lies lies lies lies lies lies lies lies lies lies lies lies lies lies lies lies lies lies lies lies lies lies

 

As we head into Night 3 of Trump's Republican National Convention, we had to make sure you saw our Night 1 and Night 2 recaps of the GOP's festival of lies and bigotry.

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NIGHT 1:

Oh the things you learned if you watched Episode 1 of the Republican National Convention last night!

Did you know that Trump understood the threat of COVID-19 before anyone else and his swift action saved the lives of millions? Or that we have the pandemic “courtesy of the Chinese Communist Party”? That Republicans represent “church, work, and school” while Democrats want “rioting, looting, and vandalism”?

Did you know that progressives and Democrats want to make America weaker so we can “replace her,” or that progressives and Democrats want to abolish the suburbs, or that it’s Democrats – not Trump – who are threatening the Postal Service??

And this was only the first night!

Send a message that Republicans’ lies, smears, barely veiled racism, and revisionist history won’t work by making a 400%-MATCHED donation to DEFEAT TRUMP AND TRUMP REPUBLICANS!>

It’s sad that one of America’s major parties has been completely captured by bigotry and cultish authoritarianism…

Republican leaders who once seemed, if not moderate, then at least decent, went to bat for Trump without any reservation, parroting Trump’s lies and delivering a full-throated endorsement of Trump’s narrative and agenda.

The hateful attacks on progressives, on people marching for racial justice, on immigrants, people of color, and others, were abhorrent.

The rosy picture that convention speakers painted of Trump’s first term was disrespectful to the victims of COVID-19 and their families, to those left behind by Republicans’ one-sided economic policies, and to the communities that have been under constant assault under Trump and Trumpism.

We’re fighting back. We’re going to hold Trump AND Republicans accountable, and, with your help, we’re going to deliver them a historic defeat up and down the ballot, all across the country.

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Chip in as generously as you can – your donation will be 4X-MATCHED!>

We saw last night – and will see all week – why the stakes are so high and why losing this election cannot be an option.

Thanks so much for all of your hard work and support.

-- PFAW Elections Team

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NIGHT 2:

Episode 2 of the Republican National Convention last night saw distortions of truly Orwellian proportions … laws were broken, marginalized communities were demonized, and speaker after speaker drowned viewers in a rapid-fire tsunami of lies, barely affording them a chance to catch their breath in between.

The most anti-immigrant president in modern times held a staged naturalization ceremony with the acting Homeland Security secretary (acting because he was never confirmed by the Senate, like many Trump administration officials). This was only one of the night’s several apparent violations of the Hatch Act – the federal law that prohibits government officials from campaigning for political purposes using government property or resources.

And the outrages continued… read more below, but first please do what the main purpose of this email is to ask of you:

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Cissie Graham Lynch, the granddaughter of televangelist Billy Graham, used her speech to slam the Obama-Biden administration for its supposed attacks on religious liberty (like, you know, not allowing adoption agencies to discriminate against LGBTQ people) and offered gushing praise for Trump’s efforts to protect freedom of religion.

Later in the night, Trump’s son Eric appealed to “all people of faith stripped of our religious freedoms and religious liberties,” saying, “my father will fight for you.”

Reality check:

• Trump ran for president on enacting a BAN on Muslims entering the country, the epitome of religious bigotry.

• He and his supporters have stoked intense Islamophobia and anti-Semitism.

• Several Republican candidates running for office – including Congress – promote discrimination against Muslims and believe Muslims should not be allowed to hold public office.

• And one of last night’s featured scheduled speakers was even pulled from the schedule at the last minute “after she retweeted a thread promoting an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory with ties to the fringe conspiracy theory, QAnon”!!! ^[1]

The false narratives being advance by Republicans at Trump’s convention are not only untrue, they’re dangerous.

They talk about the coronavirus pandemic in the past tense and celebrate Trump for handling it heroically while we’re still right in the middle of the crisis with infections and deaths continuing to rise.

They blast Democrats for acknowledging police violence and systemic racism (which they say does not exist) even as more Black men are shot multiple times in the back by police, like 29-year-old father Jacob Blake in Kenosha, WI, who this week was shot by officers at least 7 times and left paralyzed while trying to assist in breaking up a domestic dispute.

Up is down. Day is night. The sky is green. And history is whatever Republicans say it is…

Unless WE stop them and stand up for TRUTH. (AND justice. AND … The American Way.)

Please give whatever you can now. Your donation will be 400%-MATCHED and your impact QUADRUPLED>

Thank you for everything.

