 Hello, sorry, that wasn't a call and response. My name is Seth Manukin. I'm the director of the communications forum. Thank you all very much for coming out today. Before we start, a couple of quick announcements. One, we have a mailing list over here. Please sign up for it. We will only send you notices about upcoming communications forums, so you will not be spammed by us. And we try and schedule three pretty interesting forums this semester. Our next one this semester is on sexual harassment and covering sexual harassment in science and some scandals that have cropped up over the last couple of years. This forum is also cosponsored by Radius at MIT. Unfortunately, the people from Radius could not be here tonight because they're out of town at the conference, but we're very grateful to them. And tonight, I'm going to be speaking with Jamel Buie. Jamel is the chief political correspondent for Slate and a political analyst for CBS News. He's a former staff writer at The Daily Beast and a writing fellow at the American Prospect Magazine. And his work has also appeared in the New Yorker The Washington Post, The Atlantic, The Nation, and many other places. I've been a fan of Jamel's for many years and was absolutely thrilled when he agreed to come here. So please join me in welcoming Jamel. So for those of you for whom this is your first forum, the structure is we have a conversation for roughly an hour, and then we have questions from the audience for roughly an hour. When you ask questions, I'll ask you to come up to the microphone, not because we can't hear you, but because this is recorded for people who can't make it and want to listen to it later. And they won't be able to hear your questions unless you speak into the microphone. So I want to start actually by just asking a little bit about your career. I know you were not someone who majored in journalism or did journalism in college. So how did you get involved in journalism? Yeah. First, thank you all for coming. I'm always impressed by people who come out to talks on school nights. I did not do that in college or anything, so bullied all of you. Yeah, so in college, I studied government and philosophy. And I think my impression, my last year of school, I went to the University of Virginia. My impression was that I would go to law school, which is what UVA kids do. Or I would get a grad degree and do policy work or something like that. But I graduated in 2009. And my last two years of school, of course, were the 2008 presidential primaries in the election. And I've always been kind of a politics nerd. And so I think in late 07, I decided to start a blog because that's what people were doing at the time and kind of kept up this blog following the election in Virginia for a long time, for like all through my third year, through my fourth year. And after I graduated, I kept on writing the blog. And the readership kind of got up. And I started getting offers to write freelance pieces. And of course, this means 500 words here or there for like $50, right? Right. But which would be high these days. Right, right. That would be, you know, that would be a princely sum. But these days, they would just not pay you. But through that, I ended up meeting not just editors and such other writers and through kind of like basically networking, like all of us kind of for all sort of college age and we all just graduated and we're all writing. Let's kind of share information and share leads for people who are looking for work. And through all of this, I'd heard about the American Prospects writing fellowship. And so I applied for it just around the same time I was, the job I had was just sort of like an administrative job at the university. That was at the Miller Center. The Miller Center of Public Affairs at UVA. They were about to fire me, which no hard feelings they did. Because of something you had done? No, no, no, just because they didn't have money to pay me anymore. So I was like, sorry, Jamel, but you had to run out of the job. So I was about to lose that job. And I was applying for the American Prospect position. And they hired me. And so when you started out, were you covering a certain beat? How did you figure out what to write about at the start? At the start. So the writing fellowship is an interesting program because there aren't very many ones like it. I think in magazine journalism, at least, it is a kind of, it's not an internship. It's a fully paid, with benefits, like staff job, more or less. But reserved for people who have little to no journalism experience, and usually people who are either just out of college or just at a grad school. And the idea of it is that you'll kind of just learn how to do this, learn how to be a journalist by doing and go from there. And so when I was hired, they basically were like, hey, midterm elections are happening this year. This is 2010. Cover them. If you need any help, any assistance or guidance, feel free to ask. But we're sure you can figure it out. They threw you into the deep end. Yeah. It was very frustrating for the first year and a half. And one of my colleagues, who's a very good friend now, we got into, she was also my editor at the time. And I think we got into at least two screaming matches about sourcing. And it's sourcing because she felt like you weren't sourcing properly? Right. And I was like, what more do you want me to do? Was she correct? Oh, she's totally right. Yeah, and I was in the wrong 100% and I apologized to her. And so covering politics right off the bat and covering my, since 2008, I think the political coverage and the response to political coverage, both because of social media and because of the election of Obama, has been charged in a way that it has not always. I mean, when I covered the 2000 campaign, if people wanted to yell at me, they would have to send me a physical letter or find my email address somehow. That sounds wonderful. Yes, yeah. And I could either respond or not. The big debate then was whether to have comments on articles. But from the moment you started, you had this sort of instant, not only feedback, but a very healthy trolling culture. So what was that like? I mean, did that, for someone who had not been trained in journalism, was that off-putting? Was that? I honestly can't be that kind of trolling or just sort of nastiness has been such a part of my online life, professional life for so long at this point that I do not remember my initial reaction to it. You just take it for granted. Yeah, just like it exists in the world. I think I'm kind of, by disposition, hard to get a rise out of. And I think that helped being confronted with nasty trolling or attacks or such. I can kind of say, I'm not an actual person to them in some sense. I'm this abstraction that they really disagree with. And so I've learned how to not take it very personally. And since then, again, it's just kind of a daily part of the job, especially writing about racial inequality and all these things that get people very upset and very angry. And so why do you think it is that you were able to have this sort of thick skin from right off the bat and not respond to? I mean, I haven't gone back and looked at people who were trolling you in 2010. But what I imagine are oftentimes pretty personal attacks or comments. That's a good question. I mean, some of it, again, is dispositional. And that just reflects my upbringing. My parents from the military had kind of a military-ish upbringing, kind of learned at an, it was drilled into me at an early age to disregard, for lack of a better word, bullshit. Right. You're a lot to swear here. OK, OK, OK. Oh, no. We had Leslie. You're ready. We had Leslie Jones here over the weekend. So the barrier to what's acceptable has gone down. OK, all right. And yeah. So there's that. There's just the extent to which some of the stuff you can almost laugh about, and this is something. And I should say, right, that I get a lot of trolling, but sort of the tenor of it is different than, say, some of my women colleagues who, the attacks that face them are very personal and are usually sexually charged and kind of involve some threat of harm worse for me. It's like racial slurs, kind of you're dumb, that kind of stuff. And it's often poorly written. And it's often comical in a lot of ways. Controls aren't the most intelligent people online. And so it's a bit easier to kind of just shrug off or disregard. And if there happens to be a lot of it, you just leave the internet. Right, right. Is that something that you've ever considered, like leaving social media? Because I've gone through periods where, and I don't need to deal with a fraction of what you deal with. I don't write about politics most of the time. But I've taken sort of extended breaks just because the vitriol, I felt like it was starting to infect the rest of my life. Is that? Sometimes I'll just, I'll delete Twitter off of my phone. And I have a little app on my computer that only lets you broadcast a tweet, but you can't see anything else. And so if I need to like, That's brilliant. Tweet out a piece, I can just like do that and kind of leave it alone. Right. But then you get people who are furious with you because you haven't responded to them. Right, right. Who assume that because they've heard you on podcasts or read you and that you have some sort of friendship or relationship and so then get pissed when you're not fulfilling their expectations. And that's kind of the odd thing, I think, about digital journalism right now, especially for people who write with a voice. I'm not sure it's quite the same for people who are straight news reporters. Like a wire service, yeah. A wire service reporter, but for those of us who write with a voice, you're doing a lot of stuff. So you are writing and you have like usually a very distinctive writerly voice. You're podcasting, you're showing up on TV maybe, you're showing up on radio shows and it's entirely possible, right, for someone to kind of hear you and read you and experience you in all these different ways and like begin to have like a kind of relationship with you, but it's not really a relationship, right? Like I'm not, I don't know you, you don't know me. You know this like very tiny slice of, or modest slice of my life. And so I have, you know, people have emailed me like, hey, why don't you respond to my tweets? And it's like because I literally have no idea that you're sending me that. Yeah, yeah, yeah, right, right, right. Something personal just like, I don't know that they're coming. So one of the interesting things for me about history and about living through history is that I find that oftentimes I can think that the present is inevitable. And something that struck me about the 2016 election is that it's sort of impossible to think that the present is inevitable because so many people on both sides of the aisle assumed that there was gonna be a very different outcome. Right. And you were someone who I think also thought that it was extremely unlikely that Trump would either get the nomination or be elected. I thought it was pretty likely he'd get the nomination. That he'd get the nomination, okay. Well, so that's interesting. What made you think it was likely that he'd get the nomination? Because I remember when he first entered in and came down the staircase and a lot of the media and a lot of the GOP was treating him as sort of a buffoon. So what made you think that there was a likelihood that he was