombing Iran, but it's not really good for the rest of us.
• 18:57
  [SPEAKER_02]: No, it's not really good for the rest of us.
• 18:59
  [SPEAKER_02]: And I think one of the things in the reconciliation bill is to greatly increase the funding and therefore the size and scope of the deportation effort.
• 19:08
  [SPEAKER_02]: So we're going to see more and more of that.
• 19:10
  [SPEAKER_02]: And I think, cumulatively, this damages Republican prospects certainly in a statewide California.
• 19:18
  [SPEAKER_02]: I think there are probably four Republican house districts in the state where the cumulative effect of the deportation policy and the slashes to Medicaid are very likely going to cost their Republicans most if not all of those four districts and maybe even five or six.
• 19:38
  [SPEAKER_02]: what Trump wants and what the Maca-based wants and even more what Stephen Miller wants do not necessarily help the Republicans on election days.
• 19:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: One last thing, sports talk.
• 19:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: A conservative legal group co-founded by Trump's deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller has filed a federal civil rights complaint against the Dodgers, accusing them of, quote, engaging an unlawful discrimination under the guise of diversity, equity, and inclusion.
• 20:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: This DEI complaint was filed on Monday with the EEOC, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which presumably now will investigate the merits of this complaint.
• 20:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: The group is America First Legal, of course founded by Stephen Miller of Santa Monica High School.
• 20:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: And the background here is two weeks ago, the Dodgers denied ICE agents access to Dodgers Stadium parking lots.
• 20:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: Now, although the complaint is about DEI, American First Legal mentioned the
• 20:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: parking lots situation with ice blocked in their news release about the complaint.
• 20:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: What happened just to remind people who may not have followed this story is closely some of us.
• 20:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: June nineteenth ice agents out of the blue showed up at Dodger Stadium's Gate A and the Dodgers refused to let them in.
• 21:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: And you can imagine what it would do to attendants at Dodger home games if ice were set up in the parking lot outside the stadium.
• 21:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: Homeland Security did say that this had nothing to do with enforcement actions at Dodger games.
• 21:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: Next day, the Dodgers officially committed one million dollars toward assistance for families affected by the immigration raids in the city.
• 21:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: The Steven Miller lawsuit quoted the Dodgers website that includes a statement that part of the Dodgers mission is quote to create a culture where diverse voices and experiences are valued.
• 21:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: I actually wasn't aware this was part of the Dodgers mission, but let's look at Dodger history.
• 21:51
  [SPEAKER_02]: This is an Hispanic organization.
• 21:55
  [SPEAKER_02]: You cannot name any other major American business enterprise that drew everyone's attention for breaking a color line.
• 22:05
  [SPEAKER_02]: The Dodgers are famous for that.
• 22:06
  [SPEAKER_02]: They integrated baseball with Jackie Robinson.
• 22:10
  [SPEAKER_02]: They had a picture in the early nineteen eighties for Nando Valenzuela.
• 22:15
  [SPEAKER_02]: who became an icon in the Mexican-American community.
• 22:18
  [SPEAKER_02]: They had the first major Japanese player, Hideo Nomo, playing for them decades ago.
• 22:24
  [SPEAKER_02]: And now they have arguably the greatest star in baseball, also a Japanese citizen who is, I guess, here on a green card, Joe Hayo-Tani, and, you know, the most prominent Jewish baseball player ever, Sandy Cofax.
• 22:38
  [SPEAKER_02]: So they are known specifically for their diversity.
• 22:41
  [SPEAKER_02]: And there was a derisive line, I think.
• 22:43
  [SPEAKER_02]: in the lawsuit about the club's major owner Mark Walter the CEO of Guggenheim partners as being committed to social justice as a bad thing.
• 22:54
  [SPEAKER_02]: Well, look, the Dodger executive who integrated baseball branch Ricky was probably more committed to social justice than any American executive who who springs to mind.
