Trump’s Plans for the Midterms

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Good morning. It is Saturday, March 21st. I'm Ali Velshi.

In August of 2014, a man named Wayne Fish went to a division's of vehicles

office in Lawrence, Kansas to renew his driver's license.

And while he was there, he availed himself of the opportunity to register to vote.

He left the vehicle's office that day, believing he had, in fact,

registered to vote, but he had not.

The Department of Vehicles did not inform him that Kansas had recently passed a law which

required documentary proof of citizenship in order to register to vote.

So Fish got a letter in the mail saying that his registration application was incomplete

and he had to provide proof of citizenship, which is way harder than it might seem in a country

in which there are absolutely zero other reasons to ever need documentary proof of your citizenship.

Couldn't find his birth certificate. When he attempted to replace his birth certificate

from his place of birth, because he wasn't born in Kansas, he ran into another problem.

It was born on what was by then a decommissioned air force base in Illinois.

So two years and an entire election cycle later, Fish finally found his birth certificate

and a safe that belonged to his late mother. The Secretary of State and Kansas at the time,

Chris Kobach had championed a law that would require people who registered to vote to provide

documentary proof of citizenship. Now again, I just want to remind you, I travel a ton.

You have to have a passport if you travel. If you don't travel a ton,

there's virtually no reason to ever need these documents.

So the thing is Kansas, the call was called the Safe Act, the Secure and Fair Election Act. I love

the way they name these things. And in its brief lifespan before a judge threw it out in 2018,

it prevented 30,000 canzans from registering to vote. You want to guess, by the way,

that 30,000 included Wayne Fish because he was one of the plaintiffs in the suit that got the law

overturned. But of those 30,000, how many you think were non-citizens? According to the judges

ruling, the Kansas Secretary of State's office presented a spreadsheet. These are the people

who made the law. They presented a spreadsheet of all the names of the non-citizens who attempted

to register to vote between 2013 and 2016. Take a guess. Come on. Take a guess. I mean, names

run. That's for a spreadsheet. If you guess 16 pages, you'd be wrong. There were 16 names

in total of which several had administrative errors. One woman, for instance, wrongfully registered

by the Kansas Department of Vehicles, wrote to the agency, quote, please put in the record that I

am not a citizen. I cannot vote. She underlined, am not, and I cannot vote. Because that woman

wanted to make it crystal clear because attempting to vote as a non-citizen is against the law

everywhere in the United States and will almost certainly end someone's hope for naturalization.

It could, in fact, get them prosecuted or deported. Kansas's Safe Act was deemed unconstitutional.

The problem that they supposedly created it to solve was deemed non-existent. You could take

stats from every state in this country and you'll find that citizens' voting is a non-existent

problem. By now, eight years later, this precise brand of long discredited blunt force voter suppression

looks like a golden ticket to Donald Trump who's desperate to overcome the deep unpopularity that

his party faces under his leadership in this cycle. So the president is going all in on the

Safe Act, the Safe Guard, American voter eligibility act. He is so into this bill that he declared

on social media that he would not sign a single bill before the Safe Act is sent to his desk.

The Safe Act, currently upper debate in the Senate, which is in session today, would implement

requirements for voter registration that are stricter than the current standard in any state

except Ohio. It requires documentary proof of citizenship when registering to vote,

and in some cases when voting. It bans universal mail-in voting, and if you do register by mail,

you have to visit an elections office in person to verify that document again, which kind of

negates the point of registering by mail. If you change party affiliation, which you're allowed to

do, probably encourage to do in this country, it's likely you'll need to present that proof again.

If you're in a state which offers same-day voting in registration, you'd have to bring those

citizenship documents to a polling place. If you're one of the 69 million women in America,

who's changed their last name because of marriage, your birth certificate would not be sufficient

because the name wouldn't match, and you'd be required to provide yet more documentation.

Like a passport, if you have one, but about 52 percent of Americans don't have a passport,

more than 21 million Americans of voting age would not have the necessary proof of citizenship

readily available, that's according to research from the Brennan Center for Justice.

There is an exception, which would allow election officials to sign an affidavit,

affirming a voter's citizenship even if they lack this paperwork, but that is another burden

of administration placed upon election officials in a bill that's full of new responsibilities

and liabilities for election officials, so there's no incentive to really help people with this,

and there's also no funding to support these new requirements.

