 Good afternoon. I'm Michael Barr, Dean of the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy at the University of Michigan. It is a pleasure to welcome all of you to policy talks at the Ford School, featuring Barton Gelman. Today's event is part of an ongoing series hosted by the Ford School in partnership with Wallace House and Democracy and Debate. The series is called Democracy in Crisis, Views from the Press. This series, which will continue into the fall, features award-winning journalists and their insights into the forces threatening our country's democratic systems. It also explores the role of the press in upholding democratic institutions at a time of demagogic attacks on the media and dramatic shifts in media ownership and independence. We hope that you will join us for additional events in the series, featuring Sarah Kenzior on March 31 virtually and Ann Applebaum here on campus at the Michigan League on April 4th. In addition to our partners in Wallace House and Democracy and Debate, I also want to thank the Gerald R. Ford Library and Museum, the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Foundation, and the Detroit Public Television for their support of this event and the overall series. Today, we welcome Barton Gelman, a staff writer at the Atlantic and best-selling author. Before joining the Atlantic, Gelman spent 21 years at the Washington Post, where he served tours as legal, diplomatic, military, and Middle East correspondent. Gelman anchored the team that won the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service for coverage of the National Security Agency and Edward Snowden. And he was previously awarded the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for national reporting for a series on Vice President Dick Cheney. In 2002, he was a member of the team that won the Pulitzer Prize for national reporting for coverage of the 9-11 attacks and their aftermath. His recent work in the Atlantic provides timely and important insights into our country's democratic insecurity and the threat of autocracy. The conversation will be moderated by my colleague Barbara McQuade, a professor at the University of Michigan Law School and a former U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Michigan. A regular contributor to MSNBC and NBC News, Professor McQuade has been recognized as one of Detroit's most influential women. A reminder that there will be time at the end of the conversation for questions and encourage you to engage and ask questions in the YouTube chat box or tweet your questions to hashtag policy talks. With that, I ask you to please join me in welcoming Professor Barbara McQuade and today's guest speaker, Barton Gelman. Good afternoon, everybody. Thank you, Dean Barr. I want to thank Captain Carver for inviting me to host this talk and Bart Gelman. Thank you so much for being here. We're just thrilled to have you. The work that you've been doing to write about democracy has been incredible. And what a wonderful series. I really have to compliment you, Dean Barr over at the Ford School there across the parking lot from us at the law school. We've had so many wonderful speakers coming in, focusing on such critical issues at the moment. So I'm really delighted to be able to participate. I often come over as an audience member. And so today I'm really delighted to be able to participate in the conversation. I also want to thank everybody who's joining today to listen in. You know, hands off to you. A democracy depends on informed electorate and talks like this one can really help you to educate, to engage and to empower our citizens. And so I thank you in light of all the things that all of you could be doing with your time that you're taking time to learn more about about these critical issues. So, Bart, first, let me just say thank you for joining us. It's my pleasure. I want to talk. I had a chance to read some of your pieces from the Atlantic, which are not only really insightful, but also really well written. If people haven't had a chance to see some of his pieces on democracy, Bart's not just a really insightful analyst. He's a really great lyrical writer. I really enjoyed reading your writing. You've written a number of interesting pieces about the threats to democracy in America. And in one, you wrote that in the last election, Donald Trump attempted, you use this word, democracy, which I think is a really interesting word. Andy had help. You go on to say the victims survived, but suffered grievous wounds. American democracy now faces a long convalescence in an environment of ongoing attacks. Trump has not exhausted his malignant powers and co conspirators remain at large. I want to ask you some questions about about that passage in particular. So what do you mean by democracy? Well, what I mean is turning the results of a free and bare election upside down. He tried. This is an extraordinary thing to have to say, or even to imagine, but he tried to appoint himself the winner of an election when he lost it. He tried to unseat the electorate and tried to overthrow the lawful government of the United States. It was an extraordinary thing for anyone to do, but alone as sitting president at the time. And when you refer to grievous wounds that America has suffered as a result, what are some of the grievance, grievous wounds that you're referring to? Well, I think you have to start off by looking at how presidential elections are decided. We know that everybody