gonna get the nomination? It was actually two discrete moments. The first was after, like a week after he announced or two weeks after he announced, he said that thing about John McCain, right, that I like people who get captured. Yeah, yeah. And there's this huge firestorm and people are like, yeah, he's done. Like no one can recover from this. And I didn't like, I just kind of was observing the whole time and nothing happened, right? Like in fact, his numbers went up afterwards. And that was when I was like, hey, this is unusual. And maybe we shouldn't dismiss his chances of winning the nomination. And the second thing was just going to a Trump rally. I went to one in Dallas, I think in September. So early on. Yeah, early on. And just the level of enthusiasm. I've been to enough presidential primary events to get a sense of what seems to really have legs and what doesn't. And just from that rally, it was like, this thing has legs. But that, so I wasn't terribly skeptical that he would win, because just like everything points in that direction. Like the numbers, the enthusiasm, like everything. And the rest of the field, you're in L1. It was so crowded, right? Like it was, you had Jeb Bush with a hundred million dollars who was like the zombie candidate you know and liked. But I mean, we all kind of liked him like a poor Jeb Bush kind of way. Certainly in comparison, we liked him. But in terms of like actual support among voters, there just wasn't there. But he had all these resources we kind of just stay in. And you could kind of tell a similar story with too many of the other candidates. But when the general election came, frankly, I was just like, listen, every sign points against this guy. Like he's very unpopular. He's up against a pretty durable electoral coalition. You know, if you were, and I think it's been a couple months now since the election and there's still this kind of narrative going on that because analysts and prognosticators and such didn't call Trump's win, therefore they must be useless. Yeah, right. But that I think misunderstands how sort of statistics and probability works, right? That like saying that Trump just has a quarter of a chance of winning and is unlikely to win does not mean. Does not mean that he's not gonna win. Right, does not mean that you can't have, that 25% happen. There was this amazing flip specifically around 538 where they were getting enormous criticism leading up to the election for saying that he had a 25% chance and people accusing them of just trolling for numbers, trolling for clicks, then to afterwards 21 saying, well, this shows that places like that are useless because they only said he had a 25% chance of winning. And I think it's hard for people to understand that in, I can never say the word that well, in terms of probability, right? We can only experience one outcome. Right, right. And so when it happens, it seems like. It's 100%. Right, and it seems like in the way just people's minds work, they kind of backfill. Well, it happens and therefore it must have been inevitable when before that, we don't know what the outcome's gonna be and we can only kind of guess based off all this other information and all the other information strongly suggested that that wouldn't be the outcome. Right. Yeah, I mean, for my part, if I'm thinking things I wish I would have done during the general election, it would have just been to take a little more seriously the chance that Trump could win. Right. Kind of always keep that as an open possibility and I was probably a little too certain that he wouldn't, but I don't think that that certainty was completely unwarranted. I mean like. Yeah, right. I mean, this is a dude. This is a dude who we heard on camera brag about sexually assaulting women. And I feel like it's really reasonable to say, oh, someone who does that probably won't win the presidency. Right. I feel like it's a reasonable judgment to make. And not, I mean, the thing that was one of the many things that was so shocking about the 2016 election is there were a dozen things like that where you could say it's pretty reasonable to assume that someone who does X or Y or Z is not going to elect the elected president. And I want to come back to that a little bit in terms of whether that was a failure of imagination on sort of on large segments of the country and the press. But before that, one of the big narratives about the 2016 election, I think one of the most important narratives is the way that racial divisiveness really came to the forefront in a manner that had not been true for several generations at least. Trump began his campaign talking about Mexicans and building a wall in rapists. Was there a moment leading up to either his getting the nomination or afterwards when you felt like that type of rhetoric was being sanctioned in a way that had not been true previously in our lifetime? I mean, I think it was his winning the nomination and not just winning the nomination but the speed with which other Republicans fell in line, right? It's actually not that difficult to imagine and this kind of gets back to your earlier point that things are not inevitable. It's not hard to imagine Trump's opponents, the never Trumpers in the GOP forthrightly saying openly that yes, he's our nominee, but this is unacceptable. I cannot support him so on and so forth. Instead of what happened was either staying quiet or kind of saying, well, he's nominee and I have to support him. Right. There's that weird moment where Ted Cruz was like the courageous member of the GOP. Right, right. Truly living in a bizarro world. What a time to be alive. As soon as that happened, it did, I think, sanction that kind of rhetoric. And I think, I mean, this kind of goes back to sort of what the folks miss during the election. And this is something I'm still thinking about, which is that we tend to think of the use of that explicitly racist rhetoric as being something that is in addition to the political stew but doesn't really fundamentally change the character of it. But what if it does fundamentally change the character of it? What if the fact that Trump campaigned using that kind of rhetoric and that kind of rhetoric was broadly sanctioned by his party, what if that kind of changed how voters themselves made their calculations? In what way? In the sense that maybe you are someone who did not much care for Republican tax policies, but you are very angry about sort of like rapid racial change. And the Republican Party is now signaling to you that it is a party for people who have a problem with that. With rapid racial change. If you look at the turnout numbers, there wasn't increase in white turnout from 2012 to 2016. And it was heavily based in rural sectors. And it wasn't, as far as we can tell, it wasn't low income people. It wasn't sort of the... Yeah, there's that myth that... The image of the Trump voter is sort of beaten down from a blue collar. And in power, yeah, and rust belt. These were, and I grew up in a place like this. These are people who own big homes on big tracks of land, who maybe don't really engage with politics that much. And something about Trump made them engage with politics, and that something changed the electorate. And my hunch is that it's just the racism. And so, I mean, that's something that you wrote about before the election also about the extent to which racism was sort of a necessary component to being a Trump voter. And whether Hillary Clinton's classification of half of Trump voters is deplorable was unfair, never mind if it was politically expedient or not. And you said pretty consistently that you thought that people who were voting for a racist candidate probably held racist views on some level. Or, I think, less that they held racist views, but that racist views weren't fundamentally objectionable, right? That like, that, Is there a different, I mean, I think there's not much of a practical difference, right? Like, you know, I don't like that he's saying racist things, but I'm still gonna vote for him anyway. It doesn't mean anything if you're the target of the racist things, right? But for those voters, it obviously means something, yeah. For they experience it differently. But I do think that you, yeah, to have cast a ballot for a campaign that never hid its racial content meant like really one of three things that you agreed with that racial content, that it did not, it was not particularly objectionable to you, or that you didn't understand that racial, that racist content as being racist, you maybe thought it was just common sense, which kind of is like the first one, except like with less self-awareness. So what would be an example of that? An example would be, it's not racist that Trump said, you know, the Mexicans are sending rapists because like there are some Mexicans who rape, so I don't know what the problem is. Right, right. So one thing, I've been thinking a lot recently about the sort of alternative fact universe and the fake news. And wondering how that plays into this notion that voting for Trump at least accepts part of his worldview. And I'm worried I might not be being as precise or eloquent as I could be here, but what I mean is if you are getting your information from Breitbart or Info Wars, or Info Wars might be an extreme example, then you are, you're reading a narrative that most Hispanics living in the country support the wall, that the reason Trump won was because of this surge in turnout in Hispanic Americans who were upset about illegal immigration. That, you know, he has approval in the minority community that we're not aware of because the mainstream media won't report that. So does that, first of all, what are your thoughts about that? And second of all, does that affect the idea that Trump voters are sort of implicitly or complicitly accepting what voters who think that The New York Times is the real news believe? So it's first what I think about those sort of narratives which are, you know, very present on the opposite of Breitbart and Info Wars and even sort of their less extreme but still problematic competitors and such. Like who would their, like Daily Caller and stuff like that. I mean, I think it's, I think it's, I mean it's, it is actually fake news. Yeah, yeah. It is not factually the case. And it's just worth saying this, right? That in the, in last year's election, the exit polls suggested that Trump basically won like typical numbers among Latinos and African-Americans who are Republican presidential candidate, but like subsequent research suggests that Trump's numbers with Latinos was much lower than what the exit polls suggested. Right. Like around the 17 to 18% range in that among African-Americans around seven or 8%, which are both like lows. Right. But still high compared to the day before the election what some people were predicting. Right. Well, yeah. I think the best estimates for Latino, like the lowest when I saw for Latino voting was like 15%. Right. And that most people thought it'd fall between 15 and 20. So, I mean, yeah, it's kind of wrong on that level but on the sort of, if that's their fact universe and what does, what can we ascertain about them? You know, the part of the history of racism in this country is of white Americans in particular developing narratives to sort of justify the status quo that they've imposed, right? Right. And so. To justify white supremacy. Right. So in the 1950s, it wasn't that in the South, it wasn't that