Again, I remind you, our country is not built on citizens carrying around their papers.

A passport has virtually no use within this country's border, so unless you need one to go elsewhere,

you may go years or decades without needing one. I travel all the time, I know where my passport

is all the time, but if you don't, why would you need one? And as I've said before, our problem

is not non-citizens voting. Our problem in America right now is citizens not voting.

Midterm turnouts hover around 40%, for primaries which can make all the difference

in a heavily Republican or heavily Democratic district turnouts even lower.

So why is the president so obsessed with this effort to make it harder to vote?

I'm not doing it for this reason at all. It'll guarantee the midterms. It'll guarantee the midterms.

If you don't get it, big trouble, my opinion. If you get this, your midterms, and they know it,

you got to win the midterms because if we don't win the midterms, it's just going to be,

I mean, they'll find a reason to impeach me. I'll get impeached.

Ah, there it is. Trump himself seems to believe that voter suppression is the only way Republicans

can win, and Republicans winning is the only way he'll avoid a third impeachment,

because this is the president who is increasingly running out of political solutions to his political

problems. The worst the economy gets. The clearer it becomes that he's got no real plan for the

war of choice in Iran, the lower his approval ratings drop, the more he fixates on the save act.

If they're going to vote against you, just don't let him vote.

Joining me now, Angela Karrison, chairman and president of Media Matters for America,

non-profit media watchdog, and Wendy Weiser, a constitutional lawyer and vice president for

democracy at the Brennan Center for Justice upon whom we'd rely for many of our statistics on

these matters. Thanks to both of you for being here. Angela, it's not really part of the discussion,

but it's the most important part to me. What Donald Trump just said there, that if you don't do this,

you won't win, meaning to Republicans, and if you don't win, I get impeached. Kind of beginning

and end of the segment to me. Yeah, I mean, and there's a tie in there too, because one,

you know, one layer beneath that, you know, throughout the larger right-wing media,

one of the things that they're saying over and over again is that it's not just going to end

with Donald Trump. They're going to get revenge on all Republicans, on all MAGA people,

trying to create some incentive to really lean into what Trump has said explicitly is designed

to ensure that they win the midterms. Wendy, there's this thing going around in these hearings

from coming from Republicans mostly about, you should be voting for citizens, and why shouldn't

you have to prove ID? Those two are different issues. They're two separate issues. Voting is for

citizens, and ID requirements are different. This is not a normal ID requirement. No, I think you

laid it out very well. This goes well beyond asking people to show IDs at their polls. It

requires every eligible American to go in person to an elections office and bring their passport

or birth certificate, not only when they register, but when they re-register to vote. As you

said, 21 million Americans do not have those documents, and it doesn't only do this. It would

end mail registration. It would end online registration. It would require states to hand over all

of your sensitive private voter data to the Department of Homeland Security. It might even lead to

widespread purges of eligible voters from the voter rolls. This is a vote suppression bill

here and simple. So, Angela, how, and I think this is a, this is an issue for you because you're

you're a critic of how media handles things. How do we express to people that you can't in a country

that has made a decision to not be a paper's pleased country decide to do this stuff because as a guy

who gets this passport renewed as regularly as he should, it's actually harder than it should be.

They're making it easier. It's kind of online, but it still actually costs a good amount of money.

And getting a birth certificate in replace is actually a much more complicated procedure.

Getting a naturalization certificate in replace is a truly more complicated procedure than that.

We're not built for this. Yeah, I think that's the right question to ask because if you just

look at the politics of it, right, it doesn't really seem to be about getting the bill passed into law.

I mean, I'm sure they would be happy to have that happen, but that doesn't really seem what's

the case, right? Because lots of other legislation is in the same bucket, but it's considered dead

on arrival, and nobody talks about it, right? They can't break the filibuster according to

tuning itself. And so what's the point of all this? And I think that's it. The point of all of this

is the debate. Is the opportunity for them to get out there and sow the seeds of misinformation,

of deceit, of a feeling that the election is being stolen to preload a narrative for after Democrats,

you know, in theory, win the midterms that they can come back in and brag around and say,

see how not legitimate it is? They stole it. We tried to prevent it, but you wouldn't let it happen.