gets to vote. And we know the votes are tied it up. And each state then appoints electors that reflect the outcome of those votes in the state and so forth. But there is not actually any single referee, any single authority that rules that the election is over. So if it's not as though you're at a football game, right? And the losing coach says, we didn't lose. We won. That was cheating. I mean, there is a chief official at the game to say, games over, put your bellyache and you lost. You don't have that in our system. We have a series of limited jurisdiction bodies that decide individual questions along the way. The way you know who won the election in the past was that the loser conceded defeat even in the 2000 election when the Bush v. Gore case reached the Supreme Court. You might think the Supreme Court decided the election because it halted the recount in Florida and left a status quo in which George Bush had more electors. But Gore was not out of options. This still had to go to Congress for the electoral count. And as Vice President, he was going to preside over that count. And there were legal arguments left to be made about who were the lawful electors in Florida. And so the election didn't end with the Supreme Court case. The election ended the next day when Al Gore came out and said, I will respect the decision of the court. And I concede that George Bush will be our next president and I wish him the best. And, you know, we'll get him next time. That concession speech had an instrumental power there as it has in almost every election in modern times. When Trump refused to concede when he said I won, there wasn't anybody to tell him that he didn't be lost. There wasn't any single authority that could tell him otherwise. But he's done, you see, he has eroded the norms and the power of the many lesser authorities that decide our elections, the whole civic structure of the Constitution. Yeah, so much of our constitutional structure and our way of running government really depends on people acting in good faith and people following some of these norms without having, you know, a hammer that comes down. And as you say, it declares who is officially the winner for once and for all. Those are the attacks that were sustained on and before January 6, you also wrote that you see ongoing attacks on American democracy. What do you see as some of the ongoing attacks on American democracy? Well, so I mean, the first ongoing attack is that Donald Trump personally continues to speak of almost nothing else but the 2020 election and his alleged victory. He is trying to establish a fact that is in conflict with all the evidence. He is trying to persuade his supporters and he has persuaded many of them that Joe Biden is not a legitimate president. That the constitutional entities that have the job of deciding the winner are corrupt and can't be trusted, but only Trump can be trusted. He has had the active and passive consent of a large majority of the Republican Party in terms of its elected officials in creating this false history. And because of that, and because so much of their base believes it, they are chipping away at the institutions that decide elections. In the future, so they're trying to change the rules of elections in many states. They're changing voter eligibility and voting procedures and a whole lot of other things that are designed to diminish the number of votes that go to the other team. And most crucially, they are subverting the institutions that count the votes. So it's as though this fictional coach in the football game has lost the game and said all my fans, everyone go out and get jobs as referees when you all become empires in the NFL. And you'll know how to call the game next time we have one. You'll know how to show that I actually did score a touchdown and so on. It's trying to take over another way to analogize it would be trying to take over the judiciary. Trying to take the officials whose job it is to decide what the facts are and corrupt them by filling them with people who take the position that black is white and that Trump actually won the election that he lost. So it sounds like the threats are still out there is you know I hear some people say well the lesson from January 6 is that democracy held. There was this attack physical and through the levers of power and and it held it was defeated. Do you think that's the right lesson from January 6 or do you think instead this was like the the warning alarms code read time to take dire action. Well, I am happy to celebrate the fact that that that the wall tell the guardrail tell the system defended itself, but it was a very close run thing. And what's happened since then is that Trump and many many Republican elected officials and operatives have looked back systematically at what happened in 2020. And located all the obstacles that prevented Trump from declaring himself to be reelected. And they're systematically going around and trying to uproot those obstacles. So let's take, for example, the Secretary of State of Georgia, Brad Raffensperger, who conducted three different counts of the votes in Georgia. Joe Biden won and Raffensperger did what any lawful Secretary of State should do and he said yes I can see that the votes went to Biden therefore I'm going to certify that Biden has won our state. We know that notoriously Donald Trump called him up and tried to induce him to quote unquote find 11,780 votes for Trump that weren't there. So