African-Americans living in the Jim Crow were very unhappy about this. It was an outside agitators were coming and aryling people up. And then if you actually talked to them. That's the narrative. That's the narrative. If you actually talked to people, if you talked to them, they would tell you that they're happy with the way things are. Right. Or that on the eve of the Civil War, or even in 1861 and 1862, you had Southern plantation owners saying, well, I'm not worried that my slaves are going to run away or rebel because they're happy here. Why would they do that? Right. Go back further, 1840s, you have entire disorders being imagined. Drapedomania. Which is one of the most incredible things. Do people know about this? It's the craziest thing you'll ever hear. I mean, not ever, but it's pretty crazy. Yeah. Inslave people were running away. Makes sense. And plantation owners were like, why is this happening? Why are they running away? And this well-regarded physician and writer in this journal from New Orleans. And the medical journal New Orleans wrote that, what's happening is that these enslaved people are suffering from a disorder. They want to be free. And that's just like not with the nature of black people. And so they, and in fact, that if you go look at free black people, they are noticeably worse off than their enslaved brethren. And so he called this disease Drapedomania. This sort of, this mental disorder to make you want to be free when your nature says that you shouldn't be free. And I mean, the incredible thing about it is that this was a debate along the lines of a debate today about whether ADHD is properly diagnosed. This wasn't like some crazy view. The American Medical Association was saying like, well, this is, we should discuss this. Let's see. Which, yeah, I think it did not get ultimately adopted by the AMA, thankfully, as a disorder. But the fact that there was this ongoing discussion about that. And so it's just to make the point that like, that there will always be narratives created and disseminated in order to justify choices or actions that bolster white supremacy and white hegemony. And I tend to see when 60 plus million people vote for a Iranian explicitly racist campaign. And in response to that is, well, some Latinos voted for him too, some blacks voted for him too. Or kind of deflecting from that. I tend to see that those narratives in some sense trying to justify that choice or at least to say that no one who voted should be held responsible for the consequences of that vote. And that's something that you've written about very eloquently and that I've struggled with. There was a piece in which you wrote about how, and in the turn of the century, in the turn of the 20th century, how good Americans were bringing their kids to watch lynchings. And this was not abnormal. This was seen as an American thing to do. And I guess that's just a concept that I struggle with, whether we will look back at the 2016 election with the same type of horror that 99% of our society views lynchings or whether the fact that the violence that is occurring is sort of one step removed will allow us to pretend that that's not what was going on now. I think Americans really suggest that the latter will end up being true, right? That the fact that most people are not going to experience a deportation raid, they're not going to see images of Muslim Americans being harassed in the views. These things are not gonna appear to them. If the upsurge in activity from violent white supremacist groups continues to go on, most people are not going to experience any kind of like hate crimes or whatnot. Or, and they're also not gonna experience the observers of that. And so if that's true, then it does become very easy to deny that those were the consequences of the vote and to say that this is not what this was about. And in my view is that you kind of already see the ground being laid for that, that the, not just the preoccupation with the narrative of economic anxiety, which again is like a fact, is like, it's both true and not true. It's true in the sense that there were members of the Trump coalition who did feel some economic anxiety. It's not true in the sense that they were particularly representative. And it's not true in the sense. In the overall Trump election. In the overall Trump electorate. And it's not true in the idea that somehow also separate from racial anxiety. That in America, the two things are very much linked. But the ongoing push to say that this was an election about economic anxiety to say that, which implicitly also says that if you're feeling that kind of anxiety, then the political choices you make in a sense be excused, right? You were not acting rationally and so we cannot hold your actions against you. That suggests to me that regardless of what happens over the next four to eight years, that will be the takeaway. That the collective judgment will be, people were hurting and they made a bad choice, but we can't hold that choice against them. And is there anything that could occur that would change that narrative? That would force us to confront what's going on more directly? I hope. I hope, I was about to say I hope not because it seems like that could potentially be some. Yeah, it would be some. Car laceration. I mean, the only thing I can think of that would be within the realm of plausibility and something that I can imagine happening that isn't so extreme. I mean, it's extreme but sort of like it's not outside the realm of the possible. Would be if there is a terrorist attack in the United States and the response was like internment camps for Muslim immigrants and Muslim Americans. That I don't think is outside the realm of possibility looking at the actions of the past month. And I would hope that if that happened, people would begin to actually confront what was elected in 2016. And I'm not saying that there needs to be some mass, ostracization, ostracism. Yeah, no, it's another word I took over. Everyone knows. I'm not saying we should shun Trump voters by no means. That would end up like shunning a good chunk of people went to high school with. But I am saying that political choices actually do carry moral content. And if we are actually invested in making this a more tolerant and open society, then you can't simply say, well, people who voted for this thing don't have to reflect on it. They don't have to reflect on it because it's, you know, what did I read in? I think Kristoff column today. It's insulting to suggest that they might be bigots, right? Like, who cares if it's insulting, right? Like, why are you so preoccupied with the notion that it might be insulting to people rather than the consequences of what that action was? As opposed to what the consequence will be for the people who are gonna be discriminated against. Like they, you know, this isn't about, no, this isn't about whether someone's insulted. It's about what are we gonna do about the fact that we've empowered a lot of really ugly forces in this country. And that's gonna mean something for people and it's not gonna be pleasant. So that's what I wanna see. That's what I hope, those are the conversations I want to happen. You know, I don't think they're going to, unfortunately, which leaves me in the situation where I'm constantly saying this thing. Like it's kind of a recurring part of my public dialogue. And it creates the impression that this is all I think about, which is that it's not, but it's something that I don't wanna get, I hope doesn't get lost in everything that's going on. So moving away from Trump voters, one of the things, another one of the things that's been striking to me is how the racial dialogue has changed, not just in how we're discussing the election, but also how people who, how white people who are very opposed to Trump are talking about race, sometimes in ways that are very uncomfortable to me. And I know you've spoken and written before about sort of being asked to give the black point of view or someone on Twitter will send you a message and say, oh, I saw this, what do you think of that as if you can somehow be representative for black people? Is that something that sort of level of awkwardness and uncomfortability among white Americans who would be and who are predisposed to oppose Trump and support Obama? Is that something, well, how is that? Is that something you've noticed and how has that affected you? It is something I've noticed. I've had a lot more conversations. I've seen a lot more conversations among white Americans about race. I think this is good for the most part. I think at a certain point, black Americans, Latinos, we're not the majority of the country. And so at a certain point, this at some sense isn't our total responsibility, right? Like this is ultimately a thing that white Americans have to figure out amongst themselves. What is it? Like sort of like fixing it, right? Like solving racial inequality ultimately is gonna have to be a project of white Americans? But not only solving, I mean, it seems like you're oftentimes asked, or not you, but black writers and blacks who are in the public sphere are asked by white people what they should think. Right, right. As someone who's racially advanced in my thinking, how am I supposed to feel about this, Jamal? So what's interesting about that, right, is that it's the problem, and I think in this conversation you're referencing, which I did with a colleague of mine, Aisha Harris, and then two other friends, Ching Demby and Tressy Khatam, I think the thing that we all kind of identified is the problem isn't necessarily the question, right? We are in the public eye, like we have maybe discussions part of our careers, and so we're going to talk about them. I think the issue is oftentimes as questions are posed or the conversations are, people tend to have the conversations in a way that avoids them being implicated or avoids them encountering any discomfort, sort of wanting to have a conversation but have a conversation with a bumper lane. And that's frustrating because it puts limits on what we can say, right? Like it's hard to be honest when you know that maybe like completely honestly we just make someone feel bad, make some stranger feel bad. And that's, and I think in that conversation we all pushed against that pretty hard and said essentially that for these conversations to have any real worth to them, the possibility of someone feeling bad has to be there, right? Like it has to be, the person initiating it has to be open to the chance that they will feel implicated or they will even maybe even feel attacked and we'll have to like deal with that emotionally. Yeah, as long as people are open to the chance that they might get like roasted in a conversation about race and like we're all fine. So for example, would an example of that be a white reader or anyone comes to you and asks a question, what am I supposed to feel about this? And a response that could make them feel uncomfortable is how is it that you don't have any black people in your life that you're close enough to ask this? Yes, right, right, yeah. Which is also part of the funny dynamic here. It's not just being asked questions, it's sort of being asked questions in this almost intimate way. It's like I don't know, I can't, like that's a conversation you gotta have with someone that you're close with. I can't help you there. And then the response of like I'm on the good side. Right, right, right. And it's like