And in the meantime, they get to preload the narrative, put all this misinformation out there.

And so to your point, the question is, you know, we should talk about how bad the policy is,

as is noted, the legislation itself, but we should be doing what we're doing more broadly here,

which is actually getting into why they're doing this. And more importantly, not only why are they

doing this, but how much easier it can actually be. And I really do appreciate that you focus on all

the people that don't register in the first place, because that's the so what and the significance of

the other side, instead of just shaking fists and frustration, you can get to the solutions.

Wendy, let's talk about the nature of the underlying problem that Donald Trump says we have.

I spoke last week to the Secretary of State for Arizona this morning. I spoke to the Secretary of

State for Michigan. Secretary of State run audits. It's in their interest to run elections properly.

The percentage of non-citizens who registered a vote, in many cases, they're mistakes, by the way,

but the percentage is tiny. It's like it's got four zeros before it. It's not a thing and it's

punishable. It's seriously punishable anywhere in this country. There's no actually incentive for

non-citizen to try to vote in this country. Only bad things will happen to you if you get caught.

And actually recent reviews by the Trump administration itself keep on reaffirming that. They

keep they are running these checks. They are trying to gather up. They have a few

willing states who've turned over their voter rolls, and they are turning up only small

handfuls of non-citizens who are even on the voter rolls, and those are being further

investigated and whittled down. This is not a problem. This is actually not the goal of this.

This is a key element of the president's broader campaign to metal and elections. He says he wants to

nationalize the voting, take over the voting. The SAV Act, he has said, now this is his number one

priority. He's not going to sign anything out. We've got high prices, but the number one

priority is getting people to prove their citizenship for voting in a country that does not have a

problem with citizens, non-citizens voting. And a whole bunch of other things that would up end

elections and make it completely impossible this year to do those elections. This is not what the

Americans priorities are. This is the president. Angela, is there a counter effort to this? We're

a week away from no kings. Is there an effort to say maybe we shouldn't have 40% turnout

in midterm elections? Maybe we shouldn't have 60% turnout in presidential elections. Maybe

your obligation as a citizen of this country, and I don't want to be lectery about this, but

is there a way to convince people that you can at least try and overcome this by registering

and showing income to vote? That's exactly. It's going to come from the bottom up, and that's

one of the differences here. One of the effort, this, what Trump is doing, a thousand times on Fox

News. They've talked about it in the last three weeks, 700 times on newsmax. It's been off the

charts. It's topped up. They are driving this and they're forcing this narrative. The antidote

is actually not going to come from some overarching, big national singular figure that creates a

center of gravity. It's going to be a catalyst that then inspires that peer-to-peer conversations.

That's why it's so dastardly for them to be pushing on this particular thing in the first

place because the very thing, once you catalyze somebody to action, increasing any barriers or the

implied threats and somehow going to boom-ring back around you, makes it hard for you to take that

first step in the first place. I do think that's the antidote is that it doesn't have to be this way,

and the only answer is that. There is no other alternative. You actually have to do something,

and that's what people are doing with this peer-to-peer. Wendy, I want to be clear because you at

Brennan have numbers that you attach to this. One very, very large group is women.

Women who either change their names for whatever reason, whether they got married or maybe got

married and got divorced again, now they say bring your birth certificate. Your birth certificate

is not going to match your driver's license. You're literally just going to disenfranchise a whole

lot of women. 69 million married women have changed their names. That is the vast majority of

married women, and they would have to jump through extra hurdles just to be able to register,

to vote under this bill, rural Americans, overseas Americans. How are they going to get in person

to an elections office? There are so many people from all walks of life that are going to be

impacted if this passes, and again, nothing else is happening in the Senate right now while this

is going on. This is Angela. This is remarkable. The United States Senate is working on a Saturday,

not to discuss war powers, right? Not to discuss whether there should be this war in Iran,

not to discuss why 13 Americans are dead, not to discuss why 200 plus American soldiers are killed

several thousand people are dead and a million people are displaced. We're discussing this.