that Trump would actually be the victor. He threatened him, he cajoled him. He refused to accept the facts that Raffensperger gave him. And he put all the pressure of President of the United States been possibly put on a fellow Republican and Raffensperger held. It is a contingent fact that Georgia happened to have a Republican Secretary of State who could withstand that kind of pressure. And what they're trying to do now is to erase that fact. So Trump has recruited and endorsed a candidate to run against Raffensperger and also to run against the governor who likewise refused to decertify the results of the state election. So he's rounded up people and endorsed those people to defeat the officials who did their jobs. Meanwhile, the Georgia legislature has passed a number of new voting restrictions that are based on that are justified by the fictitious irregularities of the 2020 election, which didn't happen. And just in case Raffensperger is re-elected, they have passed a new law in Georgia that says the Secretary of State no longer sits as a voting member of the state board of elections. So the next time that Georgia has to certify an election, Raffensperger won't get a vote even if he is re-elected. And for good nature, the state legislature run by Republicans has also given itself the power for the first time to fire the chairs of the county election boards if they don't like the job they're doing. So if you have Republicans saying, Trump really won last time, notwithstanding all the evidence, and we're going to be in charge of counting next time, then you've got a big problem. Yeah, one of the things that's been remarkable to me is we've had a few exceptions like Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzener, Mitt Romney and a handful of others who were willing to call this out for what it was that this is fraud. It is what one judge described in suspended Rudy Giuliani's law license had not a scintilla of evidence to support that the election was stolen. And yet there are so many elected officials who are going along with all of this. Is it just naked ambition? Is it raw political power? Do they truly believe what they're saying? What causes these elected officials to continue to persist in this idea that the election was stolen? I believe that there are a lot of Trump supporters who have heard the former president and have heard many members of the Republican elites say the election was stolen. They've seen it amplified in social media and on Fox News and in the alternative communications environment that they live in. And I think they've come to believe that the election was stolen. If you were to give truth serum to Republican elected officials at the national level, probably at the state level as well, you would find the vast majority of them would admit that Joe Biden won the election, would admit that there was no large-scale fraud, that there are no magic votes for Trump that should have been counted. That the crazy, crazy nut-bag theories that the president and his people put forward on why the election was no good are invalid. So that's what the Republican elected officials truly believe. Why they don't say so is partly fear. They see what's happened to Liz Cheney. She was one of the top members of the Republican hierarchy in the House. She had plausible ambitions to be Speaker of the House one day. She lost her position in the party. She's been expelled from her state party. She's been primary with people raising lots of money to expunge her from the House. And she has paid a huge price. So there are Republicans who are afraid of Trump and afraid of his base. And then there are pure opportunists who basically don't think the truth matters all that much one way or the other. And they'll do what is good for them. But then there are some who really are deeply ambitious and see this sort of seething angry Trump base as a power center for themselves in the future. That they can marshal the intense emotional political support that has stood behind Trump and use it for themselves. One of the things you mentioned there is how social media and disinformation have been used in the pursuit of this democracy. You know, you put people in a number of different categories. Those who are ambitious and know they know this is all alive but they don't care. They care about their personal ambition. They care about their political agenda for the country. But there are those I think who get their information as you said from far right-wing news outlets who truly believe this stuff. Because they read about it on social media. They saw a Facebook post or whatever it is. You know, there are all these videos making the rounds on social media like here's a truck delivering fake ballots in Atlanta or Detroit or wherever it was. How can we counter that disinformation that is occurring online and is convincing so many people including some of the January 6th defendants that a lie was true. You know, that's a really big and important question and I wish I had a great answer for you. I see my job as a journalist as reporting and writing for everyone. I am looking to address a reader of good faith who wants to know what's true. And it's prepared to follow me as I display my evidence. So I try to show my work. I try to take seriously the things that people tell me and investigate whether they're true. I look for cooperation and that's the old school sort of mainstream journalistic answer and that's where you get fact checkers. For