• 23:08
  [SPEAKER_02]: This really almost calls in a question if Stephen Miller wants baseball to be all white again.
• 23:14
  [SPEAKER_02]: And it kind of illustrates, I think, the larger issue here for him, which is just a sheer hatred of his hometown because he didn't fit into it very well when he was growing on.
• 23:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: Harold Byerson of the American Prospect.
• 23:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: Harold, thanks for talking with us today.
• 23:30
  [SPEAKER_02]: Oh, it's good to be here, John.
• 23:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: Everybody who's worked in social movements or in helping organize political demonstrations knows how activists are often concerned about undercover agents or informants and provocateurs.
• 23:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: Now, Rachel Kushner has written a novel where the protagonist is the informant in provocateur.
• 24:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's called Creation Lake.
• 24:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: It was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and longlisted for the National Book Award.
• 24:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: It was also in New York Times bestseller named a best book of the year by the New York Times, the Atlantic, the Washington Post, lots of other places.
• 24:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: And it's out now in paperback.
• 24:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: Rachel Kushner's the author of the novels The Flamethrowers and Talix from Cuba, both nominated for the National Book Award and the Mars Room.
• 24:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize.
• 24:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: Her books have been translated into twenty-seven languages.
• 24:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: We've talked about each of them here.
• 24:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: Rachel, welcome back.
• 24:42
  [SPEAKER_01]: Thank you.
• 24:43
  [SPEAKER_01]: Nice to be here.
• 24:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: Well, in this book, the first thing you highlight about being the provocator is that it's a job.
• 24:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: It can be a government job working for the FBI or the DEA, but there's also a huge private sector workforce that spies on critics
• 25:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: and opponents of big corporations and tries to undermine their organizations and disrupt their actions.
• 25:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: And in all these jobs, if you don't get the results your boss wants, you are fired.
• 25:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: In your new book, our protagonist, she calls herself Sadie Smith, has not been very successful in her career.
• 25:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: That she's been sort of a failure as a provocateur.
• 25:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: There was a time she tells us when she felt
• 25:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: Invincible, not anymore.
• 25:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: What happened?
• 25:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: Why has she ended up infiltrating the commune in rural southwestern France instead of working in Berkeley or LA or New York City?
• 25:39
  [SPEAKER_01]: Sadie tells herself that she is ahead of the game that things have worked out as they should and that maybe she's better off in the private sector where you can make more money.
• 25:51
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's a more shadowy world where there are no rules where an agent can operate or you'd be somewhat rogue.
• 25:59
  [SPEAKER_01]: in her methods and her choices.
• 26:03
  [SPEAKER_01]: She is basically kind of kicked out of the world of the feds, you know, being an undercover agent because somebody that she was surveilling had his conviction overturned by a lawyer who claims entrapment and she was the entraper.
• 26:20
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I've read about a few of these cases.
• 26:22
  [SPEAKER_01]: I don't know if there's a large work for us doing that, but there are certainly a few.
• 26:28
  [SPEAKER_01]: And it kind of, you know, it wets the imagination, if you will.
• 26:33
  [SPEAKER_01]: Of what that world is like and that these corporations think that there are leftist groups agitating in such a way
• 26:43
  [SPEAKER_01]: that could cause trouble for power and profit and that these kind of like green anarchists need government surveillance.
• 26:53
  [SPEAKER_01]: It could be both comical and also somewhat serious because we have seen cases of it in real life.
• 27:03
  [SPEAKER_01]: But maybe the larger point for me was to write a narrator who would automatically, in most cases, take a view that would be like a hundred and eighty degrees for my own view.
• 27:19
  [SPEAKER_01]: She would report on people with a kind of cool amusement
• 27:24
  [SPEAKER_01]: In a way that I never would, she would not have a natural sympathy for the people she is surveilling, whereas I sort of would, and the question became in the novel and the tension of the narrative, whether she is vulnerable to the lament of this figure Bruno Lacan, whose correspondence she's illicitly reading.