Yeah, I mean, that's the, that is the illustration of the power of Trump's narrative

dominance, or at least the narrative engine that props him up, is that it isn't just that he gets

to control people's attention or shape it. It said he has this political lever that he can actually

make them do something on a Saturday, let alone, that has nothing to do with reality, but,

but has to do with what's happening in his own head and sort of this, this larger arc that he's

interested in. Every human I talk to, I'm sure it's the same for both of you, when they talk

about what a crazy world we're in and what's going on, they don't bring up non-citizens voting

in elections. Like, I can't, I don't think that makes a top thousand of things that Americans are

worrying about, nor should they be. Thanks to both of you, Angela Carson is the chairman and

president of Media Matters for America, Wendy Weiser is the vice president for democracy

at the Brennan Center for Justice. All right, coming up, we're checking in on our friend Betty

and how she and her family are pairing with rising gas prices, caused by the war in Iran,

and what history can tell us about oil price spikes and what might be coming next.

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All right, I'm here with our friend Caleb Silver. He's the Chief Business Editor at People

Inc. He's the Editor-in-Chief of Investopedia. Right now, everybody's talking about a gas

prices are soaring across the country, almost at $4 a gallon as a national average,

$5.65 or something like that if you're in California. This is all because of the war in Iran

and a near-tonal block on the crucial straight of Hormuz. Now, spikes in oil prices have happened

throughout history. So Caleb and I are going to take a trip through time with our old friend Betty.

We got a little twist. Betty and Betty's mother Barbara. That's little baby Betty. Back in the 1970s,

Betty was just an infant between doctors' appointment and grocery runs. Barbara Betty's mother

was keeping busy and she was feeling the pain at the gas pump because in October of 1973,

some of the members of the organization of petroleum exporting countries known as OPEC announced

a total oil embargo on countries, including the U.S. that it supported Israel and the Arab-Israeli

war. By the time the embargo was lifted in March of 1974, the price of oil had risen 400%. Now,

it gone from $3 a barrel to $12 a barrel. But that contributed to a 48% contraction in the stock

market and a recession that would last through the spring of 1975. Unemployment hit 9%. We're under

5% right now. But that's what a whole lot of people remember. Yeah, ask your parents, ask your

grandparents about those. No gas at this gas station. Right, line-ups. Line-ups for hours and

hours just to get gasoline. This had a debilitating effect on the economy. Put the U.S. economy

into a long period of stagnation. That's eye prices, low growth and very low employment. And

that's not what we want to see. This was extreme. A 4x spike in oil price. And by the way,

hard to get out of it. It did have one interesting effect. It got rid of big cars in America and

created the small car. Yeah, welcome to the sedan. That's right. Welcome to the sedan.

All right, let's go back to 19. Let's go forward now to 1990. Betty is now a senior in high school.

She and her mom are doing a lot of traveling. They're visiting prospective colleges. Once again,

filling up the car for those trips is hurting their wallet this time because of the Gulf War.

Oil prices more than double. They had started at $17 a barrel and jumped to $36 a barrel.

Consumer confidence collapsed. The economy entered another recession. Unemployment peaked at 7.8%

in the spring of 1992. Little more in common with what we're seeing. This is a lot closer to what

we're seeing today because this is supply destruction in a key part of the world where oil is

produced. And we know the strain of hormones is right there. So this is very much like kind of

what we're seeing today. This lasted for an extended period of time because we didn't know how

long this war was going to last either. It ended up being many years longer than what people thought.

You had a big spike in oil prices there. You had sort of the beginning of a huge run-up in

inflation. What do the federal reserve have to do? Raise interest rates to cool that down and that

had a very profound effect. Super hard, though, because if you're paying more for gas or energy

in your house and then they raise interest rates, you're just paying more for life.

Everything just costs more. And we might be nearing a phase like that right now. That's why

this is an interesting one. All right, let's jump forward in time to 2008. Caleb and I were

awful busy. Then it was the United States in the middle of a massive financial crisis.

Betty had a newborn son of her own body whom you know. Grandma Barbara is living with them to save

money. Gas prices spiked because of strong demand for oil amid stagnating production around the

entire world. The price of oil more than doubling again. It was $60 a barrel, went up to $143

a barrel, but then oil prices collapsed to just $35 a barrel by the end of 2008.