-- Ben Betz, Sr. Director of Digital & Organizing

“The past was alterable. The past never had been altered. Oceania was at war with Eastasia. Oceania had always been at war with Eastasia.” – George Orwell, 1984

 

Sources:

"Speaker removed from RNC program after tweeting anti-Semitic conspiracy theory," CNN, August 25, 2020

 

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POLITICO NIGHTLY: Mississippi’s GOP governor on Covid and college football

 

BY RENUKA RAYASAM With help from Myah Ward RNC’S NIGHT 3 — Tonight’s big speech: Vice President Mike Pence. Live video and analysis at politico.com/rnc. Pregame begins with a live edition of Four Square at 8 p.m. ET. GAME TIME — On Tuesday, 67 people died in Mississippi because of Covid. It was the state’s highest one-day death toll since the pandemic began. Mississippi Republican Gov. Tate Reeves was slow to address the crisis in the state — he first prevented local leaders from imposing Covid restrictions and waited until April to issue a stay-at-home order. But this month he issued a temporary statewide mask mandate, even as he also opened schools and colleges. About 900 teachers and students in Mississippi have tested positive for Covid. As states across the country continue to struggle to contain Covid, the pandemic has sometimes been discussed this week during the Republican National Convention as an event that already ended. Many speakers spoke as if the worst of the pandemic were in the past. Your host spoke with Reeves today about whether Democrats can make any inroads in the South, why he feels college football is essential and where he stands on the state’s new flag. This conversation has been edited. Schools have opened across Mississippi and Covid cases are climbing among teachers and students. Did the state open too early? It's really public health versus public health. We know that things like child abuse, sexual abuse reports are down significantly in America over the last six months. One of the reasons they're down so much is not because it’s not occurring, it is because these kids are not in school. We think it’s a better public health decision to get the kids in schools. We’ve had 500 kids who have gotten the virus. We’ve got 450,000 kids in Mississippi, approximately, who are in our pre-kindergarten through 12th grade schools. That's a very, very, very high percentage of kids who are actually sitting in the classroom and learning. That's important. Mississippi is seeing the highest Covid infection rates in the country. What are you planning to do to bring that down? We believe our mitigation measures, which we have put in place over the summer, are having a very positive impact. The total number of cases over seven-day periods is approximately half today what it was just four weeks ago. Our goal is not to eradicate and eliminate this virus, because we don't believe that's a realistic goal. Our goal is to ensure that every single Mississippian who gets the virus can be treated. The SEC starts games next month. Other conferences have cancelled their seasons. Why do you say college football is essential? College football is a way of life in the South. College football is a way of life in Mississippi. This gives these kids, the ones who aren’t going to become professional athletes, the opportunity to be in a structured environment, where they are learning and hopefully preparing for life after sports. Then there’s a large number of them who actually are going to play professional sports, and there are significant amounts of income riding on that. We believe that if you have these student athletes in a structured environment, that they are less likely to either contract or to spread the virus — if they’re playing football in between those lines, than if they’re in a bar or a saloon. Do you think Republicans are starting to lose ground in Southern states? The president is going to win very big here. You’ll see an election here that is very similar to what happened in 2016. I would think we would win between 15 and 18 points again this year. There’s no doubt that there has been some erosion in the suburbs of support from Republicans around the country. And we’ve seen a little bit of that in Mississippi. I ran in 2019, and we certainly battled that throughout that campaign. There’s no doubt that many of these speakers are speaking to those individuals in suburban areas, and in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh and in Madison and Mississippi. I think that’s important, as we remind those voters why they have voted Republican for many, many, many years in the past and why our policies are better for them and their kids and their grandkids. On the question of the Mississippi flag, are you for magnolia or shield? I'm taking a look at them. I'm trying to determine if it makes sense for me to be publicly for either one of them. Welcome to POLITICO Nightly: Coronavirus Special Edition. It’s 2020 — women can now have strong opinions about turkey brining and criminal justice reform. Reach out rrayasam@politico.com or on Twitter at @renurayasam.   HAPPENING TOMORROW - POWERING AMERICA’S ECONOMIC RECOVERY: The economy will be a driving factor in determining the 2020 election outcome. Join POLITICO chief economic correspondent Ben White for a virtual conversation with Larry Kudlow, director of the White House National Economic Council, on how post-November economic and labor policies will lay the groundwork for an inclusive recovery that helps workers and businesses bounce back. REGISTER HERE.     