• 27:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: So you imagine, say, the provocateur so thoroughly, and you have so much fun doing it.
• 27:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: She's a wonderful protagonist and a terrific narrator, even though what she's doing is so wrong.
• 28:05
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I mean, you know, again, it was like to get into her and move through the landscape was almost to get behind the wheel of a tank where I'm already occupying a space that is very insulated from my own actual feelings about the world.
• 28:25
  [SPEAKER_01]: And she did turn out to be in other ways
• 28:29
  [SPEAKER_01]: a kind of generative conduit for my own vulgar and immature sense of humor.
• 28:38
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I was able to kind of like bestow her with characteristics that I don't want myself possess.
• 28:43
  [SPEAKER_01]: And that just it was very fun for me.
• 28:47
  [SPEAKER_01]: Another part of it was the way that she seems to sort of contribute to comment on or occupy a certain literary genre that was new to me.
• 28:58
  [SPEAKER_01]: I do not claim that creation lake is a Roman war.
• 29:02
  [SPEAKER_01]: You know, it's not a spin-oval per se because it
• 29:06
  [SPEAKER_01]: It wants to reserve for itself spaces to speculate on the human condition in a way that's a little more like lavish than the tight control and sort of rules that one should learn, incorporate and submit to when we're writing a genre novel.
• 29:22
  [SPEAKER_01]: That said, when you have a spy as your anerator, it's kind of wonderfully freeing, because suddenly you have this very active protagonist who can put guns in other people's hands and plans in their head.
• 29:36
  [SPEAKER_01]: And the kind of, you know, fragile life-like semblance of reality that has created through the voice of anerator who's more like real people.
• 29:45
  [SPEAKER_01]: is much more self-doubting and passive than a lot of situations you're listening and intuitive and she is constantly manipulating and projecting and overplaying her own idea that she is the one who knows more than everyone else in the room.
• 30:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: I wanted to ask you to read one of the passages I really like.
• 30:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: This is where
• 30:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: She's thinking about the people in the group that she's infiltrated.
• 30:19
  [SPEAKER_01]: These people were different from the West Coast's eco warriors with their piercings and their food coloring hair dye.
• 30:26
  [SPEAKER_01]: T-shirts whose logos were supposed to help define some micro-split in movement ideology.
• 30:31
  [SPEAKER_01]: In order these boys would resemble the anti-globalist window smashers of Genoa, the milieu in which Pascal had been radicalized among people who wore all black.
• 30:43
  [SPEAKER_01]: Then again, Pascal didn't look like that either.
• 30:46
  [SPEAKER_01]: But whether people cultivate an exterior meant to signal their politics or they cultivate instead a straight-laced appearance that does not signal their politics, their self-presentation is deliberate.
• 30:59
  [SPEAKER_01]: It is meant to reinforce who they are, who they consider themselves to be.
• 31:05
  [SPEAKER_01]: People tell themselves, strenuously, that they believe in this or that political position, whether it is to do with wealth, distribution, or climate policy, or the rights of animals.
• 31:16
  [SPEAKER_01]: They commit to some plan, whether it is to stop old growth logging, or protest nuclear power, or block a shipping port in order to bring capitalism, or at least logistics to its ease.
• 31:30
  [SPEAKER_01]: But the deeper motivation for their rhetoric, the values they promote, the lifestyle they have chosen, the look they present, is to shore up their own identity.
• 31:41
  [SPEAKER_01]: It is natural to attempt to reinforce identity given how fragile people are underneath these identities.
• 31:48
  [SPEAKER_01]: They present to the world as themselves.
• 31:51
  [SPEAKER_01]: Their stradencies are fragile while they're need to protect their ego and what forms that ego is strong.
• 31:59
  [SPEAKER_01]: People might claim to believe in this or that, but in the fore AM version of themselves, most possess no fixed idea on how society should be organized.