example, there are great ones doing fact checking work for the Washington Post in the New York Times and CNN. And none of that stuff touches the true believers on Trump's side. And there are strong incentives for people to lie to large populations of political readers and viewers for profit and for political ends. And it seems to be quite effective. I spent a lot of time, many, many hours over a period of about a month with this one firefighter in New York who believed that the election had been stolen. And I said, tell me why you believe that? I want to let's explore it together. And he was gained to kind of go through that exercise and to take a hard look at the evidence. And he gave me one statistic and I traced that back to its first publication on the web and showed how it started with a tweet that was either misleading or just ignorant. It was comparing apples and oranges. And I showed what the apples were and what the oranges were. Here's the initial source, here's the original source of the election data. And this thing you think happened, cannot happen, just look how the numbers line up. And he just said, well, the election was stolen, so there must be something else. So we moved on to another subject. And I traced that one with it and we did it over and over again. And he was prepared to accept that some of his details might not be right, but there was such an abundance of evidence in the world he lived in. It was just such an overwhelming amount of data proving that the election was stolen. There were so many stories told about it, so many things that purported to be videos of something nefarious that it just wasn't possible that you could rebut all of it. It was obvious they must be true. It was a firefighter saying where there's smoke there's fire. And I couldn't touch it. I couldn't, I couldn't fudge it at all. And I found that strangely disfiguring. Yeah, this, you know, use of social media and other things is such a powerful force as we learned from the Facebook whistleblower. It isn't necessarily the content but the algorithms that are in there that the things that get the most negative and powerful reaction are the things that come to the top of your feed. And so in that way that the disinformation or the outrageous information is the one that makes the rounds the fastest and that likely contributes to it. So you mentioned that, you know, there are certainly people with something to gain from this idea that the election was stolen. Donald Trump himself is inner circle, other political candidates who ride his coattails. But I wonder to what extent as we see, you know, war raging in Ukraine and Russia engaging in propaganda there about, you know, like why they're invading Ukraine. It's because they have to denazify Ukraine, you know, as bizarre as that sounds, you know, and the people there want to be liberated, you know, telling their people all kinds of falsehoods to support the war. I know Robert Mueller indicted some Russian intelligence officers in the Internet Research Agency for interfering in the 2016 election with social media propaganda campaigns by posing as like the Tennessee GOP. And some group called black divists and other things and saying outrageous things to generate opposition from the other side. Do you think that there was any either Russian or other involvement by any other hostile foreign adversary in fueling this campaign about the lie that the election was stolen? We've seen some evidence that the GRU, the Russian military intelligence organization in particular, along with the FSB, the old KGB have amplified claims about a stolen election and amplified claims of irregularities. They have amplified messages that you can't trust the system. I mean, that's the most fundamental objective of all for the Russian propaganda is to tear down confidence in the institutions of this country, to tear down the idea that we actually are a democracy that is governed by the will of the people. And so we saw that in 2020, it was not apparently as wide-ranging a campaign or as effective from what I can tell, but it was still there. And you're seeing now an odd symmetry in which there are important figures on the American political right who are echoing and propagating Putin's message about Ukraine and Putin's message about what Russian forces are doing in Ukraine. And then you have Russian state television putting up clips from Fox News to validate its own propaganda message to its people. And so there's been a kind of synchronizing abuse there and a mutual back scratch that you could say. Do you have any theories as to why there are some on the right in this country who admire Vladimir Putin? I mean, he's a hostile foreign adversary. He is most certainly not acting in the best interests of the United States. And yet we had Donald Trump call him a savvy genius, his admiration for Vladimir Putin goes back many years. But we are seeing, you know, this admiration from the far right. What do you think drives that? Well, Trump personally is clearly on the record as being an admirer of very strong foreign leaders who are not beholden to democratic institutions or to opposition forces or even to their own voters. And so you have, I mean, he loved the leaders of Poland and Hungary and Turkey and Russia and North Korea. He literally said that he and Kim had a love affair in North Korea. But he admires dictators and you will virtually never see a work of criticism from him about people like Putin. And