I, there's no like succinct way of putting this, but there is this phenomenon in which being a person of color and being public and being a writer and writing about these issues or even not writing about these issues, people sort of assume that you have some sort of hidden knowledge or hidden wisdom that you don't necessarily. Hidden knowledge or hidden wisdom, like you would know how to solve this. Right, you wouldn't, you know, well, what should we do to have better conversations? I have no idea what you should do to have better conversations. Right, try having conversations in the first place. Right, and so, and I do think some of this is just kind of, it's a kind of native discomfort Americans have with talking about race, and they want to begin, they want to put that discomfort on someone else rather than kind of just tackle it. Well, and I think it's something that I think is in some ways especially acute and northern cities where you're much more likely to have to where the overall populace is much more likely to be democratic and to be liberal democratic, but in some ways those areas are much less segregated than a lot of the rest of the country. So you have populations that politically line up one way and then in their daily life in some ways have very little interaction with the people that they're talking about and it's a fascinating phenomena that's occurring so long after the civil rights movement and that we still see that in northern cities. Right, I mean, I'm from Virginia, my family's from the south and so the striking thing to me always coming from down south, especially where a lot of my relatives live in in northern Florida and southern Georgia, it's just like how rigidly segregated the north can be. Like I'm not gonna pretend that say, where do my parents live? Somerville, South Carolina is not a segregated place but it's not actually, it's not too segregated. It's not like Boston. It's not like Boston, it's not like that and it's a place where black and white people have actually a lot of casual integration and a lot of casual integration and for reasons I'm sure people can imagine often have more intimate connections, especially for people who are from those areas than you might find elsewhere. It's not as if, I wouldn't say anyone's more comfortable talking about these things but I think the raw materials for a dialogue might be more plentiful when there's just more regular interaction. Yeah, yeah, right. I think in that conversation that you were citing with Aisha that someone referenced that SNL skit with Chris Rock and right after the election, am I remembering that correctly where Dave Chappelle and Chris Rock were like, of course this is gonna happen and all of the white SNL cast members were amazed and shocked and outraged. I wanna talk a little bit about what we might be looking at politically moving forward. You mentioned how you were, well, how the sort of never Trump movement that I think a lot of people maybe naively thought was materialized within the GOP didn't. Do you, as a student of history and someone who pays a lot of attention to history, is that something that you think is going to have lasting repercussions for the GOP? I mean, in my perhaps failure of imagination, it's impossible for me to see how it doesn't. Especially with- So this is the lack, the failure of a never Trump to emerge? Just the fact that essentially, with very few exceptions, the entire GOP right now is going along with not only what he's doing and saying racially, but just the shit storm of initiatives and policies and everything that he's putting forward. Is that something that you think is going to, that we will look back at with the same type of reprobation for the current GOP that we might have about people who supported slavery or segregation, or? Yeah, that's interesting because I just remember the conversation prior to the election was like it's the GOP gonna collapse, right? Like it's like- Yeah, yeah, right. The acid of history. So I don't think it's true, I mean, my, you know. Will the Democrats take over the House and the Senate? Right, right. And will the GOP be a party in four years? And those kind of conversations I've always thought were silly. A, because, you know, the American party system survived the Civil War. Yeah, yeah. They can survive a lot. Right. It just kind of changed quite a bit when it hits sort of major events. And I think, I do think, this will have lasting repercussions for the Republican Party. And I think those repercussions will simply be that it's gonna enter like a new stage of its existence. If it went from being first, like a sectional anti-slavery party to kind of like a big business party to for the last 50 years just like ideologically conservative party, I think it is, in all the while, and the elements of each of these that are always present within the party, they become dominant here and there. I think one element that's always been within the party, which is kind of an implicit commitment to the cultural and political hegemony of white America, is now gonna become a dominant thread. Right? That more than tax cuts or small government, the thing that is going to unify the Republican Party is this notion that the people in the United States are white and that they are the legitimate holders of power. That I think is more or less Trump's like big... message. And is that something that elected GOP officials, I mean, I guess they're showing that they're comfortable with that, but I don't even know what my question is. I mean, I've been continually just amazed that Paul Ryan, that even John McCain, despite some of his pushing back, that Lindsey Graham, that any number of people are more or less okay with this. Everyone has their particular goals or ideological agenda, so Paul Ryan is an ideological conservative. He seems to believe it's a basic question of morality that the United States should be a low tax and low service country. And so if to accomplish that, it requires signing on to a popular movement that's based less on any ideology and more than just sort of a naked cultural claim, you could call it a populist claim in the European sense and sort of anti-pluralistic European sense, then they'll do it, right? Like that's a price will pay for that agenda. And that's sort of how I see this working out. And I think eventually, in this all assumes, I mean, this does assume that the Trump presidency doesn't end in some catastrophic way, right? If that happens, then... What would be a catastrophic way? I don't know, like, let's say it turns out that Donald Trump knew full well of contact and cooperation with the Putin government, right? Which is like not a crazy thing, I mean, it's not... Not remotely. It's not outside their own possibility. But that would be the kind of thing that could so tarnish a party that... Could it? I mean, what seems amazing to me is how much that's a possibility and how little anyone seems to care about it. I mean, that's... I think the thing that makes all of this difficult in terms of trying to figure out what will happen is that American politics is beyond hyper-polarized. Right. You don't really need to know much more about a person than how they voted in the previous two elections to guess how they'll vote for the rest of their lives. And that hyper-polarization, the extent to which people will just vote for them with an architecture name or a deed next to their name, means that it's genuinely difficult to say what would cause... Collapse, what would cause something to an earthquake in American politics outside of massive external events, like a depression or a big war or something like that. I mean, I started off in the way distant past of a month ago thinking that it was incredibly unlikely that Trump would not be impeached during his presidency and have come almost 180 degrees around that, thinking that it's increasingly difficult for me to imagine any scenario in which a GOP-led Congress would impeach him, regardless of what happens. So it's hard to say what will happen to the GOP. I do think that this sort of ethonationalist thing is here to stay in the Republican Party. And I say that because it kind of reflects what has been the recurring pattern in American history, which is that as either a state or a county or what have you undergoes racial change, there is a massive backlash. And you can almost think of what's happening to the country of it large, what happened in California in the 90s, when the rising immigrant population caused basically like a 10-year anti-immigrant backlash. But in the end, ended up wiping out the California GOP, like I just said, it's a rump party at this point. But United States is quite big and given the structure of our elections, given the extent to which parties in power can do a lot to shape electorates and shape election outcomes. You mean with districts? And it's an open question as to whether or not this will damage the Republican Party in the long-term way or whether maybe Trump will just have a normal for eight years and will have the access of American politics will not turn on whether or not you want small government or big government or that will still be a part of it, but essentially whether or not you see the United States as being a multiracial country or not. When you said a normal four or eight years after admit that my heart rate. Oh yeah, that's it. I mean, just my anxiety level since the election have been off the charts and I've found increasingly that I need to not only not be on social media but like not read the newspaper for a while, you don't have that luxury. Nope. And so what has that been like? I mean, have you found that it's been difficult to sort of be in the middle of this without any break? I mean, it's one of those things where I've said this run and do part of myself and accepted that I will never escape at least my like 7 a.m. to 6 p.m. Monday through Friday or Sunday through Friday, honestly of this being kind of just my life. But that doesn't mean in the times when I'm not working that I can't avoid it. And so for example, when I was talking to my parents, my like mom really wants to talk about politics and I was like, let's talk about not that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So literally anything but that. Right. I've got sort of like, I've always had photography as a hobby now it's kind of really dived into it as a way of just like having a firm break from work. And so that has mostly meant doing dark room work and kind of like spending a lot of time developing film and making prints and kind of isolating myself from politics. And yeah, just like kind of really deliberately making effort to separate my work from my life. Cause it actually is very, I think, and you know this well it's very easily as a journalist become just like be completely consumed in what you do. Precisely because it's like you can write anywhere or you can do research, you can do reporting anywhere. Right, yeah, yeah. And once you become known for writing about things, you will always get people approaching you to you know, I mean I on the one hand am gratified when people come to me and ask me to write about things I've written about in the past. On the other hand, I now am basically ignoring all emails that asked me to write about Trump's insane anti-vaccine notions because I just don't wanna deal with it and I'm not sure what I can add to the conversation at this point besides saying it's crazy. Before we open