• 32:11
  [SPEAKER_01]: When people face themselves alone, the passions, they have been busy performing all day, and that they rely on to reassure themselves that they are who they claim to be, to reassure their milieu of the same.
• 32:24
  [SPEAKER_01]: Those things fall away.
• 32:26
  [SPEAKER_01]: What is it people encounter in their stark and solitary foray himself?
• 32:31
  [SPEAKER_01]: What is inside them?
• 32:33
  [SPEAKER_01]: not politics.
• 32:35
  [SPEAKER_01]: There are no politics inside of people.
• 32:38
  [SPEAKER_01]: The truth of a person under all the layers and guises the significations of group and type, the quiet truth underneath the noise of opinions and beliefs is a substance that is pure and stubborn and consistent.
• 32:54
  [SPEAKER_01]: It is a hard, white, salt.
• 32:57
  [SPEAKER_01]: This salt is the core, the four AM reality of being.
• 33:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: When Sadie says there are no politics inside of people, she's talking here about herself first of all.
• 33:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: Sadie is not a political person.
• 33:14
  [SPEAKER_01]: Well, I would push back and tiny bit and say that she may at the end of the day whether deliberate or not, be speaking also of herself.
• 33:27
  [SPEAKER_01]: But I think that she believes that she has something like
• 33:33
  [SPEAKER_01]: unaccounting leisure and she has been surveilling leftist groups for many years and she has seen people be very strident in ways that may have had more to do with their identity and position in the group than had to do with what they truly want to uphold in some naked space
• 33:58
  [SPEAKER_01]: standing before their god, if you will, which is what I think of as that for a himself.
• 34:03
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's a kind of an adonic doubter who no longer has the veils of confidence that are produced by the repressions of questions of one's own contradictions.
• 34:20
  [SPEAKER_01]: And in a certain way, I kind of might even agree with her that
• 34:25
  [SPEAKER_01]: Politics, perhaps in the finished application of its meaning, this week's political situation, the most topical version of politics or politics within something as vulgar as like a two-party system does not in here in the spiritual texture of the person alone I'm watched.
• 34:49
  [SPEAKER_01]: There may be something there.
• 34:52
  [SPEAKER_01]: that could form a moral view of how life should be lived, but it is seldom the same thing as how people present their selves to be socially among peers and otherwise.
• 35:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: But the book doesn't open with Sadie.
• 35:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: It begins with Neanderthals, who we are told in the first sentence were prone to depression.
• 35:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: My first thought was what the heck
• 35:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: But of course, in your hands, what we learn about in the end of all life turns out to be pretty darn interesting.
• 35:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: So this is a book of ideas, big ideas about how things went wrong and when.
• 35:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: And the big ideas come from the mentor of these environmental activists, you call him Bruno Lecomme.
• 35:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: He's not exactly a Bill McKibben type.
• 35:47
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, so the first line of the book about the underfalls into depression, the underfalls were prone to depression, he said, he said they were prone to addiction too and especially smoking.
• 36:00
  [SPEAKER_01]: I became interested in the question of life before the written down shall we say, but also
• 36:09
  [SPEAKER_01]: The place of the yearning for those who speculate upon the question, or even tried to provide something like an answer to what life was like before they were written down, like both the thing itself and what it says about our own longings became interesting to me.
• 36:26
  [SPEAKER_01]: That is the ultimate mystery to me.
• 36:31
  [SPEAKER_01]: What these people were like, what they knew, how they lived, what they felt,
• 36:35
  [SPEAKER_01]: And a lot has been discovered in the last couple of decades with the mapping of the Neanderthal genome among molecular biologists.
• 36:46
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I got interested in that.
• 36:48
  [SPEAKER_01]: So I started reading a lot about it.
• 36:51
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I was aware while I was reading that, and you can correct me, you know, more about myth and politics, certainly than I ever could, and you just been in it longer.
