 to see such a crowd. Thank you for coming. I believe we're just about ready to start. Welcome, my name's Samantha. I'm the events coordinator here at Bear Palm Books. So excited to have all of you here for a discussion of bad stories. What the hell just happened to our country? I'm pretty sure we ask ourselves that every day. Even every single Donald tweet. But we're doing the discussion with the author Steve Almond and Vermont Editions to be held. All right, good. Good to see everybody out on primary election night. I hope everyone got out and voted today. If anyone needs to register to vote in the state of Vermont, we have registration forms. They're at the back table. Please help yourself. A few housekeeping items for tonight. Please mute or turn off your cell phones. And the front door is now locked. It will remain locked for the duration of the reading. If you need to exit during the reading, although we hope you don't have to leave in the middle because it's going to be a great program, the back door is open. Also, the bathrooms are located at the back of the store to the right of the back door. I'd like to thank the Vermont Arts Council for featuring tonight's event as a Vermont Arts 2018 program. Feel free to pick up a Vermont Arts Council sticker at the front counter. I've been told to turn this up and it's kind of up all the way. Sorry if you can't hear in the back. I'm trying to protect myself. That's why you said you were going out there. So let's see. We want to thank Orca Media there. You're filming the event tonight. If you're interested in seeing this video or to learn about future events here at Bear Palm Books, I'm going to pass around my newsletter signup list. I'd also like to let you know about our next event, which is Tuesday, September 4th. We have poets Jody Gladding and David Hinton. They'll be here at 7 p.m. for a reading of new work. And then on Tuesday, September 11th, we have a women's writers showcase with author Chris Bogalian, introducing the authors Melanie Finn, Maria Hummel, Sarah Healy, and Robin MacArthur. They will all be here reading from new work and discussing their work with Chris Bogalian. Be sure to sign up for the newsletter or like us on Facebook to find out more about those events. So I am just beyond thrilled to introduce our author Steve Almond tonight. I must admit, I previously only knew him through the Deer Sugar Advice podcast he hosts with fellow writer Cheryl Stray. That's a really fun one. But I was excited about this book, Bad Stories. Once it came out and I started reading it, and also Candy Freak, his other book he wrote many years ago, I've just discovered a whole new Steve Almond which is an obsessive, candy-addicted, literary critic and truth teller. Oh, and he's funny. So he's a comedic truth teller, that's what I thought. I've learned a lot from Bad Stories. I love how he weaves literary critique into his commentary on pop culture and politics. So many of these chapters connect the dots of our troubled culture through multiple disciplines. To me, it's like one big mind-blowing intersectional Rubik's Cube made out of chocolate, of course. That's my metaphor for you today. And speaking of chocolate, please check out our refreshment table in the back. We have somebody's favorite chocolate bars, Kit Kat D'Arx. I hear they're somebody's favorite. Also, we have copies of the book available at the register for sale tonight. If you don't already have a copy, I urge you to pick one up. I also urge you to pick one up for a friend or family member. I think everybody should read this book. We're also honored to welcome Jane Lindholm, who will interview Steve tonight. Jane hosts the award-winning Vermont Public Radio Program, Vermont Edition. She's also the host and creator of But Why, a podcast for curious kids. She's been, this is a great one. She's been recognized with regional and national awards for interviewing and use of sound. And, oh, a little side note, Jane got her BA at Harvard, which I think is interesting because Steve is a teacher there at Harvard, while in the Neiman Fellowship for Journalism. So Steve Allmond, the author of eight books of fiction and nonfiction, including The New York Times, best-selling Candy Freak and Against Football, his short stories have been anthologized widely in the best American short stories, the Pushkart Prize, Best American Erotica, and Best American Mysteries series. His essays and reviews have appeared in the New York Times Magazine, The Boston Globe, The Washington Post, and elsewhere. He teaches, as I mentioned, at the Neiman Fellowship for Journalism at Harvard. Please help me welcome Steve Allmond. Thank you. Okay, can you guys hear okay? Can everybody hear in back? It's good? Okay, I'm gonna take off my glasses. I'm gonna really powerfully resist those KitKatDarks, which if you have not had them, have them. I don't even, it feels to me like my voice might be louder without the mic, but maybe that's not the case. Use the mic? Okay, all right, all right. So I'm gonna read real quickly, just a couple of quick sections, and then Jane's gonna ask me some questions, and then you guys are gonna ask me some questions, hopefully in the form of questions, as opposed to statements or manifestos, which is also fine, but not for Q and A. So the premise of the book is that rather than getting our heads stuck in the kind of constant barrage of bad outcomes, that every fresh atrocity that smacks us in the face when we open our browsers, somewhat guiltily and greedily, it is probably a better approach to recognize all of those bad stories as the outcome of a set of bad stories, because the way it works is that human beings really are made of stories. We're a storytelling species, and if the stories are good, if they're intended to enlarge our moral imagination, to extend the bonds of humankindness, to make us more aware, even if that self-awareness is painful, if they're truthful stories, then the outcomes are usually good, and I see this both in my work as a sugar with Cheryl, and also in my life with my family, and also in our political discourse. If on the other hand, and maybe the best example I can give of a good story is the Beatitudes, the Sermon on the Mount, right? Which is the idea really that our highest calling is to help the least among us, and that wealth and power is a kind of perverted form of self-worth, right? Crazy. Crazy by the standard definitions of capitalism anyway, but that's another story. So I wanted to, rather than talking about people as good or bad people, I wanted to sort of acknowledge actually, everybody's made of some good stories and some bad stories, and when we're under the influence of bad stories, the outcome is always gonna be bad. So what are the bad stories, the propagandistic stories, the stories intended to sow discord, et cetera, that have beset this country, and brought us the inevitable outcome of the 2016 election, because we were building towards it, I think, unfortunately for many years. So the lens I use, because I'm not an academic, as is already apparent to you, and I'm sort of an apostate journalist, the lens I use is the lens of storytelling. So I try to sort of look at literature, and I do this on the podcast as well, as a receptacle of human wisdom and insight, something that can help us explain how we got to where we are. So I'll just read a few sections from the book that will give you a sense of what I'm up to. Okay, everybody can hear okay, because I took my glasses off and I can't really see you. I saw you before and you look fabulous, but I can't see you now. As I struggled to make sense of the 2016 election, my mind kept spiraling back to one particular scene in American literature, Ahab perched upon the quarter-deck of the Pequod, with a prosthetic leg fashioned from a whale's jawbone, right, this is movie deck, okay? The captain has come to announce the true nature of his mission, which is not economic in nature, but deeply personal. He seeks revenge against the Leviathan that maimed him and exhorts his crew with a soliloquy Trumpian in pitch, if not diction. Here's what he asked to say, all visible objects are but pasteboard masks, and he's up there like roaring at his crew. All visible objects are but pasteboard masks. If man will strike, strike through the mask. How can the prisoner reach outside except by thrusting through the wall? To me, the white whale is that wall shoved near to me. Let's have a moment of fucking silence for that beautiful bird. All great writing, and Melville shows this in Conor, all our great writers, because so much of it is in the birds. To me, the white whale is that verb shoved, is that wall shoved near to me? Sometimes I think there's not beyond, but tis enough, he tasks me, he heats me. I see in him outrageous strength with an inscrutable malice, sinewing it. That inscrutable thing is chiefly what I hate, and be the white whale agent, or be the white whale principal, I will wreak that hate upon him. Talk not to me of blasphemy, man. I'd strike the sun if it insulted me. It's not even the subtext of every tweet from the president. The text of every tweet from the president is, I'd strike the sun if it insulted me. It is this volcanic sense of grievance that fuels Melville's saga that binds the crew of the Pequod to their leader. Ahab's quenchless feud seemed mine, Ishmael tells us, rather helplessly, who can blame the kid? Ahab is something