up I wanna talk a little bit, I've only gotten through about a quarter of the questions that I wanted to ask but I wanna talk a little bit about journalism generally, about journalism today generally. And one question that I've been struggling with a lot is both our meaning the media's role in the election, whether the public was well-served by how we covered it. And two, whether we have the tools to not only cover a Trump administration but to cover a world in which there are alternative facts and which essentially you have not a 50-50 split but maybe 40% of the population that thinks that CNN and the New York Times and is what is fake news. So that's a very broad open-ended question. But let's start with how the media did covering the 2016 election. You got to cover it from a vantage point. There's still this sort of mythologized ideal of objectivity in American journalism. How do you think places like the wire services, the networks, the New York Times, the Washington Post, how did they do when covering the election? I think it's a pretty mixed bag. And across all outlets and across all different types of media, whether that's print versus network news, whether that's cable news, whatever, there's been great work done. There's absolutely no question of that. On the same token, at a certain point in the election it became about Trump saying crazy things versus emails, and I think that's a function of choices of media coverage. And frankly, I think it reflects an implicit assumption among a lot of people covering the election that Trump is gonna lose. And so you had to look for ways to scrutinize Hillary Clinton and you kind of just focus on the spectacle of Trump. And I don't think that's served people quite well. I just read a story today about Trump voters who are surprised that he plans to cut Medicaid, which if you did any policy journalism or read any policy journalism, that shouldn't be a surprise. Like Trump is a Republican candidate. The Republican Party has said repeatedly that it intends to repeal the Affordable Care Act and that means cutting the Medicaid expansion and cutting Medicaid even deeper after that. The fact that a lot of Americans didn't realize this I think reflects a kind of failure on part of the collective news media. Kind of a preoccupation with the sensational over actually scrutinizing the candidates and not quite communicating the full stakes of the election. It's also, I think this sort of knee-jerk ingrained tendency in American journalism to do on one hand, on the other hand. And this notion that if you were covering a Trump scandal, it was somehow unfair. If you were also not covering a Clinton scandal. As someone who writes about science, one of the things that fascinates me is this, a reality that I think the media has a very hard time accepting, which is if you repeat something, even if you repeat it within the context of it not being true, a fairly high percentage of people are gonna come away from that thinking it's true. And that's a well-known fact. But I think it's largely a fact that the American media does not grapple with. Yeah, it's actually, it's really very hard to dispel false information without reinforcing it. It's legitimately difficult to do. And I think that compounds with another thing I'm not sure the American media as a whole has really grappled with, which is, as far as political scientists can tell, there are asymmetric changes in American politics. The Republican Party and the Democratic Party aren't mirror images of each other. And that, I don't think it's a good idea that the Republican Party has moved, moved ideologically in ways that aren't equivalent to what's happened in the Democratic side. And that does require you to sort of like offer different kinds of context and like cover them a little differently. And I'm not sure, and I think Trump demonstrates this very well. I mean, there was, until it became untenable, there was an effort to sort of treat Trump as kind of a normal candidate or a normal candidate. I think after it became untenable, there was still that effort. And I'm not sure, I mean, part of me, you know, I didn't, we mentioned earlier that I didn't really study journalism. And part of me wonders, part of the problem is that a lot of people doing journalism like study journalism. Yeah, yeah. And that there's no, there's surprisingly, there's not enough, I'm not gonna say surprisingly little, there's not enough historical grounding, there's not enough grounding in social science, there's not enough grounding in disciplines outside of the profession. And as such, people get wedded to sort of like, what are basically sort of like ways of doing things that ought to be a little more flexible than they are. And this doesn't mean, I mean, this isn't a question of like objectivity or bias or whatever, it's just a question of sort of like, how do you understand something in its proper context? How do you understand something in given, given its history and given everything that's happening? So the last question before I open it up, what tools do we need, do journalists need to not only cover this administration but cover this role in history? What can journalists do to rise to the challenge that we're facing? I mean, the thing I would recommend, and this is just now speaking, it's like a history nerd, is I think journalists need to figure out how they wanna be remembered, right? And in a very, very serious way, like if you think that the Trump administration represents something, if not unprecedented in like a rye in American politics and American political culture, then how do you wanna be remembered? How do you wanna be thought of and responding to it? And for my part, you read books like The Race Beat about the reporters who cover the civil rights movement and there were mainstream outlets who were dismissive, who did not take these things seriously, who were hostile and they looked very bad for the hindsight of history. And I think kind of deciding who side you're on here is right and that they're not a partisan thing, that is recognizing that the Trump administration has made a priority of targeting marginal groups in the country and so how are you going to report that? Yeah, I think covering the civil rights movement is an excellent example because the outlets that argued against covering it aggressively or covering it from sort of Mount Olympus did so using the justification that like, well, who are we to decide whether it's proper that we should treat all citizens equally? That's not our call to make. And I mean, sort of a colleague of sorts, Brian Boitler at the New Republic, made this argument before the election and I think it's one that journalists should grapple with and that is what is a profession for? Is our profession to defend the prerogatives of journalists? Are we defending free speech or are we defending kind of pluralism and constitutionalism? Are we as James Madison vision very much part and parcel of what makes the American system work? And if we're the latter, then that actually does imply a different set of responsibilities and obligations. It means that you can't cover something like the civil rights movement from Mount Olympus. You have to see it from the perspective of, oh, these things are actually threatening the kind of society that we want to have. That is having a perspective, I guess, but it's having kind of a... A perspective as a human being. Right. And a perspective as someone, as a profession, that values a liberal, pluralist, constitutionalist government. Right, right. Let me open it up. Come up to microphones, ask away. We still have a good chunk of time. And identify, if you're comfortable, identify yourself just so we know who you are also. Sure. Hi, my name is Dane. I'm a law student at Harvard. Thanks for being here, Jamelle. No problem. So right now we've empowered a right-wing version of white nationalism, how I see it. But there's also, I see conversations on the left among politicians and activists and academics. And there's a sort of analog, right? There's a left-wing white nationalism that could emerge and there's a debate going into the next set of elections. Do we center race or do we avoid race to reach certain people that could vote Democrat but maybe feel uncomfortable by centering race? So how do you see this conversation going over the next couple of years? And is there a difference between maybe what is right and what is most politically expedient? Yeah, that's a great question. So I think it's definitely the case that you do, with him, I guess the broad Americans in our left have this ongoing conversation about race versus class, which, for my part, I think kind of the, this is all very overstated, but you have this conversation happening. I think, I mean, I think where people are ending up basically depends on how they envision a future coalition, right? If you believe that the goal ought to be mobilizing non-voters, mobilizing people not participating in the process as it stands, then there is no real reason not to continue centering concerns of racial equality and such. I think this is sort of the driving force behind Keith Ellison's bid for the DNC chair, which, parenthetical, party committee chairs aren't that important and it's really insane to me how this has become like this thing, but as it stands, that's like the symbolism of a Keith Ellison pick. If you envision a future coalition as necessarily winning back or incorporating some number of white working class people, however defined, and there are a lot of questions about how you define them properly, then I do think you run into some of these difficulties, in part because the history of white working class politics in this country has been one of class mobilization. It's also been one of a defense of white hierarchy and white hegemony, and oftentimes even nascent interracial movements involving white working class politics have ended up collapsing because of the tensions with that. You can look at the fusionist movement in North Carolina in the 1890s as an example of that. You can look at the fact that outside of the radical wings of the labor movement in the 1930s, there's a real hostility to interracial unionism among a lot of rank and file union members. So like CIO aside or United Auto Workers aside, or the Communists aside, your mainstream factory worker in Detroit wasn't too happy about letting a black family move in there into their neighborhood. So if you envision the future coalition as being kind of centered around or necessarily including a large portion of the white working class, and I do think you're gonna have to run into these tensions, that you're going to have to resolve them somehow. My sense is that looking at where the energy is among American left-wing movements, even within the Democratic Party and its center left, I don't think the tensions are gonna emerge too much given that the energy is with, it's with movements like Fight for 15 and Black Lives Matter and Moral Monday. It's these intentionally intersectional and intentionally multi-racial movements that refuse to sacrifice a commitment to racial equality or sacrifice a commitment to economic equality. I will say though that there is, people are expecting like a groundswell wave of like support for stuff like this. I'm not sure that's the case. I think given the history of like white American politics, there's gonna be a hard limit on the number of like white people period that are going to