• 37:01
  [SPEAKER_01]: But I feel like there's this idea that, you know, agriculture, which is a big wrong turn, you know, about ten thousand years ago.
• 37:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: That gave rise to the possibility of organized exploitation and oppression.
• 37:16
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, and that like, and cities themselves were not this inevitable human development, et cetera.
• 37:23
  [SPEAKER_01]: And Bruno kind of goes back to, you know, the propensity to even want to be in a crowd could perhaps be attributed to the propagation habits or numbers, only among this one subspecies called homostapians.
• 37:40
  [SPEAKER_01]: And he develops a kind of romantic vision of the Neanderthal as sort of like his beautiful loser, which, you know, they did not stick around.
• 37:51
  [SPEAKER_01]: They could not hack it.
• 37:52
  [SPEAKER_01]: And so for decades, this term Neanderthal was used in a derogatory way to mean somebody who was too stupid to win at the game of life.
• 38:06
  [SPEAKER_01]: lately there's been some weirder reclamations of the neanderthal to do with some new iteration of something like race science but you know I'm not interested in that at all and I think I see Bruno more looking at speculation on the life of the neanderthal like
• 38:26
  [SPEAKER_01]: the way that scientists now and anthropologists are speculating on the life of the dennes oven and also other populations only deemed so far ghost populations whose evidence is in our DNA, but we have not found any archaeological evidence of them, which as Bruno says basically means we have not yet found their trash.
• 38:52
  [SPEAKER_01]: And his idea is what messages might have been left for us by these people.
• 39:00
  [SPEAKER_01]: If we can tune in to a secret spiritual shortwave radio frequency where their life as sound was continuous with ours, like what would we hear, what would they tell us?
• 39:15
  [SPEAKER_01]: So he kind of moves that
• 39:17
  [SPEAKER_01]: the standard story as people call it of agricultural being the wrong turn.
• 39:22
  [SPEAKER_01]: He moves that back thirty thousand years.
• 39:25
  [SPEAKER_01]: He does encounter over the course of the novel.
• 39:28
  [SPEAKER_01]: The novel has to be an occasion for such generally speaking.
• 39:32
  [SPEAKER_01]: He encounters a kind of crisis of confidence in his own idea of what might have been the case, but he's looking for a potentiality
• 39:40
  [SPEAKER_01]: in people that may still be something that is available to us that could be attained or at least dreamed of.
• 39:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: I want to go back to your decision to write this novel in the first person about somebody who we would say is on the other side.
• 39:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: Your books up to now have had a protagonist that have a lot in common with you, writing motorcycles fast, working on women's prisons.
• 40:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: How did you decide to make the eye of this book, the ruthless Asian provocateur?
• 40:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: Did you know somebody who worked for the FBI and then changed sides?
• 40:21
  [SPEAKER_01]: No, no, it's a good question.
• 40:23
  [SPEAKER_01]: But you know, I find so far in my, you know, brief writing life, fourth novel, I find the first person to be the hardest.
• 40:32
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's the biggest challenge and for a few reasons.
• 40:36
  [SPEAKER_01]: You have to be able to instill in yourself, I have to be there when you return to work each day, a sense of deep believability that the person is not you and has enough kind of, you know, with of personhood that you can step back in because I does suggest me.
• 40:56
  [SPEAKER_01]: So it
• 40:58
  [SPEAKER_01]: takes a lot of like creative jets on my part to build an eye that it's definitely not me.
• 41:05
  [SPEAKER_01]: And none of the eyes have been, although the first person voice in the flans horrors was much closer to my sense of experience and this in that she's a young woman who moves to New York and is kind of surrounded by older people who know more and take up more space and she feels like the only way that she can really acclimate is to sort of receive and listen to them and
• 41:25
  [SPEAKER_01]: that was how I felt once upon a time with Sadie, I don't really rely on my own ideas, but I always can take what I would see and then see what she would see because her persona and her style feel very real to me.