FIRST IN NIGHTLY MAKE RALLIES SMALL AGAIN — President Donald Trump has finally given up on his MAGA rallies. After he formally accepts the Republican nomination for president Thursday night, Trump will launch a general election campaign with a new playbook, according to four people familiar with it: short speeches, mostly outdoors, multiple times a day, with the occasional stop at a diner or store to greet people, minus the handshakes, White House correspondent Anita Kumar writes. Many events will take place at airports, where Trump will fly in on Air Force One to greet crowds of no more than a few hundred people, as his campaign playlist blares and U.S. flags wave around him. Welcome to the most unusual election season in modern presidential history — where the coronavirus outbreak has forced the most nontraditional candidate to embrace a more traditional campaign style. Trump has finally settled on a mega rally-free campaign model he can live with for the next nine weeks. He’s expected to travel a couple times a week, with the number of trips increasing as Election Day draws closer. His first stop after convention wraps up will be Manchester, N.H., where he will deliver remarks at an airport. Trump hopes to draw a contrast to Democratic nominee Joe Biden, who has participated in only a few live campaign events outside his Wilmington, Del. home, since the pandemic struck. Trump employed a similar strategy in 2016 against Democrat Hillary Clinton, who he tried to portray as weak and lacking stamina. Last week, both Trump and Vice President Mike Pence visited Wisconsin, the official host of the Democratic National Convention before it was transformed into a virtual event. “I think Vice President Biden has an understanding of the gravity of the pandemic and the need to emphasize safety and model safety,” said Rep. Ami Bera (D-Calif.), a doctor and Biden surrogate. “Certainly he is starting to do more … but again in an appropriate physically distanced way.” A worker carries picked grapes during harvest at the Chateau de Jasson vineyard in La Londe-les-Maures, France. | Getty Images AROUND THE NATION SPORTS STOP, AGAIN — All three NBA playoff games scheduled today have been postponed, with players around the league choosing not to play, in their strongest statement yet against racial injustice after the shooting by police officers of Jacob Blake, a Black man, in Kenosha, Wis. The NBA said the games between Milwaukee and Orlando, Houston and Oklahoma City, and the Los Angeles Lakers and Portland would be rescheduled. In baseball, the Milwaukee Brewers and Cincinnati Reds, along with the Seattle Mariners and San Diego Padres, decided to sit out tonight’s games. The WNBA also postponed three games. IN COVID’S SHADOW — Nursing homes across the country have closed their doors to visitors. In the latest POLITICO Dispatch, Alexandra Levine explains how the lack of human connection — combined with communication problems — has left nursing home residents and their families in the dark. Listen to the latest POLITICO Dispatch podcast COVID-2020 NO MEDDLING SEEN FOR MAIL-IN VOTING — The intelligence community has seen no evidence that foreign powers intend to manipulate mail-in voting in the 2020 election, senior Trump administration officials said today, undercutting a claim by Trump that such fraud “will be the scandal of our times.” “We have no information or intelligence that any nation-state threat actor is engaging in any activity to undermine the mail-in vote or ballots,” said a top official with the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, who joined other senior intel community officials from the Department of Homeland Security and FBI to brief media on the status of foreign election threats. They spoke with reporters on condition they not be named. Trump has repeatedly and groundlessly asserted that mail-in ballots will be subject to widespread fraud, sowing doubts about the security of the election, Kyle Cheney and Natasha Bertrand write. Intelligence community leaders and lawmakers of both parties have pleaded with political leaders to refrain from casting doubt on the legitimacy of the election, which could be amplified by foreign adversaries like Russia who seek to cast doubts about the validity of American institutions. PENCE TAKES THE STAGE — Nightly’s Myah Ward talked to Tom LoBianco , Washington correspondent for Business Insider and the author of Piety and Power: Mike Pence and the Taking of the White House, about Pence’s politics, his role in the Covid-19 response and the 2024 presidential campaign. This conversation has been edited. What kind of politician is Pence? Boring and methodical. His political superpower is almost uniquely designed for the Trump presidency and the Trump campaign — which is just this superhuman discipline. What’s his role in the administration? You have these two extreme caricatures of him, which I think have elements of truth but miss the bigger picture. The caricature goalposts were either glorified coat rack — the elf on the shelf, the guy standing there smiling and nodding in the back of every meeting — or the “shadow president,” the guy who's secretly pulling the strings on everything. If you look throughout the presidency, when trouble arrives, Pence tends to make himself scarce. He’s been around a long time. He knows what to do, and I think sometimes people mistake that discipline, and that sort of flat affect, for acquiescence. It’s hard to see the human there sometimes. And the skill, he’s got a lot of political skill. What about his role in the pandemic? He plays a big role leading the task force, yet he’s managed to stay away from becoming the face of the pandemic. There was some chatter that Pence would become a fall