like a natural force, a vortex of vindication as mighty as the beast he pursues. And I'll just summarize for the sake of quickness, and just ruin the end of Moby Dick for all of you. I hope you'll be that great American classic. They chase the whale for four years. They find the whale. It does not go well. I would argue it doesn't even go especially well for the whale. The whale is hauling around Ahab for the rest of his days. But anyway, everybody is destroyed. The ship is destroyed. All the men die with the exception of Ishmael, who survives by clinging to this coffin made of American wood. Symbolism alert. Melville is offering the mythic account of how one man's viral bombast can ensnare everyone and everything it encounters. The setting is nautical. The language epic, the illusions biblical and Shakespearean and Miltonian for that matter. But the tale stripped to its ribs is about the seductive force of the wounded male ego. And how naturally a ship steered by men might tack to its vengeful course. The plot of Moby Dick pits man against the natural world. But its theme pits man against his own nature. The election of 2016 was, in its way, a retelling of this epic. Whether you choose to cast Trump as agent or principal hardly matters. What matters is that Americans joined the quest. Whether in rapture or disgust, we turned away from the compass of self-governance and toward the mesmerizing drama of aggression on display, the capitalist id unchained and all that it unchained within us. Trump struck through the mask and it was enough. When I started writing this book in the months after the election, I was furious and frightened, worn down by decades of disappointment and determined mostly to launch harpoons at those I imagined to be my adversaries. I am struggling in these pages to see Trumpism in a different light as an opportunity to reckon with the bad stories at the heart of our great democratic experiment and to recognize that often embedded within these bad stories are beautiful ideals and even correctives that might help us to contain the rage that has clouded our thoughts. I've taken Ishmael as my guide here, for while it's true that he falls under the spell of Ahab's folly, as did I, as did I. He is also its only surviving witness and chronicler. The voice left to impart whatever wisdom might be dredged from the deep. Amid the spectacle of a mad captain and his murderous query, we must forget that Moby Dick is a parable about our national destiny in which the only bulwark against self-inflicted tyranny is the telling of the story. OK, so that's the upscale literary version of what I'm up to, and now let's take it right into the gutter. I struggled to find anything that would qualify as funny in this book. And one of the central arguments of this book, I'm sick. I did turn it off, ma'am. Thank you. And now, thanks to you, turned it on. And now it's going to be a struggle for me to turn it off again. All right. So I was struggling to find something that passes as funny. And this is especially difficult, because I think, as we'll discuss a little bit further on, one of the crises, especially on what we call the left, is that while the right has rendered the American story as a horror movie, the left is sort of stuck trying to treat it as a farce. And it's not. It's our destiny. But here's just a little short section that I think maybe we'll speak to some folks in here, by which I mean everyone. Even Jane. In moments of errant rage during the campaign, I found myself conducting little thought experiments. How are the media reactive tape emerge of Hillary Clinton bragging to one of her female aides? Hey, you know what I like to do when I see one of those hot little consular attachés? I'll just walk up to them and grab them by the cock. Just like that. Maybe juggle his balls, stick a thumb up his ass. They let you do anything when you're secretary of state. And you're laughing. But that's literally what you would have to do. That's the mental experiment you would have to go through to understand the obscene double standard that applied in this election. Thank you, patriarchy. Still going strong. All right. Then I tick down the list. What if Hillary Clinton mocked a disabled journalist from Fox News? What if she introduced herself as a candidate by invading against Hillbilly rapists? What if she urged her supporters to beat up protesters at her rallies? What if she called John McCain a loser for being captured? And this list goes on for about 40 pages. OK. Let me just read one more quick section. I think I hope that's the only place where, and I don't even think of it as partisan, but where I'm just trying to highlight the kind of monstrous double standard that obtained in this election and has in most others. But I want to read a section that's a little bit more, the book is full of my kids, because kids are not sophisticated, but they're highly absorbent. And one of the, basically, the reason I had to write the book was because election night in the morning and the wee hours of that bleary moment, there are my kids. We're down in Florida, as you'll discover here. And I had, at that point, a 10, no, a nine, a seven, and a three-year-old. And it occurred to me, a couple of things occurred to me. The first was, how in God's name am I going to explain this to my kids? That the adult world made this decision. Because, again, they're not sophisticated, but they get mean. They get that somebody who mocks disabled people or brags about sexually assaulting women is probably not going to be allowed onto their playground. So the question naturally follows, why is that person our leader? How did the adult world conspire to create that reality? And then the second thought I had was, as freaked out as I was looking at my kids, how freaked out must a family of color be or a Muslim-American family or a family of immigrants to this country, particularly if their status is that they're either undocumented or they're in limbo? If I'm worrying as a privileged white dude about my kids, what is that set of parents thinking about their capacity to protect their children? So I felt like I had to write the book to try to explain. And I used them, in a sense, because they're really thoughtful and smart and illuminating and what they have to say about the world and the questions they ask are really the right questions, I think. Anyway, here's a little section that has to do with the day after the election. On the day after the election, I went swimming with my son, Jude. We were in Florida at a writing conference. And on the way to the hotel pool, I spotted a young father with his daughter who looked to be about three. She was seated on the chef's lounge next to her dad, happily munching on potato chips. Let's not have any more snacks, the dad said. It's going to be dinner soon. The girl continued to feed chips into her mouth at a slightly greater clip. Good luck with that, I said to the dad, ruefully as I passed by. He laughed. And we felt that instant kinship, shared by fathers of young iron willed daughters, against whom we know ourselves to be essentially powerless. I had a three-year-old, too. Some minutes later, my son pulled me to his side in the shallow end of the pool. Look at that man, he whispered. Look at what he's wearing. I glanced up and saw the young father with whom I just shared a moment of levity, a bright red Make America Great Again hat, perched on his head. Jude wanted me to react with horror, I think, or at least indignation. But I had no idea what stories had led this guy to put on that hat. I knew only that he was a father like me, an American on vacation, and at the mercy of his lovely daughter. To make any further judgment about him would be a failure of moral imagination. We're suffering from enough of that already. The real question, then, is what stories guide our fellow citizens? How have these stories led so many to squander their franchise to accept the idea that we can be united by those who so discord or made great without admitting what, in our weakest moments, we are? Amid the constant prod of monetized distraction, can we slow down and start to connect the dots between our compulsive consumption of entertainment and the degradation of our public discourse between the bread and circuses and the corrupt leaders? Can we activate what David Foster Wallace called the deep need to believe? If we're ever going to get out of this mess, we can no longer fritter away our passion on tribal contempt. We have to fight in a new way. We have to be the fools in charge of forgiveness. So that's all I'm going to read. It's so nice to hear you read, because I'm so used to your voice. You don't look like what you're supposed to look like. Isn't that what they tell all radio people? Yeah. So you write in bad stories about the ways that the stories we've told ourselves have led to this outcome, Trump's election. And not just the election of Trump, but the world we live in that would allow that. Yeah, they want you to stand, yeah. I'll stand too. You want to see us? I have to wonder, I mean, there is an indictment of everybody in this book, in some sense. But don't we live in this empty Anderson hyper-loud, hyper-reality TV, hyper-all-about-us kind of reality that leads us all, even those who do not like the outcome, to sort of love it. We find each other on the street and say, oh my god. And then somebody else says, I know. But that's