• 41:42
  [SPEAKER_01]: In this case, it also kind of seemed like it would be a challenge because I decided
• 41:49
  [SPEAKER_01]: to try to achieve a novel that would only be told in her voice.
• 41:55
  [SPEAKER_01]: So that she has a total monopoly on the reality of the novel.
• 41:59
  [SPEAKER_01]: And in all of my prior works, even if I at one point set out to do that, I ultimately changed my mind because I was going for a kind of amplitude that could not be filled out by one character alone.
• 42:10
  [SPEAKER_01]: Like other people were banging up the door to tell their version of things to speak.
• 42:16
  [SPEAKER_01]: And in this case, I was not going to allow for that.
• 42:19
  [SPEAKER_01]: I also didn't think that the novel needed it, but it starts out with her.
• 42:25
  [SPEAKER_01]: interpolating Bruno now.
• 42:27
  [SPEAKER_01]: So she's reading these, this correspondence and saying, this is what Bruno says.
• 42:33
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I had been working on the book for like three years and trying to figure out how to do it.
• 42:38
  [SPEAKER_01]: And then finally one day I wrote that first line, which is the whole first few pages of the book.
• 42:43
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's the thing that I wrote first.
• 42:46
  [SPEAKER_01]: And it was her describing a letter from him describing some things to a set of recipients that are decidedly not her.
• 42:58
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I have this tone in my head from the first line of the movie by Chris Marker, uh, son Soleil, where it's a British woman.
• 43:08
  [SPEAKER_01]: speaking, and she's recounting the letters of this fictional person named Sandour Krazna, which is really an alterty.
• 43:14
  [SPEAKER_01]: You go for Chris Marker, and it goes something like, the first thing he told me about was three children on the road in Iceland in nineteen sixty-five.
• 43:23
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I love the mystery of that.
• 43:25
  [SPEAKER_01]: You don't know who she is.
• 43:26
  [SPEAKER_01]: You don't know who he is.
• 43:28
  [SPEAKER_01]: The magic of cinema is that then you see the footage of the children on the road in Iceland.
• 43:33
  [SPEAKER_01]: The magic of the novel is that only I see what she's describing
• 43:38
  [SPEAKER_01]: I love the challenge of trying to get Bruno's sort of
• 43:45
  [SPEAKER_01]: lonely yearning, and his kind of earned sejacity into the hands, into the voice of this much more sardonic and brittle woman.
• 43:58
  [SPEAKER_01]: And the tension would be how long can she keep pulling back to criticize Bruno's assertion, and at one point will the tables flip if they do, and she will be the one who's kind of being
• 44:11
  [SPEAKER_01]: you know, tickled or seduced by him rather than her being the one who is the master's seductress who's manipulating everybody around her.
• 44:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: Rachel Kushner, her amazing new novel is creation lake.
• 44:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: Rachel, thanks for talking with us today.
• 44:28
  [SPEAKER_01]: Thanks so much, John.
• 44:30
  [SPEAKER_01]: Oh, the pleasure.
• 44:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: We spoke with Rachel Kushner about creation like in September, twenty twenty four.
• 44:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's out now in paperback.
• 44:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: You've been listening to start making sense, a podcast from the nation magazine, recorded in Los Angeles at our Blight Avenue Studios.
• 44:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: Renee Reynolds is our associate producer, Alan Minski is our producer.
• 44:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: Ludwig Hurtado is executive producer.
• 45:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: D.D.
• 45:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: Guttenclan is editor of the nation.
• 45:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: Baskar Shunkara is president of the nation, and Katrina Vandenhuvul is publisher and editorial director of the nation.
• 45:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: Our theme music is from Barcelona, Afrobeat, licensed by Creative Commons.
• 45:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: You can find out more about start making sense at TheNation.com.
• 45:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: And you can subscribe to start making sense on Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
• 45:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: I'm John Weener.
• 45:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: Thanks for listening.