Right. This didn't cause the great financial crisis, but it sort of got a set up for it. And when

the bottom fell out of the housing market, you had these incredibly high prices. You had inflation

everywhere. This took the stock market down about 50 percent and it wrecked a lot of people's

squares, took people years to get out of the economic hole from the great financial crisis,

but it just shows you how profound the impacts of these rising oil prices have on all of us.

It's not just at the gas pump. That's where we feel it on a daily basis, but everything you do,

and everything you get and everything is delivered to your house, every plane you take,

every piece of food you get from a farm, all of it. All of it. The gas prices are the obvious

ones, but it's not the only place in it. And you see them on the highway every day or when you

go to fill up that you're getting in every derivative product of oil and petroleum. And that's

kind of what happened then. So let's go to the not too distant past early 2022. Russia just invaded

Ukraine, Betty Bobby and Grandma Barber are just trying to make it past the hump of the COVID pandemic,

worldwide countries embargo Russian oil. And as a result of that, Russian oil being taken off

the market, prices for oil rose 70 percent going from $70 a barrel to $120 a barrel, a number that

we've actually just hit in the last few weeks again. This again did not kick off a recession,

but the economic impact was widely fell because what you call real incomes ended up falling,

and the U.S. aggressively ended up hiking interest rates.

Hiking interest rates has kicked off a bear market. We had one of those in the past five years.

That was the year that that happened. This caused a tremendous amount of instability. Supply chains

were blocked every which way. We didn't know where oil was going to come from. Ironically, the U.S.

buying oil from Russia now to make sure we have enough supply, but this upended oil supplies,

it upended the entire global capital markets as well. So we've seen Brent, which is the worldwide

price of oil, hitting about 120 bucks at various times in the last few weeks. We've seen the U.S.

price above 100 at some point. Unlike other things like tariffs where a company might pass it on

to the consumer or not, that's not how it works with oil. 100 percent of the increase in the price

of oil will be felt. So if you're thinking oil is about four bucks a gallon right now,

it's probably going to go higher. Yeah, do the math like this. Every $10 increase in crude oil

prices means about a quarter a gallon, another quarter to a half dollar a gallon. So is oil prices

rise, gas prices rise, but it's the bottom of the barrel that we want to think about too. That's the

crude. That's where diesel comes from. That's where jet fuel comes from. That's where the fuel to

power big rigs comes from. That's where a lot of industrial production gets its fuel from those

prices are spiking in oil trades 23 hours a day, six days a week. So a lot of companies buy it

into the future. We're already hearing from companies like United Airlines saying we can see oil

prices of 150, 160. We're going to cut capacity. We may have to charge more for our seats.

Airlines prices are already rising. This is an overall inflationary effect and we don't know how

long it's going to last. I killed. Thank you. As always, Caleb Silver is a chief business editor at

People Inc and the editor in chief at Investopedia. All right. Coming up my conversation with the

Pennsylvania Congresswoman and member of the Foreign Affairs Committee, Madeline Dean. That's next.

The war with Iran has entered the fourth week and MS now has learned that the Trump

administration is now sending an additional 2,500 Marines and three more warships to the Middle

least. That's in addition to the 2,500 US Marines and three warships. The administration

separately deployed last week and on top of tens of thousands of American troops and assets that

are already in the region. 13 US service members have died so far in the war. 232 have been wounded,

including 10 seriously. Overnight, Iran reportedly launched two ballistic missiles at joint US

military base Diego Garcia. That's according to the Wall Street Journal citing multiple US

officials and as you can see, Diego Garcia is located almost two and a half thousand miles away

from Iran. It's in the middle of the Indian Ocean. Importantly, this marks a significant attempt by

Iran to attack US assets beyond the Middle East. Just hours ago, Iranian state media reported that

its Natanz nuclear facility was attacked. That's until facilities, one of Iran's three main nuclear

enrichment facilities. Notably, it's the same one that was targeted during last year's US

Israeli bombing campaign. President Trump said then that the facility was, quote,

completely and totally obliterated. DNI chief Chelsea Gabbard and CIA director John Ratcliffe both

stated back then that the site would take years to rebuild. I come to you now as a democratic

congresswoman, Madeline Dean of Pennsylvania, congressman, a woman dean serves on the House of