you will see a great many words of praise. And I think Trump sees himself in that. As for why people on the right are going for the Russian propaganda when for so many decades, one of the main litmus tests for being a Republican was to be anti-Soviet and anti-Russian and strong underpins and inclined to skepticism at desk about Russian intentions. First of all, I think they are well aware that Russia tried to help Trump in the 2016 election and interceded strongly on his behalf. Some of them believe and many of many more of them state that Ukraine intervened on the side of Hillary Clinton, which is not true, didn't happen. But it's part of the of the fantastical counter story that Republicans tell about the 2016 election in terms of foreign interference. So they are inclined to believe that that the Ukrainian government is corrupt and so on. I really don't get the appeal of it and that this is actually still controversial inside the Republican Party. There are plenty of Republicans who still stand up for the traditional anti-Russian point of view who still believe that Putin is a dictator who's trying to invade and impose his will on a neighboring country and are actually backing Joe Biden's policy on Ukraine. You're seeing one of the few open splits in the Republican Party today is happening over Ukraine. Yeah, it's it's been very interesting and very difficult to to comprehend I think how members of any party are speaking favorably of Vladimir Putin. I want to focus back on things in this country. You know, we have we enjoy all of these freedoms in our country and it seems that people have been pushing most of these constitutional rights to extreme positions. We've seen this this real expansion of gun raids for people, not just advocating for gun rights, but almost fetishizing guns. You know, we see these members of Congress posing in their holiday card with everybody in the family holding an assault weapon, glorifying guns in a country that has so much gun violence. We see the same with free speech rights and people talking about, you know, you can't you can't constrain me from saying things that might be inciting like we're going to fight trial by combat and we're going to go down and fight for our rights or else we won't have a country anymore. We're seeing a rise in militia groups and threats to public officials. We're seeing people defying masking mandates and vaccine requirements. And it reminds me of a quote from Justice Robert Jackson, who wrote in the 1940s in a riot incitement case that he said words along the lines of unless we temper our views of the Constitution with some practical wisdom, we will convert the bill of rights into a suicide pact. I kind of feel like that's the path we're on these days. How do we prevent these extremists from using our rights against us to commit democracy. Yeah, well that's a really interesting phenomenon you're talking about here. And I'm not actually a huge admirer of the opinion that gave rise to that suicide pact. And I'm not going to go into the notation you just made because it was, it was an opinion that justified infringing of constitutional right because the outcome would be bad and I'm closer to an absolutist about some constitutional rights that I am a fan of that kind of compromise. Yeah, I mean, it's culture, it's a question of culture, it's a question of political culture and civic virtue, you know, either you have a population that fundamentally believes that we all ought to try to get along that we take turns in power based on the outcomes of elections that people ought to do what the others as they would like to be done to that that then a society in which everyone is just asserting a right and screaming towards the maximum possible interpretation is going to be a kind of an unpleasant place to live. I think the idea that gun rights are the foundational right for all other rights in the Constitution is has got a lot of currency among the gun rights supporters. The idea that it's the only guarantor of liberty is that everybody has guns because of the government turns against the people and the people could rise up to feed the government with their guns. This strikes me as being a curious model for self government. I don't believe that that is in fact what founders had in mind. But it leads, it does lead to this kind of extremism where you know the gun lobby wants, let's bring more guns into schools where we need more guns as we need them among school children. Let's arm the teachers. We need more guns and bars. So let's have open carry and cocktail and so on. It sounds like someone in a contest to make up the most outlandish scenario they can and try to make it law. But yeah, I think what we're missing is a political culture that tempers everyone grabbing at the rights that they favor. Yeah, you know, I worry that in our multicultural pluralistic society there are some who don't want to share with with others. You know, I think part of this make America great again movement is about going back to the days, the good old days when women knew their place, minorities knew their place. And white men, Christian white men were on top. You know, in Charlottesville at the unite the right rally, we heard white men chanting, you will not replace us. Which seems to reflect a fear that Jews and racial minorities are going to replace white men in this country. You know, I've always viewed the rising tide lifts all boats. But it seems that there are others who view the