an interaction that happens partly because we love it. I mean, it's an indictment, right? I mean, we're all complicit in what has happened. Yeah, so I mean, it's painful. Like a lot of the business that I do on Dear Sugars is gently trying to get people to face their shit. And this book, Jane, is really hit it. Along with the book I wrote against football, that was about me being a football fan, about whatever gets triggered in my madness, my aggression, my insecurity, my suppression of my better angels and instincts. It's not about what somebody else is doing. And I think we are, all of us, all across the political spectrum, kind of obsessed with the idea of assuring ourselves of our own virtue and offloading all the ugly, negligent, reckless, destructive parts of ourselves onto some other. And it's bullshit. This is democracy. The rules are screwed up in ways that I try to articulate in the book and that we should stop calling ourselves a representative of democracy since that's not what we are. And so we change the system, that's not what we are. But also it's a democracy. We don't live in a theocracy or authoritarian state. We live in a very lazy, entitled, privileged democracy where voter participation is 35th in the list of industrialized nations behind Turkey and Greece and so forth, where the big winner in the election with 104 million non-votes were the people who didn't vote. It's an atrocity that the winner who got 100% of the power in Washington lost by 3 million votes. No question about it. I write in depth about that. But it's even more upsetting and troubling that we are, as a culture, all of us, rather than being activists and rising to the occasion of our own citizenship, that duty and burden that we really hate watching democracy and in a way getting off on it. And I say that as somebody who actively is fighting to change my media diet, to change the way, the kinds of stories that I look at, in the same way that I believe the right wing has really announced who they are. This is who we are. We are vassals for the corporate sector. That is what we're going to do. There's no pretense of governments of trying to look out for the people of breaking the corrupt alliance between government and big business. We, in fact, are trying to foster that. We're always going to put corporate interests before human interests. They've announced that that's who they are. The question now becomes, who are we? Who is everybody else who would like government to function in a more common sense way, confront the real problems that we have? And that really redounds to individual citizens. What the right prays on, what corporations pray on, is really a loss of faith. Is people losing faith in the idea that their individual role as citizens matters? And they've effectively done it. It's not an active voter suppression effort, which also exists. It's an effort to simply dispirited and depress people and get them trapped in a mentality where what's playing out in Washington or in the capital of your state or even in your town is some ugly, rankerous game, reality TV show for ugly people. They really pray on that loss of faith. And on the right, it resides in portraying America as this horror movie where the dark other is always hovering on the edges of the border and a sleeper cell in your community. But we on the left also I think fall victim to this. We shouldn't be laughing at the message that John Stewart or Samantha Bee or any of these brilliant comedians is delivering night after night. It's not a matter to laugh at that we just naturally assume everybody's a hypocrite and a liar and corrupt. That's a tragedy. And our therapeutic efforts to deal with that feeling of distress is part of what saps us of the faith we need to actually become active and rise up and be the subjects of history rather than the objects of history. They're trying to make it as ugly as possible. They found the perfect ugly bomb. He will turn everything to shit. He will make everything a sad little narcissistic, limp dick game. He'll do it. And if we watch him do it, we are participating with him. If we lose focus on what governance is really supposed to be about, that's part of the reason that I talk about various books including The Grapes of Wrath in which the hero of that book which is about migrants, right, is the government. We've kind of lost our sense. Wait a second. The original role of governance and I quote Teddy Roosevelt as well as this beautiful speech where he really talks about, look, the job of government is to break this corrupt alliance and also to equalize opportunity and also to destroy privilege. That's the job of government. That's Teddy Roosevelt, folks. The raging imperialists. Let's go to war overseas. That's not some crazy lefty, right? But he understood the basic role of government and I think we kind of have fallen away from that and I think it fallen in love in many ways with our own virtue. But the question that we should be asking every minute of the day is, what am I gonna do about it? Not who's being an idiot or oh, the latest outrage but what am I gonna do about it? You also write that it used to be that people cared about their party and they had pride in the party that they felt a part of whereas now the way people think of partisanship is a hatred for the other party. So instead of pride in the side that you feel aligned with it's a hatred for the other side and that's been a remarkable change. Yeah, I mean you're soaking in that but basically we change from a mindset where you say here's what I'm for to here's who I'm against. And it's hard because the right has a number of advantages in the storytelling business. One, they don't have to worry about facts. It's not funny, they don't have to. It couldn't be more obvious. They come out every day and say, we're just gonna say the opposite of what we said yesterday, it's like a constant tautology. And that really degrades epistemologically. It degrades our capacity as citizens to understand what truth is, what a verifiable fact is. But in addition to that, they can ratchet it because they don't have to worry about facts or governance. They can ratchet up the threat level. They can tell the story that, here's what the story that I will say, political actors of good faith are trying to tell about healthcare reform. We are trying to appreciably improve the delivery of healthcare systems in your community. It's a great, beautiful story but it's not exactly as a barn burner. On the other side, the story is they are coming to kill your grandmother. They're coming to kill you, they have a death panel and they are gonna kill you. The story that we are trying to tell and that the scientific community is telling us along with the raging wildfires and Fiji being blown off the map and everything else is, geez, we've been roaring drunk on petroleum for 200 years. We're gonna have to give up some of the conveniences and some of the engines that have allowed the auto capitalism to operate so effectively as a centrifuge for building great wealth and power in America amongst the top echelons. Otherwise, the planet's thermostat is gonna go capluy and we're all gonna be in a lot of trouble. That's a true story but it's really tough for people to absorb. It's much easier to say, you know what, there are a bunch of egghead scientists at places like Harvard trying to sell you a hoax about global warming in order to make you feel guilty for driving an SUV and don't let them do it. They're just after the grant money. That's a completely fraudulent story but it's very seductive. Stories that key into people's primal negative emotions that exalt our grievances are the same stories that allow us to hide from our vulnerabilities and that's really what's going on. It's that people don't wanna face their vulnerabilities because it's really hard. It's a natural impulse and they are finding political actors and demagogues are realizing that it's incredibly effective for them to exalt grievance all the time but it is a two-way street. The one form of bigotry that's acceptable in our culture now is political bigotry. Those of you who remember when Bob Dole ran for president, he said, oh, my aching back but anyway, when Bob Dole ran for president, I remember looking at a Bob Dole bumper sticker and saying, ah, Dole wants to help out the wealthy. He doesn't care as much about working people in this country and that was about it. That was the extent of my bigotry. Now, let's get real in here. When you see a Trump-Pence sticker, what do you start deciding about the driver? They're white, they're male, they're a gun owner, they're racist, they're misogynist. I think that in my own corrupted head and that's bullshit. That is my bigotry. And so I think that hyper-partisanship, it also explains ultimately, that's why I say we can't fall for this tribal contempt. It's a dead end. It's what the other side wants. We should be having a conversation about how the common good can be served, not an argument about whose interests are gonna be served. And the great trick of the right is to turn everything into a brawl and an argument. And if I may editorialize for a moment about the media, every media outlet preys on that because they know that's what's gonna be exciting and that's what's gonna juice the ratings to get more clicks. But it gets more clicks because of our clicking, folks. That's the game. The media has also