Foreign Affairs Committee, congressman, great, good to see you. I was just speaking out if you heard

it. I was having a conversation with our correspondent, Inza Mom Rashid in Dubai, and he very

diplomatically said that these gulf allies of ours are getting up this morning a little bit confused

about what the point of this is. They bombed the Natanz facility in Iran that Israel and the US said

was destroyed last June. Kind of weird that we're in this war to do something we apparently did

nine months ago. Well, good morning. Good to be with you. And he has every right to be confused,

I'm confused. Our allies are confused. And our enemies are pleased with the passing fancy of

this president. He's so erratic. We can't tell why he chose this war of choice. He never made the

case to the American people. Certainly never came to Congress as required under a constitutional

republic. But he never made the case to the American people as 13 service members have died.

As tens of thousands of members are in the region, as you just reported, 2500 more marines going

to the region, 200 plus service members injured, and take a look at the rubble. That is what I think

this administration pays no attention to. People's lives in ruin, the suffering, the rubble,

the schoolgirls who were killed on day one. I can't understand this administration. You have

Christie Hegsett as I see him playing this as a video game. And the president just has everything

as a passing fancy with no consequence, with no understanding of the grave human losses here.

Yeah, I think I really appreciate you bringing this up because one might think if one doesn't

follow the news, these are enemies and people, sometimes innocent people die when you, when you

bomb. There's just no good reason for that. It's not just the Iranian girls. I mean, there's

thousands of people dead in Iran. There's people dead all over the region in our allied countries

in Israel. None of which needed to happen because no one has articulated why anybody needs to die,

including our 13 service members and the more than 200 service members who are injured,

ten of whom are injured, very seriously, for what reason? It hasn't been given and I can tell you,

not only has it not been given publicly, it hasn't been given in the classified briefings that

I have sat in on. I have to admit to you what we heard in the classified briefings, I can't

identify much of anything that was classified. And there was no straight answer as to the

imminence. In fact, we have heard members of the administration say there was no imminence

as to what the mission was. Is it about nuclear enrichment? Is it about the missiles? Is it about

decapitation? No answers along those lines and very critically. No answers along what's the end

game? When do we get out? How many more lives will be lost? I'm a little surprised at the lack of

resistance coming from your Republican colleagues, but you are on a committee that's actually directly

related to this. Are your Republican colleagues on the committee saying American lives are being put

on the line for this? There had better be a valid reason why any Americans died in the pursuit of

this thing. And more will die. I mean, JD Vance talks about it like it's a video game. He says,

hey, people died. That's what happens. No, they are not saying at least behind closed doors where I

am. They are not saying it. They're not parting company with the president. Again, drained of

their humanity and their constitutional authority. I serve on both foreign affairs. I feel so

fortunate to be on foreign affairs, but I also am on the appropriations committee. And you know that

this administration has put before us the request for $200 billion more for this excursion as the

president calls it a strike operation. You know, I carried off a lot of that language. Watch the

language around this excursion. All to avoid the use of the word war. And I see the Republicans

playing along with this Orwellian nightmare. Yeah, if it's an excursion, you don't need $200

billion board. Congresswoman, thank you for being with us, the Democratic Congresswoman, Madeline

Dean of Pennsylvania. All right, coming up. Another meeting in the Valshi band book club. Today's

features Tony Morrison's famed and award-winning novel, Song of Solomon. I'll talk about its

relevance with Tiary Jones, the author of the brand new blockbuster novel, Ken.

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operate in Virginia by chef and as many campuses, including at 21 21 15th Street North in Arlington,

Virginia. In 2004, right after George W. Bush was elected for the second time, Tory,

Tony Morrison had this to say, quote, this is precisely the time when artists go to work.

There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear.

We speak, we write, we do language. That is how civilizations heal.

I know the world is bruised and bleeding, and though it is important not to ignore its pain,

it is also critical to refuse to succumb to its malevolence.

Like failure, chaos contains information that can lead to knowledge, even wisdom,

like art, end quote. I don't think you ever need an excuse to revisit Tony Morrison or her work.