world as a finite resources and if I give more power to other groups than I'm losing power and that's intolerable. And you noted in some of your writing that one interesting aspect of the January 6 attack on the Capitol is that most of the perpetrators there were middle age middle class white men, including law enforcement officers and military members. Do you see a connection between what happened in Charlottesville and what happened on January 6 and how does that bode for our future. There is connection. It is not that the January 6 protesters by and large were openly racist. There were some there who were there were there were neo Nazis, and there were people with contemptible slogans about the Holocaust, and so on. And, you know, there was the Confederate flag, and there was a lot of calling capital police officers the N word. So there was some open racism and some open anti-Semitism. But there was a lot of based on the political science data is that is that the people who came to that protest on January 6, who took part in that rebellion were disproportionately from counties in which the share of white population was on the decline. Now, the Census Bureau has projected that in around 2045, this country for the first time will be majority minority. That is to say, white people will no longer begin absolute majority of citizens of this country, and they will become instead the largest minority. And that is an interesting fact. It is a fact to be celebrated by some people. And it is a fact that fills many white people with dread. And where where the white population is on the decline, there is an inclination to believe that there is a loss of status and power. And that the country is no longer ours. And if you take national polls, as they've done at the University of Chicago, and find the group of people who believe that one, that Biden is an illegitimate president and two, violence is justified to restore Trump to power. You, you come up with about 20 million people in this country who can meet that. And the vast majority of them also agree with the idea that there is a great replacement going on in which there is a conspiracy to replace white people and white Christian people. With black and brown people and the conspiracy is most often attributed to Jews. And that that fear and loathing was a significant driver of the anger on January 6. Yeah, and you know, it's it's unfortunate, but there are politicians who will stoke those kinds of divisions for their own political advantage, building blocks of people. You know, for example, if you have poor whites who are not aligned with minorities where they might otherwise find economic commonalities, but keep them apart by driving a racial wedge between them, then you can keep them on your side of the ledger, which is, you know, one cynical view of what motivates some of the so called leadership by people who want to push for those things. Well, why don't we move on to some audience questions. We have got a number of questions that have come in. And if any of you have any additional questions, please feel free to submit them in the chat. And we'll, we'll ask them of of Bart. So first question for you, Bart is this, you don't have to defend your profession a little bit with this one. The audience member asked, it felt like mainstream media outlets played an active role in helping Donald Trump gaslight the country. For instance, with extensive live coverage of his rallies and White House daily press briefings during code where lies were spread, or daily press briefings like the size of his inauguration crowd. Is this just a case of giving the public what it wants, or is there more to it. Well, that's an interesting criticism. It is a complicated answer, I think. For one thing, I mean, sometimes people criticize mainstream media for giving Trump a platform. Well, let's just unpack that he's the president of the United States, or he was for four years. He has the presidency as a platform. Anything that the president says or does traditionally is understood to be news. And when the president says or does extraordinary things, as Trump did all the time, he said, while things that is by the definition of mainstream news that is news, that is something you need to know about. It would be strange and not a better world, in my opinion, if somehow there were a very effective conspiracy by the media, not to let Trump talk. And you never knew that he was threatening to nuke somebody or making extraordinary claims or all the other wild things that he did. We have to cover him. We have to let him say what he wants to say. I think that we were slow to push back hard enough on the lies. It is typically something that journalists are very, very reluctant to do is to say that someone's lying, because that implies a knowledge of the inside of their head. You can only lie if you are knowing the lie, if you are knowingly telling falsehood. How do we know that they know? And so journalists typically will dance around that question, although in Trump's case there are plenty of cases in which you do have evidence of life. And the mainstream press started saying so. There is a criticism of the press as having a view from nowhere in which all facts are in contention. And you just have to report that he said it was sunrise and she said there's no such thing as a sun. And you don't have to distinguish between them. In fact, you do have to distinguish. There are questions of fact and the journalist can