announced who they are. They're a for-profit concern. They used to be to a greater extent a civic institution. And I write a long chapter about the fairness doctrine which was the doctrine that was in place in order to make sure that people who held the licenses for public broadcast actually were serving the public good and that all debates of controversial issues included all shades of reasonable opinion. And when that was removed by Ronald Reagan in 1987, the spoiler plate came off of propaganda and the rise of the right-wing talkers began. And if you think that Donald Trump has an original idea in his head, you just haven't been listening to right-wing talk radio. Because they have been telling the story, he hasn't built a movement, he just inherited an audience share. And I don't say that because I think everybody should listen to those stories, but you should know where you are not gonna win somebody over. No matter how reasonable and empathic you are, you're not gonna win somebody over who for 40 years has been told and has really literally taken into themselves, into their body a story about their ecstatic white victimization. It's just not gonna happen. What you can do, I believe, is speak to people who are politically disengaged or disillusioned. Especially if you have some leverage with them. And think very much, I think, about the ways in which you can tell stories that will make them understand that their citizenship does matter. Their vote and their civic activism actually does matter. But I don't think we do any good when we say, well, how can we bridge the divide? I know NPR loves to think about this stuff. But I simply don't think that's gonna happen. And I think you're pouring good energy down the drain. Our energy should be enlarging the electorate and renewing people's faith in why their citizenship matters now, in preparation for what I consider to be the most important election of my lifetime. That's interesting because clearly in this room and in your conversation and in your book, you're speaking to an audience who you believe probably believes a lot like what you believe. And even in talking about you should know what the right's doing. There's a sense that nobody in here is from the right. Or that you know who your audience is. And if that's true, what's the purpose of your book if you're just speaking to an echo chamber so that everybody can then feel better about feeling bad? Okay, great question, a bit on the nose, but I'm gonna come back over to the top, which is to say the purpose of the book is that the people in media are not doing their jobs. They're not tracing back. And I say this with all due respect, when if I hear one more passively reported, the president is off to this place. We're sorry. Hold on. Oh good, I've got the mic again. Good. There are big important stories that I think don't get talked about. And we don't trace everything back and sort of say, oh well, families are being separated at the border. What are we gonna do about immigration? And there's very little context to explain to people, America's always had a really fraught relationship to immigrants. 125, 130 years ago, there was an editorial in the New York Times saying these Sicilians who are lower than rattlesnakes should be lynched. They're coming to our country and polluting our country. That's not, again, some kind of crazy. It's by way of saying we're within the context of no context. We have no larger context. And what we're talking about and sort of calling news is almost always, not entirely, but in the main, I would say, is a set of arguments between people rather than a discussion of what the real issues are. And the central evidence I would give you is, 10% of the coverage during the election was about policy. 10%. There were three debates where the candidates had the opportunity to be questioned in an unfiltered way. And there was not a single question about the central existential threat to the planet. Not one question about climate change. That is because the fourth estate is no longer the people's representative in Washington. And I don't feel they can be depended upon to tell people what's really at stake and how we got to this moment. The other thing I would say is that a lot of people are really confused underneath their rage and indignation and so forth. They're really confused by how did we get to this point? And I feel there's almost no place that's offering an adequate explanation. You have to know about the fairness doctrine. If you wanna understand how our media became so propagandistic. How we allowed that to happen. How we changed what was a civic institution into a marketplace. Where if it's profitable, great, it works. It's gonna, if it finds an audience, it doesn't matter how propagandistic it is, that's what media is. It's a marketplace. If you don't understand what the fairness doctrine is and the fact that the United States did actually regulate media to keep it from becoming propaganda, then stop complaining about Facebook or Twitter. Okay, don't even bother. Unless you understand, this is a fundamental issue that we have to reckon with or not reckon with. The same thing is true of thinking in a broader way about what is the bad story of race about? The bad story of race was created before this country was even in existence. And it was created in order to keep people of a similar class, indentured servants or people who are working people from focusing their energy on the people with all the money and land. If they could create this imaginary pigmentary alliance between people, then you could get an indentured white worker to resent somebody who was an African American or from the Caribbean or Chinese. It's an old con. It's not something that just came along because Donald Trump started ginning it up. It's baked into the American fabric, this idea that we could distract people from a politics of economic uplift by ginning up racial resentment. And I feel like part of the point is there is no context, no larger context that can make understandable what happened in 2016, how somebody so manifestly corrupt, self-interested, uninterested in governance, ill-equipped and entertainer essentially became our leader. You don't have to, but it is really helpful to read Fahrenheit 451. And remember that that's not a book about censorship, that's a book about a culture that stops reading, that stops believing in stories or reading meal post-mins amusing ourselves to death, which is about a culture. What happens when a culture stops being a people, stop being a sort of public and instead become an audience who essentially regard their role in life as passively consuming bad news, laughing at it or raging at the TV, but in all instances, sitting there, passively receiving news or shows that are about what's happening politically as a form of entertainment. The book isn't trying to solve everything, it's just trying to explain how we got to this place because frankly, I was kind of gobsmacked. And I was saying, well, hold on a second, I know some of the things that led us to this moment, but I think I need to try to try, not succeed, but try to pull them together. And I need to use George Orwell to do that, I need to use James Baldwin and Hannah Arendt, and I need to look at this aspect of it and that aspect of it. So it's really just an attempt to explain how we got to this moment, which is in its own way empowering. People in Dear Sugars, when they send us letters, they're struggling because they don't know why their lives, why they're making bad decisions, why they are self-destructive or destructive to others. They're in a state of anguish because they're not aware of what the stories are within them that are confounding them, that are conspiring against what they really want. And all Cheryl and I are trying to do is to say, wait a second, I think there's a story underneath the one you're telling us, or there's another story you need to think about before you can get through these struggles. There's some difficult set of truths that you're gonna have to confront before you can hope to have a better outcome. If we don't recognize the bad stories at the heart of what has happened to America, we are gonna be subject to the next bad political actor, the next demagogue, who's gonna come along and maybe even be much more organized, much more willing to use the highly armed factions of this country who also happen to be incredibly paranoid. And ready to couch their own aggressive outbursts as defensive in nature. You understand? It's not about Trump. We get stuck on him, but it's really, he's the outcome of a whole bunch of bad stories. Until we look at those, we are not, I think, we're not really gonna get to a place where America's healthier and the government is functioning in a way that causes people to not exactly walk around whistling in hope all the time, but to feel that government's trying to serve the interests of the people. How do you think we get there? You said earlier, you're not gonna convince the people who have been listening to right wing talk radio for the last 40 years. Don't bother to have a conversation with them because it's that kind of position because you're not gonna convince them. People who support Donald Trump, who don't think that America is in a bad place, who maybe don't even agree with the concept that this is a bad story, are not gonna pick up a book that says what the hell