support this kind of left movement. Do I think that we reached that limit? Obviously not, because if we had, we wouldn't be having this conversation probably, but I do think that that's the thing to keep in mind. Like there's a reason, there's a reason why since 1968, a national democratic presidential nominee has not won a majority of white voters. Not in 68, not in 72, not in 76. Bill Clinton won a plurality, to never won a majority, never outperformed an opponent with white voters. Since 1968, it has not happened and that is not an accident. Thanks. Anyone else will keep the ball rolling. I'll give it a try. Just to add to that last observation, of course, Democrats have won the popular vote. Democrat presidential nominees have won the popular vote and what, five out of the last six, six out of the last seven elections. Like eight out of the last nine, right? Some large proportion over the last 30 years, which illustrates why, illustrates a number of the changes you've been talking about. I've got a whole bunch of questions for you and I'll just choose one because it's one I really am most perplexed by, which is one of the big themes of Republican politics for a while now and certainly Trump's campaign was American exceptionalism. We've got to, the Make America Great Again is a claim that America, I mean, it's claimed a bunch of things, but it's claimed that America is distinctive, has a unique role, unique power, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And one of the really interesting things is a lot of the social facts, that some of which fed into economic anxiety and so forth, emphasize how unexceptional we are. Where our lifespan doesn't even come close to exceeding, being near the top of the tables for developed countries. I just saw a paper reported yesterday or today that says growth in life expectation. America is going to fall way behind over the next predict next 20, 30 years. This is in the Lancet I think. And there's, I think, one of the things you have with more access to information from more parts of the world, this sort of this globalization of experience is there's more and more perception that whatever the claims may be, whatever the sort of braggadocio about American exceptionalism, there's lots of evidence that this isn't the only way to make it in the world and may not be the best. And I'm wondering how much you think sort of this cultivated dime show nostalgia played a role in this election and how much you think that sustains over time? How can, with the data that are coming out, the reality of the various social ills we face has compared to other places? How much do you think that plays out going forward? Yeah, so I definitely do believe that this notion of American exceptionalism, of inherent greatness played a huge part in this election. It is the case that for the better part of the people who voted for Donald Trump, who are above the age of 40, they have a very distinct memory of a United States that at least felt more prosperous and more comfortable for them than it is now. And so this sort of, and you're seeing this, I mean, you see this kind of nostalgia politics in Europe as well, right? That there's a very distinct nostalgia politics happening, of grasping back to a time of presumed and perceived stability and prosperity, which is like, you know, both true and not. It's true for some people, not for others. I tend to think that looking at, I said, as I said earlier, on thinking about populism in the European sense. And what I mean by that is when Americans say populism, they usually just mean sort of like really liberal. But when Europeans say populism, they actually mean something quite distinct. And what they mean is a type of politics that makes exclusive claims to representation, right? That like, my party is the people. And if you are against my party, you are against the people. It is anti-pluralist. It is not inherently authoritarian, but it leans towards that. It is often tied up in lots of other nasty things. I think Donald Trump is that kind of populist, right? Like this sort of European-style populist. And the thing about those kinds of politicians when they grapple with power is that precisely because they do make this like very profound connection with their supporters, elevating them as the representation of the nation, it is hard for external events to dislodge that. For example, I would say in Hungary, Victor Orban has presided over deep cuts to the welfare state, deep, deep cuts to the welfare state. His supporters still love him, right? Even though they were relying on him, they still love him because in their minds, he is, even with these difficulties, he is working for them. He's working for them and elevating them as sort of the rightful claimants of Hungary and Hungarian politics. That dynamic, I can very easily see happening in the United States with Trump, which would mean that even as he talks about America's exceptionalism, even as he makes promises to make America great again, even if external conditions don't meet any of that, that the connection won't be broken, which is actually really troubling for thinking about how to get out of all of this, right? If that is the kind of politics we're dealing with. So I hope that answers the question. It does, though. I'd say as somebody who's 58, I mean my political memories range from the Vietnam War protests to stagflation to lots of, lots of, from the 60s to the 80s, there was a, which is the sort of formative years for a lot of people who I think ended up voting for Trump. A lot of white people who ended up voting for Trump were years not of memory, even fogged memories of a supposedly idyllic 50s, but of much more fraught and much more really kind of fragile. It wasn't obvious in the 70s that America was going to prevail in the Cold War or be, you know. That's the power of nostalgia, right? To use a trivial example, I'm 29 and I am sort of, the Star Wars prequels were made for people my age back in the late 90s and there are, I have peers in the world who were like, oh, the prequels were great. They were great movies that really enjoyed them, which is nonsense, like they're bad movies. They're objective. Send them to the re-education camps. True deplorables. Right, right. But because they exist in sort of childhood memory, right, they exist, they're tinned by nostalgia. A lot of people who are like, oh yeah, they were fun, they were enjoyable, when that's just not, it's just not true. Just to, so I'm not accused of being, presenting alternative facts, it is six of the last seven. Elections and Democrats, yeah. Hi, I'm Melissa Knowles, Professor of Political Science here. And so I have two questions. One is about how you view the, I'm trying to make an assessment of how to make sense of Trump, believe it or not. This might not be reassuring for people who study political science, but I'm trying to figure out, is it that on the one hand, when I listen to how the press covers him, on the one hand is this notion that he's completely kind of exceptional in ways and outside of the mainstream. And we're all struggling to make sense of him. Then on the other hand, the reason why you can study him is simply, for all of the radicalism of his program, he still has to presumably still go through the ordinary channels of government. And he's doing it not very well. And so even if to our, as we watch with some, with different levels of concern, the hope is that eventually certain rhythms of governance will kick in. Legislation has to be passed. He can't govern through executive orders entirely. At some point, there's actually gonna have to be legislation. And that there will be certain, all of this will help to tame and control him. And the Republicans also will have to get in line, even if they're trying to basically dismantle the new deal, right? It seems to me that's part of the desire. And so is it, I'm trying to figure out how, it seems to me the press is trying to figure out how to cover him. Is he incompetent or crazy like a fox? Like which, you know, which is it? And depending on which way you view him, you would judge him accordingly. That's one. The second question is how much do you, you know, without prejudice, it seemed to me some of this had to do with the election in part implicitly had, was a rejection of the first black president or at least a backlash without exaggerating too much. So we read the article in the Atlantic of looking at this election is right after reconstruction, right? Kind of the redemptionists. And in fact, language of redemption was used. So I wonder if you're being a student of politics and of history, did you see this in certain ways as through the lens of looking at the third reconstruction being a civil rights movement. And now a backlash against it. And we've only been basically 50 years of a multi-party democracy where we had an actual multi-racial electorate that could vote. And maybe there's a backlash against what full democracy brings. So for the first question, crazy like a fox or incompetent. I don't... Or crazy like an incompetent. Or crazy like an incompetent. Which actually, I think that's actually and I think that's the correct one. I think it's undoubtedly true that at least the people around Trump have a very radical notion of what they wanna do in government, right? You wrote a really great piece I love about Bannon and Miller and all that. Yes. Yeah, I mean, Bannon is, give him a top hat in like an old time you watch. And he's like straight, he's straight in the 1920s. He's a 1920 style like immigration restrictionist, sort of like decline of the white race style thinker. Except like, you know, almost a farcical one, right? But Bannon and Miller and Sessions all do have like a very well-defined ideological view and a well-defined sense of what they want to do. I'm not sure if Trump does. I honestly, I mean, Trump has long had native instincts. You see that going back as far as the 1980s, just long had demagogic instincts. But whether he has any like firm thought patterns is up in the air. So they have, they're crazy, definitely. But this is also in all the reporting from the White House has confirmed this. I mean, this is also profoundly inexperienced White House, not just in terms of direct executive experience of which none of the principles in the White House have, but in terms of just experience in government. Trump, from reporting I've read, does not seem to, did not understand that the courts can stop White House action. Like, well, he's like, oh, I didn't know this could happen. You have. And was like mortally offended when he found out. Right, right. He was angry. He's learning about checks and balances in real time. Why didn't anyone tell me about this? Bannon and Miller, I mean, Miller was a communications director in Sessions' Senate office, and Bannon is like a failed producer slash guy who ran a crazy website. Like, they, and you see this in the drafting of the travel ban, especially the Muslim ban. They did not check in with the relevant agencies. They did not, you know, doctorize or cross through T as in the result was an order that was hard, difficult to interpret, extremely far reaching, whether intentionally or not, and very vulnerable to legal challenge. I think for as much as there is radicalism at play here, this is also like an inexperienced, in a lot of ways, arrogant, and as a result, incompetent administration. What will be interesting to see happen is, first, where the power