There's never a bad time to open beloved or the bluest eye for the first time or for the

hundredth time. And after reading that passage in a world so desperately in need of the healing

that she speaks of, it is time for the Valshi band book club to turn to Tony Morrison once again.

Today's feature is Tony Morrison's award-winning third novel, a work that, depending on who you ask,

is her greatest song of Solomon. The novel begins with the death and with the birth, quote,

the North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance Agent promised to fly from Mercy to the other side of

Lake Superior at three o'clock. Standing on the roof of a building, the insurance agent jumps to

his death, the trauma of his death causes Ruth, who is among the townspeople watching from the ground

below, to go into labor. Her baby, who becomes known by the nickname Milkman, grows up to be disillusion,

selfish, and even from childhood, unable to return the love and devotion that he receives from

his mother, his sisters, and his aunt Pilot. Although born to a prominent black doctor and landowner,

the painful legacy of slavery is still a wound that is untreated. By age 32, Milkman is restless

and resentful. He leaves home in search of a fortune, bars of gold allegedly hidden by his

aunt Pilot. What Milkman finds, however, is more valuable, an understanding of his past,

his heritage, and as a result, an understanding of himself. When we read Beloved on the Velshivan

Book Club last year, I said that this is one of those novels that's difficult to summarize,

because its nuance and its lyrical language and its themes are as inherent to the story as the

bones of the plot. I think this is even more true of the Song of Solomon. Author Tyory Jones,

who wrote the new introduction for Song of Solomon agrees, quote, Morrison's gift lies in the

even handedness of her passions. Her layered characters engage in layered relationships,

ponder layered dilemmas upon a layered landscape. These situations are varied in color and

texture like the rocky cliffs that line some seashores and adhering these details,

these dynamics and facts and fictions and actions and ideas is language. With Morrison,

it always comes back to language. Although Song of Solomon follows a man,

it is a story about women. It is a story about what becomes of the women who are left behind,

abandoned so that men might be free to take flight, to find themselves, to embark on their own

heroes' journey. And because it's Morrison, Song of Solomon is about so much more than that,

the alienation of racism, the power of names and oral tradition, liberation, the importance of

community, the lasting effect of slavery in this country, trauma, and how foundational and

necessary it is to understand your lineage and background in order to understand yourself.

So right after a quick commercial break, I'll be joined by Tirey Jones, author of the latest

forward for Song of Solomon, and many of her own important novels, including the brand new novel,

Kim.

Today's meeting of the Melchiband Book Club is officially in session. We're taking another

look at the great Tony Morrison. This time, we're examining her third published novel, which is a

true masterpiece of American fiction, Song of Solomon. And to discuss it, I'm joined by another

great Tirey Jones. Jones wrote the forward to the latest edition of Song of Solomon. She's the

author of five novels, including the recently published blockbuster of a novel, Kim, which we

are going to talk about separately on another visit. Tirey, welcome to the show. Thank you for being

with us. Thanks for having me. Let's start with the forward that you wrote for the rerelease of

Song of Solomon. In it, you write about one of the central themes in the book, which is heritage.

You write quote, when milkman leaves the cold word world of Michigan for the verdant hills of

Virginia, he finds the legitimate keepers of histories and gas stations, parlors, and even the woods.

They share more than the mere names of the generations past. Painful stories, some remembered,

some handed down as heirlooms reveal the contours of nearly forgotten lives end quote. Tell me a

bit more about this. You know, milkman is a young man of a privileged background who feels like

his life is empty. And he goes on a search to find out, you know, who he really is. Like today,

you know, everyone will order their 23 and me kid and, you know, swap their cheeks and get a

print out a graph, a pie chart to tell them who they are. But in Song of Solomon, you see that

if you don't talk to people, you will never know what the real history is. Records often cannot be

trusted. What can be seen? What can be touched? Felt our physical artifacts that people hold close

over the generations and stories that are passed down as the true legacy of a family and of a

community. Let's talk about on pilot. She's described as being born without a navel. And I think

that's meant to underscore her spiritual nature. Tell me what you what you find from that.

You know, she has no navel. So there's no kind of tangible evidence that she was ever born

of a mother. But it's ironic because she is the one that is most connected to the generations

gone by. Any understanding of the truth of milkman's past, of milkman's father's past,

it all must come through pilot who carries with her a physical legacy of bones.