just happened to America. So how do, what you believe is that we need to have these conversations, we need to understand the context, we need a better press, and I totally agree with you on that. How do we get there? So that's the big $64,000 question. My book is a book of explanation and ideas. It's not a manifesto that says, here are the steps you take. It really is saying, check out where we've been, check out the things that in a very obvious way have led us to this moment. And as I try to convey in reading that last section, remind yourself that we're an experiment in self-governance. And the emphasis there is on the self. In other words, it's not my role to say, okay, here's the roadmap. It's just to say, here's the map of where we are. A place where politics has become angry, divisive, almost media is almost never dealing with the real moral crises. And I say that, there's a long section about my own experience as a reporter. I worked for three and a half years in El Paso. And the big story, if you live along the US-Vexico border, is that there's a really poor country where people are nutritionally in jeopardy, right up against a very wealthy country, that's us. And that there's a kind of de facto system where people from the really poor country come over to do a bunch of work at very low wages that Americans won't deign to do. And that was just, I saw that every morning. I could get up at six or seven in the morning and I could see the daymaids coming across the Rio Grande on the shoulders of the moulas and they would scramble up the embankment and they would peel back the chain-link fence and they would have this, they had a bag, usually a plastic bag on their heads that had their dry clothes and they would undress there in the dawn and they would put on, it was almost invariably young women and they would put on their dry clothes and then they would dash through the low scrub into El Paso itself, hoping that the INS vans didn't come and arrest them and deport them back to waters. And I saw that every single morning while I was sipping my coffee, welcome to America. And I almost never wrote about it. I wrote about new kids on the block because they were coming to the El Paso County Coliseum or I wrote about Bon Jovi or I wrote restaurant reviews of bowling alley cafes. And that's not because I was a jerk, it's because that's what the media was up to. They were trying to get clicks, they were trying to get stories that people would be interested in and they knew that if they told a story that was too difficult, complicated, intractable, morally thorny, it wouldn't, you know, people wouldn't read it, it wouldn't sell advertising. But that was still the central story that was happening in El Paso. And you know, the answer I always have when people say, well, what do we do? Here's what you do. Before you leave tonight, turn to the person next to you and ask them, what are you gonna do for this midterm election? What are you gonna do? What candidates and causes are you gonna support? Because ultimately that is what democracy is, is people taking political action because in this culture you have the freedom to do that. And if you don't do that and just say, well, it's somebody else's fault. It's somebody else's problem to solve. What are we gonna do? I don't know. The question is, what are you gonna do? What I did was write a book, trying to explain what's going on. I'm giving as many free workshops where the ticket of admission to the workshop is contributing to a candidate or cause that you support and everybody who shows up at the workshop has to have a little action plan about what they plan to do and I'm writing postcards with my daughter who's brilliant and a wonderful illustrator that's to remind people to vote. And you know what I mean? That's what I'm doing. And is it enough? No, it's probably not enough, but it's something. Now the question is for you guys. What are you gonna do? Especially after you read a book like Bad Stories that makes it clear like, hey, it's not gonna change until we change it. And it's great when there's a leader who galvanizes people and makes them hopeful. I was a big Bernie as I write about in the book. I really loved how clear his moral vision was. How, you know, and I don't wanna oversimplify it, he basically was saying, and now I'm gonna oversimplify it. Let's just take like a yacht from every zillionaire and then everybody will have healthcare. Let's just take a little bit from the people who have hundreds of thousands of acres of land and we will be able to create tremendous opportunity for people who don't have that opportunity. Those ideas are gaining some currency but the larger point is that he motivated people because he spoke in very stark moral terms about what we can do, what we're capable of doing and people say, wow, that sounds terrific. He was, I think, a good storyteller and on the other side was somebody who was very good at telling bad stories and poking people's primal negative emotions. People tend to forget that there are far more people who are people of good faith who want the government to be compassionate and want vulnerable communities to be protected and are willing to surrender some of their privilege so that other people don't have to live in jeopardy or in harm or just with inequality of opportunity or experience. I truly believe, call me crazy, that there's way more people like that than there are people who are, for whatever complicated set of reasons are willing to act politically in a way that abrogates the rights of others and that privileges corporate interests over human interests. I simply think there's way more of us we're just not active enough. We don't demand accountability. We think it's enough to throw up our hands and be disgusted and have those ecstatic conversations about the outrage. But we're no better than that if we're not willing to put skin in the game and give up some of our time and energy in pursuit of and really shoulder the burden of hope. It's a burden to be hopeful about things. It means you're subject to being disappointed. But the other side of that is the loss of faith that's brought us to this moment. So I would say less, what's the answer? The answer is you. The answer is whatever action you can muster in whatever fragile sense of belief in what we're trying to accomplish as a country. And we should have a sense of urgency about it because we've seen that the right has told us, here's how low we're willing to go. And if there's a young woman in your orbit who just thinks politics is dumb or doesn't matter, then you need to patiently and compassionately explain to them that their reproductive rights are going to be criminalized. That is gonna happen. And if they live in a place where if they live in a particular state that's automatically guaranteed gonna happen. Do you see what I mean? Or somebody like the woman who was babysitting for us on election night, she was a medical student. She was preparing to go to medical school. I said, naive, dreamer that I am. Well, did you kind of check out what the different candidates had to say about student loan? Because they do have very different approaches to that problem. One is, let's try to solve this and believe the debt burden. The other is, hey, there's a Ponzi scheme I'd love to sell you, right? And she said, no, I just didn't have a chance to vote. And I'm an absentee voter from North Carolina, right? Nobody had gotten to her to say compassionately, this democracy matters to you if there's a difference between this political actor and this political actor. If you don't wanna wind up up to your eyeballs and hawk just for trying to be a doctor, right? I also feel it's important for us to remain focused on the really good stories that are out there. Which tend to kind of get buried. Teachers all over this country, not just on the coasts in Arizona, in West Virginia, right in Oklahoma, they just rose up spontaneously like in the old days of the labor movement and said, God damn it, we teach your kids. We should not have to spend our own money on school supplies. It's an abomination. Every social worker, every home healthcare worker, every teacher should be revered by this culture. It is a function of how depraved morally we've become that we sort of spend all this time and attention on white people's feelings and rich people's feelings. Like we've got to get, figure this out. And this sort of redounds to what is our religious, our religious history is full of. Our religious history has all these stories like the Beatitudes that are really very morally clear about what you need to do when the nation has fallen away from God, when we become impatient, waiting for Moses to come down with the rules and start worshiping the golden calf, right? And I think in our political discourse and certainly in our media ecosystem, there's almost none of that being discussed. I feel like people need to figure out how much it really deeply matters to be the subject of history in this moment rather than the object. Very good. Okay. I would add cisgender men to your list of people whose feelings we pay attention to. I wanna open it up to your questions because I'm sure you have many. And Samantha, I don't know if you want us to repeat the questions to the mic or have people come up and ask their question into the mic, do you have a preference, Claire? Sure. Yeah, I'm just, just shout. Right ahead. I