centers are in this administration. It seems that, you know, Bannon, for example, it's like actually a legitimate power center in the administration is putting pressure on kind of the agencies interested in, like Homeland Security, State Department, Department of Justice. Will those agencies push back? A lot of the federal government is under staff right now. There's, there are hundreds of Senate confirmable seats have not even received nominees, and so how is that going to affect things? It's possible that, at least for the next few months and for a situation where everyone really wants to do stuff, but like no one quite knows how to do it and how to do it effectively. And this, beyond the White House, I mean, the State Department, the Education Department, Housing and Urban Development, the EPA, not EPA, not EPA, but commerce, the Treasury are run by people with no government experience, which is an obstacle to getting an agenda through. So crazy and incompetent and just plain inexperienced. And the thing is for the administration is that you really only do have a limited window of time for getting stuff accomplished. And it's entirely possible that the first, this first month of, very frankly, catastrophic missteps has shortened that window considerably. I mean, I still think the Republican Congress really wants to repeal Obamacare. I think the window for that happening is like closing really soon. And I think we may end up with like, you know, some modest cuts to the program called Obamacare repeal and then just kind of just moving on because they can't incur the political damage and the White House just doesn't want to get mired into some massive, massive fight. Okay, so understanding Trump's election as a backlash, this basically been my frame for this, going back to the primaries. And a backlash against the civil rights movement more broadly than not. Right, right, right, against, and the point you made about us only being 50 years into multiracial democracy, I think is actually really important. We take that for, to the extent that American democracy is multiracial, we take it for granted. Take it for granted that we are a society where people of all races and ethnicities are free and equal and can participate equally. But for most of American history, for millions of still living American citizens, that was not the case. And in quite a few communities in this country, I think the status, something like seven out of 10 white Americans don't have a friendship with the person of color, right? Like most white Americans don't really have close relationships with people who look different than them. It's actually not at all, given those facts, it's not at all crazy to imagine that a guy named Barack Hussein Obama prompted a backlash against the, against the perceived racial change, against the perceived sense that this is an inversion of the proper order of things. And because our history is one of sort of progress, retrenchment, progress, retrenchment, I do think Trump's election is kind of like the, I mean, and this is actually for me the question, it's either the culmination of a slow moving backlash, beginning in the late 1960s, or it's the harbinger of like something, of something pretty terrible that may last quite a long time, depending on, yeah. So yeah, that's- Have a good night, folks. Yes. Precisely because the United States is going through this major demographic shift. It is becoming a country, I wouldn't necessarily say it's becoming a majority minority country, because I think that kind of overstates or understates the degree to which whiteness is a political category. It can't expand. Wait, understates the degree to which it can expand? It can expand, right? That like a hundred years ago, people didn't think of like Italians- As white. And Russians as white. There are other races of people who were kind of- Were Jews. Yeah, kind of white. And then a combination of kind of external events like the World Wars, the Depression, and sort of, you know, other social pressures. Created a new class of white people. And it's not, to me, it's not obvious that it's not gonna happen again for some category of people that we don't recognize as white today. But nonetheless, it is the case that the share of the country that is directly descended from, or who we recognize as white, is shrinking. So American history pretty glusy demonstrates that like in place where that happens, there are vicious back flashes. And this seems to be part of the pattern. And yeah, so again, for me, the question is like, are we at the end or are we at the beginning? And I think you can make a good case for either one. Or are we in a place where, you know, winning control of so many states and so much of government gives you an ability to kind of like entrench existing power. I mean, the case for this being the beginning is in part the fact that the coalition here, the Trump coalition, is a shrinking chunk of the country but is geographically extremely well distributed. So given the electoral college, given that distribution, it's entirely possible that, you know, yeah, maybe you lose some college educated whites, maybe the non-white population is growing in places like Virginia and Georgia. But essentially, you have Democrats getting 90% of the votes along the coasts and 48% of the votes in the middle of the country. And if you end up losing white working class voters eight to eight, or I guess that'd just be one to four, or one to five, then yeah, you can continue going for a while. Like the United States could just end up being to kind of put it in like simple terms. I feel like American future is either something like California or something like Florida or like Mississippi, right? Like there's the Mississippi option, which is just sort of like, whites vote 90% one way, non-whites vote 90% the other and the politics favor the white plurality. Yeah. Hi, my name's Dan. I guess to the point of like what a multiracial, what a multicultural democracy would look like going forward, I have in mind and just kind of want your take on, shortly after the election, there were a lot of pieces written by, I guess what I would call like white liberal universalists or someone like Mark Lilla or Jonathan Haight, talking about going forward, a multiethnic democracy has to be based on a very robust project of cultural assimilation and a minimization of difference, whether that be ethnic difference or religious difference. And I guess I sort of feel like that on the underside of the push to like the compassion for the Trump voter, like there's the direction toward, oh, they're really voting because of economic anxiety, but there's also this sense that we have to respect their desire for a monocultural society. I feel under that as well. And so I guess I just wonder how, how you would respond to that kind of movement or. I mean, so I, you know, to be frank, I have respond to that notion with like a fair amount of hostility, like instinctive hostility, in part because I think the analysis you see from Haight or from Lilla is lacking in any racial analysis. And so to say that we have to respect and desire for like a monocultural United States and that maybe the aim of our politics should be that kind of assimilation is essentially to say that the culture in question is a kind of like kind of general like colorblind whiteness kind of thing to which people are assimilated in, which A, I think is just sort of like, I'm resistant to the notion that people should like jettison their cultural traditions for that reason, but B, ignores the fact that the United States is sort of a racially hierarchical society and that doing that actually robs you of the ability to deal with that fact. And it seems to me a kind of compromise that disadvantages people who are, you know, lower on the racial totem pole. It in a way reifies race hierarchy rather than doing anything to dismantle it. And so that's sort of the source of my hostility towards it, but that does raise the question, what do you do? Like how do you build a multi-racial society and one specifically that is trying to make race less salient for people's life outcomes? For my part, I mean, that does mean that you do have to, to make race less salient for people's life outcomes, you have to make race salient. You have to show people that it does affect their life outcomes. You can't beat around the bush there. And it's remarkable to me that Willow Peace was remarkable to me for a lot of reasons, but one of them is there's a passage in the piece where he approvingly cites Martin Luther King Jr. I think this is that piece. I wanna say this is that piece. When like the whole point of the civil rights movement was actually like confronting people with the reality of the situation, like not letting people tear their eyes away. And that's, I think, you know, I wrote a piece after the election about the Jesse Jackson campaigns in the 1980s, which I think are really instructive and offer kind of a model for sort of politics of solidarity, that solidarity and mutual disadvantage and not so much in trying to force assimilation into a common, you know, vision of the normal. And I think that kind of thing is possible, but I think the draw in power of race hierarchy is such that it's like just very difficult. And so I think there are models in American history and in American life for like genuine multi-racial democracy. I mentioned moral Mondays earlier in Southern North Carolina, which is exactly this kind of like people of different races and class backgrounds and gender identification coming together on the basis of their, of shared recognition and disadvantage, but that's really difficult. And it runs right into an actual reaction and actual opposition from people who just oppose that vision of the United States. But to sum up, I think the little height notion I find it's just sort of a backdoor way of saying, it's a backdoor way of making the same kind of claim Trump makes, basically. It is a more palatable way of making that claim. And I reject that claim. I reject the claim that the United States has some kind of core cultural identity outside of its commitment to its sort of enlightenment ideals. My name's Katha. And given the fact that much of the media is owned and controlled by people who are white and looking at the election as a place where Trump who was clearly playing to white supremacists all the time. I sort of feel like there was a lot of the media saying, I'm shocked, shocked that there's racism in this country. And I'm wondering how that played out, what you think about that idea and how you can move forward from that. So I think it played out in an interesting way and it's still playing out, which is that there is, at this point, there is genre of reported story that you can almost fill in the blanks in. It is city reporter goes to, I don't know, like depressed Rust Belt town talks to people who live in places where the jobs have been gone for 20 years and they're voting for Trump and it's very sad and it's very depressed and it's a portrait of American industrial decline. What's funny is that you could also find these pieces in the 80s, it's like the recurring type of a story, but these are very prevalent in the past election. And I think there's nothing inherently wrong with these pieces, but I think they reflect the whiteness of the news media or at least certain parts of news media in that they didn't actually take people's political decisions