guy for the coronavirus response, assuming everything went to hell. And things went pretty badly. They still are going pretty badly. But he hasn’t become the fall guy, and the reason why is Trump. Who’s going to steal the spotlight from him? Mike Pence is like the last person who’s going to steal the spotlight from him. How well has he set himself up to run for president in 2024? Most of the races he’s run successfully have been races where the party has cleared the field for him. That doesn’t work in 2024. He himself has never had a knock-down, drag-out Republican intra-party fight. He doesn't have that experience. If you look at what he’s doing right now, he’s kind of doing what he’s always known, which is trying to run as the de facto frontrunner, perhaps even prohibitive frontrunner. FROM THE HEALTH DESK TESTING TURBULENCE — Top Trump administration officials involved with the White House coronavirus task force ordered the CDC to stop promoting coronavirus testing for most people who have been exposed to the virus but aren’t showing symptoms, health care reporters David Lim and Adam Cancryn write. Federal testing czar Brett Giroir denied those allegations today. “The new guidelines are a CDC action,” Giroir said. “As always, the guidelines received appropriate attention, consultation and input from Task Force experts, and I mean the medical and scientific experts, including CDC Director [Robert] Redfield.” The revised testing guidelines, which CDC released late Monday with no public notice, say it is up to state and local public health officials and health providers to decide whether people without symptoms or underlying risk factors need a test after high-risk situations — such as coming into contact with an infected person for more than 15 minutes. The agency also says it is now up to local public health experts to decide whether testing is needed for people who attend a public or private gathering of more than 10 individuals when masks are not worn and social-distancing guidelines are not followed. Anthony Fauci, the government's top infectious disease expert, said the change could send the wrong message. “I'm worried it will give people the incorrect assumption that asymptomatic spread is not of great concern,” Fauci said in a statement read by CNN's Sanjay Gupta on-air this afternoon. “In fact, it is.” THE BACKSTORY AFTER THE 19TH — One hundred years ago, on Aug. 26, 1920, the 19th Amendment was officially adopted into the Constitution, giving women the constitutional right to cast a ballot. While many focus on the struggle to gain the vote, deputy magazine editor Elizabeth Ralph looks at how the women’s vote has evolved through history, and the challenges many still face at the ballot box, in the latest edition of Backstory. ASK THE AUDIENCE Nightly asks you: What is your favorite memory from previous editions of the RNC or DNC? Send us your response on our form and we'll include select responses in Friday's edition. NIGHTLY NUMBER 225,000 The number of hotel rooms available across Texas to provide shelter to Hurricane Laura evacuees, according to Gov. Greg Abbott. Because of the pandemic, Texas has reduced the capacity of emergency shelters and is instead sending evacuees to vacant hotels. PARTING WORDS SEMI-CHARMED CITY — Nightly’s Tyler Weyant writes: After Trump’s rodent-inspired tweet about Maryland’s largest city last summer, a rebuttal ad appeared in The Baltimore Sun with a simple message: “People are talking about Baltimore.” A year later, they haven’t stopped. The last 12 months have seen: The federal prosecution of a former mayor for a self-enrichment scheme involving a children’s book and clothing line; the death of a Democratic House stalwart and continued high homicide rates. The White House hasn’t stopped talking about Baltimore either. Kimberly Klacik, a Republican running for the late Elijah Cummings seat, was invited to speak on the first night of the RNC after the president retweeted her viral campaign video. Tonight, the vice president will speak from Baltimore’s Fort McHenry, the home of the national anthem. I write this north of Baltimore, credentialed by blood that likely has specks of Old Bay in it and a dog named after Cal Ripken Jr. Here’s my advice for Pence tonight (he may need it after already leaving a bit of a mark at the fort): Don’t mention The Wire . If you’re looking for a local business to highlight, we all love a good mention of Under Armour (no need to remind us of the current stock price). If you want to pander to us, mention how the O’s are exceeding expectations. At the end of the day, as with all voters, people here are looking for leaders who speak to their concerns and have a plan for the future, not simply someone they want to crack open a Natty Boh with. If Pence can find a way to speak to the actual lives of Baltimoreans, and not merely castigate the city as another Democratic stronghold run amok, he might just find himself invited to a crab feast once the RNC concludes. And if he doesn’t, well, at least people will still be talking about Baltimore.   INTRODUCING POLITICO MINUTES: These unprecedented times demand an unconventional approach to political news coverage. POLITICO Minutes is a new, interactive content experience that delivers the top takeaways you need to know in an easy-to-digest, swipeable format straight to your inbox. Get a breakdown of what we've learned so far, why it matters and what to watch for going forward. Sign up for POLITICO Minutes, launching at the 2020 Conventions.     Did someone forward this email to you? Sign up here.   Follow us on Twitter Renuka Rayasam @renurayasam   FOLLOW US