wanna ask if you have any stories in your book of stories about the splits on the left and how we should be looking historically at how we undo our own goals by doing the circular firing squad and focusing on our differences rather than joining them together as we have done in Vermont. We repeatedly have done one presidential election after another. So internal squabbles on the left. Right. So what I do, I have a long chapter about what I think, well two things to respond to that. It's a great question. I have a chapter that is about essentially the way in which female ambition is criminalized in this country and volition to some extent and in which, in a sense, Hillary Clinton sort of became the object of that patriarchal agenda, which is a very fundamental divide. If you're not gonna allow women to have ambition or if they become ambitious, you're going to treat them like the anti-Christ even though they are, even though they're a good faith public servant who's made some decisions that I personally hated and thought were kind of icky, but you don't get perfect candidates. That's a myth, that's a bad story. You just get candidates who line up much more with the direction that you wanna go, right? There is no perfect candidate. And I think to some extent, the propagandists on the right and the Russians understood very clearly that they could sow this division that you're speaking about because they targeted, I write a chapter in the book or not a chapter, but a portion of a chapter is about a young friend of mine who was a real Bernie supporter. He was writing a lot of posts on his Facebook page and stuff about economic justice, and quoting articles that had to do with seeking economic justice. And he also was a lot of other things, living with his mom, not making very much money, living in a part of the world where a lot of people of color were doing better than he was, dot, dot, dot. And they were able to figure out because Cambridge Analytica had this job in the election, how to turn him from a Bernie supporter into a Russian bot, essentially. And by the end of the election, all he was doing was posting I Hate Hillary kind of propaganda, some of which was literally made in those fake news farms in Russia. It's by way of saying that every empire or political power that ultimately falls, falls because of internal division. And one of the struggles, therefore, is to figure out how you can convince people that they're not gonna get the perfect candidate, but they're gonna get a candidate who's at least a little bit closer to the policies that they want, and who's willing to have the discussions that they wanna have. Because if you don't do that, and there are a number of examples of this in the book, what you wind up with is what we're in now, which is we're not even, scientists aren't even allowed to use the word climate change. Forget having a responsible discussion or a set of policies. I don't spend a lot of time talking about the internal divisions within the Democratic Party, because I feel like the real division that was mined in this election was the partisan divide. And the Russian, as a student of history, to whatever extent, Putin understood that the way that an empire falls is because they become internally divided. And he understood that you couldn't beat the United States with military might. They couldn't beat the United States with economic might. In fact, that effort had led to the downfall of the Soviet Union. But if you're Vladimir Putin and you're trying to make Russia great again, you do know that America has a weakness. And you know what that weakness is, right? That weakness is bad stories. And if you can get in there and foment and even have people working on the inside, there at Fox News or wherever it is on the radio, if you can tell those divisive stories, those seductive divisive stories, then you can actually, and the system is rigged so that a candidate who gets three million fewer votes can still sort of sneak into office, then you have at least a shot at beginning the decline of the American empire. And he made that bet and he won. That's the central one that I focus on. I'm not a big believer in trying to sort of relitigate what happened in the primaries, even though I was very disappointed and was an ardent supporter of Bernie Sanders. Because my fundamental feeling is that most people in the Democratic Party have an agenda that I basically agree with. I wish it was more radical, more along the lines of what Bernie Sanders was interested. I wish it was more morally forceful, but I basically think Hillary Clinton would have tried with great intransigence from the other side to address certain things that I think are important for me, my kids, my community, et cetera. And I will say that when people ask me like, well, what should the left be saying? I will tell you what I think the left should be saying, as one unified voice. I'll read it to you. It's this new nationalism speech that I talked about. It's really incredible, that's why I put it in the book. So what Teddy Roosevelt proposed in 1910 was he outlined a national health service, social insurance for the elderly and needy, an eight hour workday, a minimum wage, workers compensation, dot, dot, dot. All of these things, many of which came to pass. And he said that essentially the idea also limits on campaign contributions, registration of lobbyists, the recording of all congressional proceedings, so you can't hide from view what you're doing as a public servant, right? And the idea was to destroy this invisible government to dissolve the unholy alliance between corrupt business and corrupt politics. And then he went on to say this. Roosevelt sought to defend the founding principle of America, equality of opportunity. I love this little piece of the speech. In the struggle for this great end, nations rise from barbarism to civilization and through it, people press forward from one stage of enlightenment to the next. At many stages in the advance of humanity, this conflict between the men who possess more than they have earned and the men who have earned more than they possess, just let that sink in. I'll say it again. This conflict between the men who possess more than they have earned, if you for instance were born with a really rich dad, who gave you a bunch of money, okay? And the men who have earned more than they possess, all of the social workers or teachers or whatever else, okay, is the central condition of progress. In our day, it appears as the struggle of free men to gain and hold the right of self-government as against the special interests who twist the methods of free government into machinery for defeating the popular will. Is this starting to sound familiar? At every stage and under all circumstances, the essence of the struggle is to equalize opportunity, destroy privilege and give to the life and citizenship of every individual the highest possible value, both to himself and to the commonwealth. That is nothing new. All I ask in civil life is what you fought for in the Civil War. I think most people on the left, moderate, would agree with that basic articulation of what government, what function government should be serving. And we might argue about the particulars, but I think most people who are of good faith say, yeah, government's kind of there to protect us from the tyranny of the corporations. Right, a kind of corrupt alliance. I know I'm not directly answering your question, but the book doesn't get into the internecine battles and in the Democratic Party. Another question? You can add to that. Oh, I can add to this. It can go really fast. So one of the things that I am interested in maybe having you respond to is I kind of clocked both of you as like, you say like the left and the right and you kind of name certain groups, but then you still default to the use of pronoun, we a lot and we and us. Right. And I'm wondering if you can hand to speak to how, like, yes, on our money it says we the people. And so I don't know if you're engaging it on those terms because we, I guess I'm interested in we the use of we and how we acts as a linguistic erasure of specificity. So rather than saying like, we need to be more complicated about we. Right. And it's about coalition and like the unification, but not the active erasure and like your thoughts on the use of we consistently tonight. Okay. That's a question about pronouns. From me, Schucker. Yeah, well, that's all right. It makes sense. In fact, that little bit that I read from Teddy Roosevelt is, you know, basically your patriarchy saying, you know, man, the condition of men, the central condition of men, men, men, men, men. You know, we're in this interesting moment where certain segments of the culture hold themselves accountable for various degradations and for an inequality of power exercised upon vulnerable communities. But you're absolutely right that that is really, what you can get away with depends on who your constituency is. And on the right, they have said, well, it's okay if you brag about sexually assaulting women, you could still be president and dot, dot, dot. And also you can also, if you wanna be a senatorial candidate, it's okay if you were predatory towards teenage girls in your mid thirties as a powerful man, whatever, there's no proof. Cheng, you know, we'll pull the lever for you. And I think this, I think kind of speaks a little bit to your leariness, and