and choices at face value, right? Instead of saying, instead of someone who says, I'm suspicious of immigrants or I am hostile to this cultural change, it is an attempt to say, yeah, but they also live in this depressed town that's obviously influencing their vote. It's kind of an attempt to add nuance where nuance may not necessarily be there. And I don't say that as a way of like disparaging anyone, but just, I live in Washington, D.C., Washington, D.C. infamously elected Mary and Barry several times to mayor. And I've read a lot about Mary and Barry and his administration through reaction to him, and I cannot recall a similar type of analysis of Barry and of the people who elected him. I cannot recall a similar type of analysis of the people who elected Detroit's succession of bad mayors. And by a similar type of analysis, you mean going into minority neighborhoods and doing that sort of profile. And sort of ignoring face value and looking for basically some empathetic reason for why this happened. As opposed to this chit storm. Right, right. That's a technical term. I think that white reporters, for reasons that are entirely understandable, are reluctant to understand people who may well be like their family members and like their friends as acting in ways that are, politically acting ways that are morally objectionable. And so rather than accept that possibility, there I think there is a real urge to look for some underlying reason for why this might be the case. A dramatic example is this week, I forgot who published it, someone published this long profile of not Milo Yiannopoulos, but the dudes who followed him around, like the 20-something-year-old dudes for his entourage. And these dudes are basically signed up to be like groupies for like a bigot, right? Like groupies for a guy whose entire persona is that like he goes after racial minorities and transgender people and women and sort of does so explicitly from the perspective that they are not worth as much as white men. And the piece is very nuanced and empathetic towards these guys and sort of it offers this narrative in which the reason why they're even attracted to someone like Milo is a kind of, since it being left adrift in the modern world and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And it refuses to take them at face value. It refuses to even posit that maybe the reason why they wanna get behind Milo is because they're also bigots. Like straight up. And we can understand the impact of that bigotry. We can understand sort of what's maybe underlying that bigotry, but our kind of top-line observation needs to be that like that's why they signed up. And I don't think it's an accident that everyone involved in like writing and reporting the story was white. And like there was just a mutual feeling that like they could recognize people they knew in these dudes and so there must be something else there that offers some, if not excuse, but some like deeper reason for why they're acting like this. This isn't them at their core. And I guess I'm not saying it isn't anyone's core. I'm saying that we should at least posit that question, right? That like perhaps, hey, maybe it's possible. Maybe it is the case that you have people voted for Trump at a deep-seated frustration with their economic situation. Maybe they voted for Trump because they don't like Mexicans. Maybe that's it. And we just have to deal with that. I'll offer another example of this that I found very troubling. It was a fresh air segment about one of these towns. And it's very much about the sort of sense of decline that people feel in the town. And then as an aside, the reporter mentions that this town has an active branch of the Ku Klux Klan. Wait, what? That seems like the whole story. That seems like the thing that we should focus on. And I think that is emblematic of the kind of quest for empathy that ends up, I think, perhaps obscuring more than it illuminates. I feel like I sound really hostile to Trump voters and I'm not. I'm really not like my best friend from high school. Her dad is sort of like gung-ho fucking Trump, like loves this dude. And I find this very regrettable. I still love him very much. He's been part of my life since I was a little kid. So it's not like hostility. It's just that I don't think we should coddle people. I don't think we should, I do not think that in, whether we're trying to understand or win their vote that we should shy away from the actual bases for which people do things. Even if it's unflattering or seems insulting to them, I just, I refuse to do that. Like, I find that the conversation around Trump voters reduces them purely to a sense of economic or cultural anxiety. And I don't think we should do that. I think we should take people to face value. We should understand the surroundings and their context, but also not turn our eyes away from what might be ugly. And I think, I do think that there is a real, a real preoccupation with turning away. And I, as a related phenomena, I do think there is a lack of attention paid to people who face the threat of a Trump administration. I mean, this complained a lot last year, but I read a lot of stories about, like, I don't know, Brussels, Pennsylvania, I didn't read that many stories about Hispanic service workers afraid of getting deported, right? I didn't read very many stories about Muslim Americans who were wondering what they're gonna do about their families. I didn't read, my wife teaches an elementary school that is predominantly Latino and Muslim. I did not read a story about eight-year-old kids afraid of what might happen to their parents, but I read a lot of stories about how people are hurting and butting for Trump. And stories about eight-year-old kids who were then saying, build the wall, and what their circumstances might be. Right, like, didn't read very much about people who might be affected, and I think that is a function of the demographics of journalism. And I apologize for this rant. It's just trying to put thoughts together here. We have time for one last question. Yeah. I think you actually, I'm sorry, I'm cool in my eye, I'm a grad student here. I think you actually started to answer my question a little bit, but I will ask it anyway. I also grew up in Virginia Beach. Oh, where did we go to high school? Ocean Lakes. I went to Kellam. Oh, okay. Are you guys gonna, like, brawl after? No, no, I feel like, I don't know who Ocean Lakes was, because there's a lot of high schools in Kellam and Virginia Beach. So, like, I remember, I recall that the high school that Kellam folks were always, like, trying to brawl with was Lantstown, which is, like, down the street, but I don't know about Ocean Lakes. Yeah, I don't know. I did Scholastic Bulls in high school, and so our big rival was Princess Anne, so. Okay, I'm gonna ask you another question. What year did you graduate from high school? 2011. Oh, no, sorry, 2007. Okay, I graduated in 2005. So there's, like, a non-trivial chance that we played Scholastic Bull against each other. But please, your question. Anyway, so, I mean, I've been sort of struggling with this. This is somewhat personal, that, you know, I, of the people that I sort of, like, I'm in touch with are my friends on Facebook or whatever. I don't really know, and I don't have any close relationship to anybody who voted for Trump, but, like you said, you do. And, like, I'm sure that having lived in Virginia Beach for 20-ish years, that there's someone that I know closely that voted for Trump. So how do you sort of, like, deal with that on, like, a personal level, especially my parents are immigrants. And so it feels sort of like, cause it's not just, like, well, Trump was kind of crazy and he's just doing these things. He said he was gonna do these things and now he's trying to do these things. So how do you sort of deal with that, like, not just, especially since you're a public figure that writes about the sort of the moral choice that Trump voters are making. How do you sort of square that? I mean, on a personal level, for me, it's, because of just the way our communities are set up, I think a lot of Americans understand politics in a very abstract way, right? That, like, it's not necessarily happening to someone they know. And I actually think, you know, in this case, saying to people, listen, you know, you can support Trump or whatever, but recognize that when he's talking about X, Y, and Z, he's talking about people like me, right? Like, this is not abstract. And so if you endorse it, then, like, understand what you're endorsing and what that means for people like me. And I don't think there's any guarantee that's gonna change anyone's mind, but I do think at least making people confront that is important, making people make a choice for themselves. Are they going to deal with any nagging doubts they might have, or are they gonna say, okay, that's just a necessary sacrifice? I will say for myself, you know, my friend's dad, I have not done this with him, apart because I just don't see him that often, in part because it's sort of hard, right? It's like hard to go up to someone that, you know, you know they're a decent person and say, like, listen, the dude you support wants to, like, deport my friend's mom, right? Like, that's, and if he gets his way, this will have a direct impact in my life. The dude you support wants to, supports expanding, stopping the frisk, and this may impact my life. I may have to be a bit more careful about how I drive around because of the guy you support, and that is a real thing, and that's sort of, I don't know, I have kind of, these two broad ideas, thoughts about moving forward from the present moment and the present situation. The first one is, you know, broadly just about people who are opposed to Trump across the political spectrum, kind of putting aside some of their differences for the sake of the United Front. But the second thing is very much about the necessity of people talking to and interacting with each other and being plain spoken and blunt about what the policy of the moment means for their lives and not flinching away from it. This goes not just for those of us who are people of color or immigrants who know Trump voting people in our lives, but also for, you know, white Americans who have family members and friends who voted for Trump but don't share those political commitments and like actually confronting those family members and friends, I think, and this is going back to something I said earlier, at a certain point, this was a problem for white people to solve and so white people need to solve it. And I think, I mean, I hope, Hillary Clinton did win more votes that there are enough white people who want to solve it, that it can be solved. But at a certain point, I can only, I can only talk to my friend's dad, my friend needs to talk to her dad. Like, ultimately he's not related to me, he's related to her, and maybe she needs to confront her dad. Well, please join me in giving a big thank you to Jamel. This is, I'm sure you know, he's an incredibly busy person and speaking at the communications forum does not come with great financial rewards. So this is something that he took the time out to do and come to have this conversation with us and I really appreciate it. I know we all really appreciate it. Thank you all for coming and being part of the conversation. Don't forget to sign up for our mailing list and I hope I see all of you in the future. Thanks. Thank you.