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RSN: FOCUS: The Radicalism of Woody Guthrie

 

 

26 August 20

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FOCUS: The Radicalism of Woody Guthrie

Arvind Dilawar, Jacobin
Excerpt: "Legendary folk singer Woody Guthrie is best known for his anthem 'This Land Is Your Land,' which can come off as an innocuous ode to America if you aren’t listening closely. But the singer-songwriter was a lifelong socialist."

I suppose that Old Man Trump knows just how much racial hate

He stirred up in that bloodpot of human hearts

When he drawed that color line

Here at his Beach Haven family project

oody Guthrie wrote those lyrics in the early 1950s, when he spent two years living in the Beach Haven apartment complex in Brooklyn. The song, “Old Man Trump,” refers to Fred Trump, Donald Trump’s father, who owned the complex and allegedly barred Africans Americans from renting units. Guthrie, who had recently faced down a racist mob alongside Paul Robeson, minced no words when speaking about his landlord.

Guthrie’s lyrics might come as a surprise to those who know him solely for the schoolhouse version of “This Land is Your Land,” which seems like a paean to the National Parks Service. But Guthrie was a lifelong radical, who not only intended those lyrics much more literally than they’re typically sung, but who wrote three additional, often excluded verses challenging private property, poverty, and the capitalist state:

As I went walking I saw a sign there,

And on the sign it said “No Trespassing.”

But on the other side it didn’t say nothing.

That side was made for you and me.

In the shadow of the steeple I saw my people,

By the relief office I seen my people;

As they stood there hungry, I stood there asking

Is this land made for you and me?

Nobody living can ever stop me,

As I go walking that freedom highway;

Nobody living can ever make me turn back

This land was made for you and me.

Jacobin contributor Arvind Dilawar spoke with Will Kaufman, author of three books on Woody Guthrie, about the folk singer’s music and politics — as well as how the two came to be divided. Their conversation has been lightly edited for clarity. 

AD: Was American folk music always political? Or did Woody Guthrie bring politics to the genre.

WK: Woody would be the last to say that he was the first to bring politics to folk music. Folk music has always been political. Woody knew about Joe Hill, who wrote songs for the Industrial Workers of the World — the Wobblies — in the early twentieth century. He’d have known that the abolitionist movement in the nineteenth century was driven by music.

AD: What were Guthrie’s politics? How did his perspective change over time?

WK: He was born into a conservative, generally racist Oklahoma household in 1912. His father was a supporter of the Ku Klu Klan, although there’s no documentary evidence that he was actually a Klan member. On a great recent recording — The Live Wire, the only recording of a full-length, live Guthrie performance that’s been released — you can hear him talk about how he used to think like his father and make political speeches for him as a child, but that as an adult, he grew to think along the exact opposite lines as his father.

This had to do with Woody’s education on the road: going through the Dust Bowl, seeing how badly the Dust Bowl migrants were treated in California, falling in with the Communist Party (CP) and the Popular Front (there’s no documentary evidence that Woody was a CP member, but he wrote for the People’s World and the Daily Worker, and was largely in sympathy with the communist movement, if not the party itself), serving in the United States Merchant Marine during the war, witnessing Jim Crow and the Cold War, and seeing his friends like Pete Seeger getting hauled before the McCarthy committee.

He saw a lot in a tragically short lifetime — he was only fifty-five when he died in 1967. He’d have to be made of stone for it not to change him.

AD: Although he wasn’t necessarily a card-holding member of the Communist Party, was Guthrie a communist?

WK: The way I’d describe his politics, vis-à-vis the CPUSA, is that he nailed his colors to the mast of the communist movement. He called it “plain old communism.” He was an anti-capitalist, anti-fascist, and devoted socialist to the end of his life, but he was also too much of an individualist to fit into any party discipline or structure.

AD: How was Guthrie’s music both embraced and ignored by political actors, organizations, and movements?