I share it about saying we, we, we. Like, whenever I hear any political person say, well, the American people, I'm just like, are you kidding? There is no American people. There's a set of complicated individuals. But this applies, I think, in every instance because we on the left have a tendency to say this or that. How could they vote for him without any real awareness of the complicated stories that people are telling or avoiding knowledge of, that cause them to act politically? My in-laws voted for Trump. Oh. Oh, that's it, look. My mother-in-law believes, my mother-in-law believes, who's just as much as a citizen as you, by the way, believes that conception, life begins in conception, and that it is murder to allow women, even the choice to abort a fias. Okay, she's just as much an American as everybody else. So I think you're very wise to question when people make big declarations because the truth is we're living in a lot of different constituencies and some of them have consented to a different moral standard and others have said, no way, man, don't intrude upon our privilege. Don't tell us about these new rules that make us feel guilty or ask us to be responsible or question the success that we've enjoyed. And I think about that all the time because I was like a lot of white men in America, I was born on third base. And it's hard to admit that because it means you didn't hit a triple, right? Do I speak to that? Do you want me to speak to that? If you want to, I would gladly take your response too. I think about we often as a rhetorical device, I think of it as if we, if, in this instance, for example, if Steve is talking about here's what we should be doing, then I'll use the we too. So what do we do, you know? Right. But I think in my work on Vermont Edition, I think about how the language you use sends a signal to who you think your audience is. So not specific to this conversation, but that idea of the words you use, the way you use them, the slang you use, that sends a really strong message to who you think you're talking to. And there's a really brilliant public media journalist named Stephanie Fu who talked about this once about an experience she had on this American life where she was telling, or I think it actually was a colleague of hers was telling Ira Glass about, sorry, I don't have it all in my head. I think it was Denny's, I think. They had sandwiches and so people on staff could make up names for sandwiches. And one of them was supposed to be called the Beyonce. And Ira Glass said, why was it supposed to be called the Beyonce? And she said, because it's this burger with cheese and sauce and if you like it, you put an onion ring on it. And Ira Glass said on air, now to those who don't know, Beyonce has a song and she said, everybody knows that Ira. And apparently they got all of this hate mail from people who said, how dare you? I didn't know it. How dare you assume that I don't know something? And what she said was, well, finally, you have to go Google something which is what all non-white middle-class people have to do all the time. It's the point of the burden of representation. It's like, oh, if I have to explain it, you don't have to do the work to figure it out. And it places it all on you. If I explain it, it's because I think you don't know it. If I don't explain it, it's because I think my audience already knows this. So that question, not only of pronouns, but of what you explain, what you don't explain, I mean, that's what keeps me up at night. And it's the same demonious assumption. It is, but it's an assumption, but then if you want to bring people into your audience, you need to make them feel welcome, not only in the topics you cover, but in how you cover them and how you talk about them. But anyway. Yeah. Anyway. The goal is to have, I mean, in the idea when you're a storyteller, you're trying to have as many people as possible understand the story and feel included in it. So that, you know, I can understand the effort to say, well, let me try to explain to people who might not be hip to that song. Okay. Any questions? I know there are people in back. Everybody feeling represented in back? No. To the gentleman in blue. Okay, yep. With the Kit Kat. Very cleverly done. Yeah. Well, I'm definitely going to have some. Yeah, that's going to happen. The right seems to be more effective at telling bad stories. Is it that the left is not things that they're not, like they won't do down to that because I think they could. Or is it that they're talking to a different audience that they're like, like when did they talk to a different audience? Yeah, so the, the fount of bad. So the question is why is the right more effective? Why is the left not as effective at telling stories that will land with people and cause them to become riled up in one way or another, riled up to act politically and so forth. And, you know, I don't know exactly, but from my observation of things, when you create a market for bad stories, like all those folks on right wing radio, who knows what their beliefs are, that's not, that's almost not the point. They're trying to build an audience. And the way you build an audience is by telling an audience that they're in trouble and they're at risk and their power is going to be taken away. And they're, you know, and by poking at their grievance and, you know, their sense of indignation and their sense of loss and very real feelings of declining cultural utility of, you know, I call it in the book fear of a brown planet, right? That's a story that, and these are also people, and this is not incidental, who are very frustrated. They're frustrated in their lives, their sense of where the country is going, which they don't understand all this discussion of intersectional, dot, dot, dot, but also literally do, they're in traffic in the great American nightmare of traffic without lots of trees around. And they're feeling thwarted, blocked, angry, and they need somewhere to put it. They need what Hannah Arant called the Talos, a grand narrative, a larger story. She talks about totalitarianism as a kind of organized loneliness. When people are lonely, when they're confused, when they fear that they're losing power, they become vulnerable to propaganda, okay? That's what happened, you know, study the history of any country that goes up, that ends up falling under the sway of fascists or a totalitarian mindset. It's always predicated on people feeling helpless, isolated, having lost faith, and being in a certain kind of anguish. And if they can, rather than, it's hard to face that, it's much easier to say, here's who's to blame for it. And if you're really good, you could build a really successful market and audience by telling those stories. A good political actor is not doing that kind of work. A good political actor is sitting around doing the boring fucking work of governing, not trying to craft a story that will build a fucking audience. They're not an entertainer. And one of the central confusions that we have is somehow the idea that our politicians, our political actors, should be entertainers. That's not their job. Their job is to try to figure stuff out and work in a legislative system and to try to hammer out policies that will appreciably improve the lives of their constituents. So if you see what I mean, I think a lot of people on the left take seriously the idea of acquiring power so that you can govern effectively and solve people's problems. That winds up being incredibly inconvenient. It means you can't just demagogue. But what's happened is we've essentially realized, well, or I think people on the right realize, if you demagogue effectively enough and depress the electorate and suppress votes and take advantage of the slaveholder math that created the electoral college, then there's a tiny little window where a white nationalist can be elected. Based on tribal loyalty, based on whatever I try to outline the various stories that lead to that. He feels no compunction to try to govern in any discernible, coherent way. Well, people I think who are political actors of good faith really do take that seriously. They're not sitting there trying to craft a pitch to grab raw political power. They're trying to figure out how to build coalitions, how to articulate the issues that they feel are important, even if those aren't entertaining to the people. And part of our struggle is to step out of our roles as the watchers of The Daily Show and Sam Bee and all those arguments on CNN where people are yelling at one another and recognize that's not governance. That's that self-government, that's entertainment. And anytime we're watching that, we're not a public, we're an audience. And an audience just wants to watch the show. They don't want to create self, they don't want to create the republic. So that's part of, again, it sort of redounds to individuals. I don't want to idealize people on the left. I think you could effectively be a demagogue on the left. And it would mean that you would essentially say, let's go kill wealthy people. Let's go after the castles. Let's go murder the Koch brothers. Or let's go make their lives as difficult as possible. But constitutionally, I don't feel that's what people who are interested in social electoral justice are gonna do. Do you see what I mean? They're burdened by having a function in conscience. If you think it's all through. It's probably