So if you go from pilot to the novel's opening scene, there's this element of magical realism

throughout the novel. Tell me the significance of Morrison marrying myth and reality in Song of Solomon.

I don't know that Morrison would necessarily call this magical realism. I think she may just

call it realism because for many people, magic is real. It isn't a device or a gimmick.

There is a sense that the past is always with us that ghosts, both literal and metaphoric,

are around us everywhere. And this is why pilot is able to understand the world in the way that her

very kind of empirically minded nephew cannot. She knows that everyone we have ever known

is still here in the room with us. Let's talk about something that's going on currently. We're

in the midst of what one New York Times book critic called A Wave of Morisonia. Eleven of her books,

Song of Solomon, are being reissued and re-released. Tell me about that and why that's happening now.

I think it's as simple as the fact that Morrison is the greatest American novelist to ever pick

up a pen to ever play the game. And here, you know, we're approaching the anniversary of her passing

is only makes sense that these American treasures be re-released with new introductions by

writers of a different generation explaining how these stories are and will always be relevant

to how we understand who we are as a nation, especially now in such times of strife. These stories

road maps sometimes some other times they provide just good ideas cautionary tales to how we

should take the next steps forward if we want to have a country that is just fair and nurturing to

everyone. Well, that quote I wrote in the intro after the election of George Ellery Bush would

seems now quaint compared to the moments that we're in right now, but it was very telling, right?

In these moments, this is what we need to rely on. I think that becomes as relevant, it's perhaps

more relevant now than when Tony Morrison wrote that or many of the other things that you wrote.

I mean, I think the real question for any time you find yourself puzzled by the moment we're in,

you have to ask yourself what happened and in fiction, we can find a different kind of question

answered to that question of what happened because fiction goes into people's homes

into people's hearts in a different way that say important books of history. When we find out

what happened between people members of a family, what happens when a black boy went to the emergency

room? What happened when milkman traveled to Virginia and found his great aunt who is living in the

home of the people she worked for because she wants to see that home fall to pieces. We understand

it differently. And when we understand, we can make meaningful decisions about the way forward.

Is there a way, if you are revisiting Tony Morrison or your or your new to Tony Morrison given

the sort of the sustaining relevance of her work? Is there a way you'd tell our viewers to approach

how to how to start reading this? You know, I feel that Morrison has this reputation for being so

difficult. So people want to know like how do I get in as though there's some kind of complicated

lock that you need a like a formula to open. But one thing that Morrison doesn't get enough credit for

is that she plots a novel like a house on fire. You will turn the pages just to find out what happens

next. Because of her profundity, people think of her as kind of like, you know, take your medicine,

eat your spinach. But this book is a delight. You will laugh out loud. You will find yourself,

you know, quoting her more masterful lines about everyday life. Just jump into it. Put aside

whatever your English teacher may have told you and pick it up because it is a pleasure to read.

It is a profound pleasure. And by that, I mean, not that it is merely profoundly pleasurable,

but there is a profundity laced within this story. This is interesting that you say this because

it's something that we talk about on the Velce Band book club that forget the rules you learned

about how you should consume information or consume books. Just just read them and just enjoy

them. And I appreciate you saying that tire. You'll be back to talk about Ken very shortly. So I

appreciate that. Thank you for joining us today to talk about song of Solomon. Tariah Jones,

the newest member of the Velce Band book club. She will be back with us to discuss her novel,

Ken, which is a story about friendship and motherhood in the American South. It is already

being heralded as one of the best books of the year. So you'll want to read that. And then we'll

talk to her on the show. That does it for me. Thank you for watching. Catch me back here tomorrow

morning from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. Eastern. Also joined Stephanie rule in me on YouTube on Wednesdays at

3 p.m. Eastern for it's happening with Velce in rule sending your questions. We will answer them

live on air. They can be about anything, by the way. We talk about the intersection between

politics and economics, but ask whatever you want. And you can send us the email anytime you want.

The email address is velcey rule at ms. Now that's velcey rule at ms. Now say where you are.

The news continues with my colleague Ariel Rechef, who's in for Alex Witt right after break.

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