WK: In the late 1930s, he had a very small audience of Dust Bowl migrants on Los Angeles radio. That’s when he began singing political songs. He moved to New York City in 1940, and during his productive years there — only about twelve years of recording and performing, before Huntington’s disease put him out of commission — he probably wasn’t much noticed beyond the city’s bohemian or leftist milieu.

It wasn’t until his torch was picked up by a new generation, what’s been called “Woody’s Children,” that his work became more widely known. Pete Seeger was largely the link between these two generations. Woody was still in the hospital while Pete began to take his songs to a wider audience. Then behind Pete were the likes of Bob Dylan; Peter, Paul, and Mary; Tom Paxton; Joan Baez — all of whom were devoted acolytes.

AD: How were some of Guthrie’s songs, like “This Land is Your Land,” depoliticized when he himself remained such a political artist?

WK: That’s a complex question requiring a complex answer. First of all, yes, he was indeed “a political artist,” but we’ve been finding out lately how much more expansive an artist he was, beyond the political dimension. In addition to being a songwriter, he was a poet, novelist, playwright, painter, illustrator, sculptor, and essayist — truly a modern, often abstract, artist in all senses of the word.

He engaged with subjects such as love, sex, the environment, science and technology, mass communications, cinema, theater, and literature. He was cosmopolitan, sophisticated, and urban, behind the pose of the unlettered “Okie Bard” or “Dust Bowl Balladeer.” He had a great interest in Jewish culture and history, having married into a Jewish family, and he even wrote some songs in Yiddish. (My book Woody Guthrie’s Modern World Blues focuses on all his modern expansiveness.) So there’s a lot of his work that can be depoliticized by folks who are looking to do that.

With “This Land Is Your Land,” we’re not sure exactly why it was depoliticized or even who was responsible for it. We know that the original manuscript contains the three anti-capitalist verses that probably weren’t sung at too many Republican Party conventions, and we know there’s only one version that Woody recorded with the verse against private property.

Pete Seeger believed that the short, anodyne, apolitical version that most of us sang in school was down to Woody treating that song just as one of thousands of his songs: casually. He’d forget verses or not bother to sing them depending on his mood. Possibly he was constricted by the three-minute time limit often imposed on 78 RPM recordings, producing the truncated version that was largely picked up and first circulated through school songbooks. And that particular version of “This Land” is what got Woody noticed — and, as his friend Irwin Silber said, “They’ve taken a revolutionary and turned him into a conservationist!”

AD: How did Guthrie’s politics affect his musical career? In Woody Guthrie, American Radical, he comes across as a musician wanting to be part of a radical labor movement, but that movement both fails to recognize his value and largely abandons its radicalism.

WK: There were only a few brief episodes when Guthrie sought a musical “career” — when the lure of monetary reward was attractive to him — such as his roughly twelve weeks on CBS radio after the war or when he was briefly a cast member of the radio show “Pipe Smoking Time,” for which he bastardized his Dust Bowl Ballad, “So Long, It’s Been Good to Know Yuh” into a contemptible jingle. He hated himself for having done this.

It is true, though, that often he wanted to be part of the labor movement more than the movement wanted him. Pete Seeger remembered the two of them going to sing at a union meeting in the Midwest somewhere, and the delegates were irritated with them, saying, “We’ve got work to do. What are these hillbilly singers doing here?”

Having said this, there were chapters or sectors within the labor movement who were happy for him to be part of the struggle, usually on a more local basis, on picket lines or for fundraisers or whatever. I think we get into trouble when we begin to talk about a unified, monolithic “labor movement” anyway. Surely, no such animal ever existed in America.

AD: Both Bob Dylan and The Beatles have cited Guthrie as an inspiration. What lasting influence did he have on music? And is there any corresponding influence on politics to speak of?

WK: Woody’s influence on music is easier to identify than his influence on politics. After all, if you’re going to influence someone like Dylan, or The Beatles, or, later, Joe Strummer, Bruce Springsteen, and Billy Bragg, that’s going to have a huge impact. He seemed to define the “singer-songwriter” for so many people.

In terms of political influence, it’s hard to say. I do know that something of Woody’s often pops up during a political debate or a time of political crisis. For instance, the scathing verses and prose that he wrote about his racist landlord, Fred Trump, back in the 1950s — as you can imagine, they’ve been referenced a lot over the past four years.

I discovered those writings in the Woody Guthrie Archives back in 2014 and revealed them to the world in 2016, just after Donald Trump announced his candidacy. And as the 2020 election approaches, I imagine we’ll be seeing a few more references to “Old Man Trump,” as Woody called him.

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