fine if it does fall, because, I mean. And this is what Richard Hofstadter calls the paranoid style in American politics. He wrote about this in 1964. Oftentimes what you hear in the sort of extreme, most vocal parts of the writing, it filters into the mainstream media is a kind of nihilism that says it's all going to shit. Let's bring it down. Let's burn the fucker down. Let's have this sort of orgy of destructive, aggressive, masculine id that just brings the whole thing tumbling down. And you know, there is something seductive. We all get sucked into that, right? We all get sucked into the stories about palace intrigue, about how despicable this or that administration official is and the president, whatever. And it's irrelevant. What matters is, how are the levers of government being used? This is what I think Jane I'm sure struggles with all the time, is what's actually happening to NASA? What's happening to the EPA? What regulatory bodies are being deracinated, right? In front of our eyes. What's happening in the department of education? Why is it becoming more difficult for educational opportunity to thrive? Dot, dot, dot. So people, political actors of good faith are interested in the mechanisms of governance, not being an entertainer. Not sort of showing you America as a horror movie. And that's never gonna be as you know, it's never gonna be as viscerally interesting to talk about that stuff. But it actually will save the country. Yeah. One more, one more question. Yeah. I mean, I was an activist in the 60s and Go and Tell Pro and the CIA and the FBI had the season of its adversaries. And now I find myself really admiring. I mean, America can think about that. Right, right, yeah. So talk about the deep state. Who's telling that story? What does it mean for us? Yeah, I think it's such an interesting, sort of turn. So let me start by saying a quick thing about Watergate. The first bad story, well, yeah. I mean, it sounds like a weird segue, but I think I'm gonna take the long way as it's my custom, but I want it, it's a great question. The story that we, is the received wisdom about Watergate is that power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely, and that's what Watergate shows us, is that there was this corrupt president who got power man and turned the Oval Office into basically a criminal espionage operation. That is true that that happened, but the real story of Watergate is a story about a shared sense of idealism because everybody recognized that it was unacceptable to have a criminal in the Oval Office. And I mean everybody. Oh, here's, here's what I mean, here's what I mean. I don't mean like every single person. I mean that the media recognized that it was a problem and wrote dogged investigative work. Congressional committees were initiated that took seriously the expanding sense of how much Nixon had done, what he knew and when he knew it, right? And ultimately, the people, including the Republican Party, recognized it is unacceptable. Now they only did that when Nixon's approval ratings were in the mid-20s. But the point is that his public approval ratings got that low because people were sufficiently idealistic. They were sufficiently affronted at the idea that our leader would be corrupt and would commit crimes and lie about those crimes and try to cover them up. That is a story that's really about a shared idealism that we believe that we are entitled to better from our elected officials and our public servants. And the outgrowth of Watergate was a raft of reforms in which dark money was eliminated, campaign finance reform, there were all executive power was limited. All of these measures, real discernible reforms were passed to say, let's not let that ever happen again. And very quietly over the past four decades, without anybody really raising too much of a stink, every single one of those reforms was undone. And when I talk about stories that aren't being told in the mainstream media, that's a story that's not being told. That we have essentially, through a series of court decisions and very carefully constructed legislative efforts, we have undone all of the good regulation that tried to curb the executive power in this country and try to get money out of politics. Where we find ourselves now is in a state where the people who we used to think of as the bad actors who were spying on Martin Luther King, right? The FBI or overthrowing democratically elected foreign governments, Ainday and Chile or whatever the CIA, those people are now the upholders of the rule of law against a party that has essentially said, well, we're gonna sort of not make too much noise because we don't wanna be primaried. And even if this guy doesn't believe in the rule of law or even understand what it is, if he really wants to be a king or an autocrat, we're not gonna oppose him because that would mean that we would get primaried and we would lose our own power. They've chosen their own interests over the interests of the country, right? There isn't that same core of idealism that allowed a significant portion of the population, including Republicans to say, I'm not okay with this person, even if they're of my party. And I watched Nixon resign. I write about it at the beginning of the book. I was in Mendocino with my parents. I was about eight years old and or maybe younger than that. And we watched it because there was no TV up there. We watched it in the home of a retired Marine who had been a loyal Nixon voter. He had a crew cut, I remember him. He was like, boom. And he was devastated and betrayed and furious that Nixon had proved to be such a despicable actor, political actor. Unfortunately, through forces that I try to explain in this book without yelling, we are not in the same place as we were back then. Some of our shared communal sense of idealism about how political actors should behave has been chipped away at. And our standards, our kind of basic moral standards have been chipped away at. And that leaves us in a circumstance where people who we were understandably suspicious of because of the tremendous power they held and the way that power was exercised. I think now of Obama, the surveillance that he enabled, the drone strikes and all the rest of it, right? Any time people have power, it is the job of the press and the people to be their oversight. They work for us, right? A lot of that understandable skepticism about those folks who are sort of maintaining the rule of law and sometimes abusing it, those people have become a kind of last link. I hope they're not the last link. I hope the democratic process will help us restore order. But in this current environment, they seem to be a kind of last line of defense because ultimately what they're trying to do is root out corruption and crime. I think that's what the FBI is mostly up to. And they truly believe in law and order, not as an electoral pitch to vilify or demonize vulnerable communities, people of color, dot, dot, dot. They truly believe if you commit a crime, justice is blind. You will be held to account. And so I share that same sense that they are sort of a protective sheath. About the deep state, the deep state is one of a number of kind of paranoid fantasies that basically is a product of this paranoid style in American politics that says there is always something out there that you don't know about that could kill you, that could rob you, that they're not just coming for your guns, although they're coming for those. They're not just coming for your religion, though they're also coming for that. They're coming for your way of life and they're also, by the way, coming for your grandmother. That paranoid style in American politics has always been with us. I try to trace the history quickly in the book. And the deep state is yet just a new iteration of a very old tradition in American politics, which is if you're in pursuit of raw power, one way to grab it is by really sort of praying on people's pathological inner lives, a manner and style of thought that is perpetually aggrieved and willing to buy into a story, even if it's patently fraudulent because it quote unquote feels true, right? It's satisfying to a certain sense that, and we walk around with this, all of us, are innate sense that we're walking around and there's no justice. That person just cut me off. They didn't even use their signal. We think we're somehow separate from it, but if I had all of you in traffic, we would see who you really are, if you know what I mean, right? The deep state and those fantasies are really just the perpetual feeling of people being stuck in traffic and aggrieved and willing to buy into a story in which there's an active plot to keep them. You guys have been in traffic. You know that place you get to. Never, good for you, why'd you buy it? But you know you do reach that place where you're like, well, I'm gonna switch lanes because I'm an American and I wanna get ahead. And then suddenly that lane slows down and then you switch lanes again and that lane you're like, wait a second, there's a plot here. Everybody is on their phones to block me in my progress. I think that's sort of the deep state brought to the level of traffic. I wanna make sure there's time for people who want Steve to sign their books, to have them signed. Obviously, big thanks to Bearpond for hosting this conversation. And hopefully spur it on. I'm here sharing the thought of it.