resolve them. The journalist should. And not just quote someone as saying black is white and leave the question open for the reader. So we had to give Trump the attention of the craves because the American people elected it. What we didn't have to do was let him get away with telling spectacular lies and not pushing back hard on behalf of the truth. In other words, I think journalists are allowed to be on the side of the truth. That's their business. All right. Very good acquittal of your profession part. Question about what can be done now to prevent these threats from truly destroying our democracy? I guess, you know, are the things big picture that we can do as a country or are there other things that each of us can do as individuals to help fight back about this? You know, I think most of us want to see our democracy preserved and don't like to see these threats to it and don't want to see a successful democracy. What are some things that we can do to prevent or counter these efforts? Well, I'll start off by saying what I can do, what I could do is call attention to it. I have a big megaphone because I write in the Atlantic, and if I write an interesting piece, then sometimes I'll get invited to a prestigious forum like the University of Michigan to talk about it and talk to more people about it. I make it on television or podcasts or radio and that has happened with my democracy coverage. And what I'm trying to say is, hey, everybody, this is a big deal. This is a big problem. The life of our democracy is on the line and we could actually lose it. So from a citizen's point of view, the first thing to do is to be willing to suspend your disbelief because I think that we grow up with an understanding that we come from a very special country that we have lived at our constitutional democracy for well over 200 years and that we can take it for granted and that if someone is saying democracy at risk, it sounds like hype. And I'm saying if you look at the facts on the ground, it really is at risk. So first of all, being willing to look at that candidly and understand what the facts are and then look at where it's happening. A lot of it is happening at a very local level. So there are precinct and county officials whose job it is to make a fair count of the vote on election day or whose job it is to fairly register people who want to register to vote and not look for excuses to throw away their registration. These were traditionally nonpartisan jobs and Trump Republicans are making extensive efforts to take over these jobs. I mean, Steve Bannon says on his War Room podcast, we're going to take over the election boards and they're going to fill them with partisans who believe that the last election was stolen or at least profess to believe the last election was stolen. And who knows what they'll give themselves permission to do in order to make good on that. But if you have someone who believes the earth is flat and wants to teach your kids geography at school, then you probably want to find a way to stop that. So people who care about democracy have to care about their local election boards and find out what's happening on those and find out how to volunteer to be on them or to support someone who wants to be on them. That's one great practical thing that ordinary people can do right away. Yeah, I worry about, and certainly I hope some of the people who are listening here are people who are engaged and want to be part of the solution. And I think there are things, as you just said, that all of us can do to be helpful. I worry that there are people, you know, maybe in some of these states that are in play, places that are red states where people just don't have time to pay attention to these things. They're busy. They're busy with their lives. They're busy doing things. And so from right beneath their noses, their legislatures are doing things like you described in Georgia, where they're enacting laws that allows the legislature, for example, to swap out its own choice for the voted choices of the electors. Are there ways we can expose those kinds of things and generate the kind of outrage that seems like it should already be there, but somehow isn't. Is there a way that we can help amplify the message, the kinds of things that you're talking about in the Atlantic? Somebody said, I'm trying to remember who it might have been Lenin, but someone should correct me, that you may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you. And the same is true of politics. You are not outside the world in which politics takes place, and politics will affect your life. And if we lose the institutions that allow us to govern ourselves and allow us to oppose the government in power, then we've lost something big. And it'll come knocking on your door one day in a way that affects you very much personally. I don't know how to get people to care about something they don't care about. All I can do is say what's happening. Yeah, well, maybe we'll take one more question here, and I think people want to end on a good note perhaps. Is there any reason to be optimistic? Are there good things that we should look to that can give us optimism that our country remains strong and that with some help perhaps we can preserve our democracy? Yeah, I think that this country is filled with well-meaning people who want to do the right thing and who love their country and love their families and love the idea of America at its best. And I don't in my heart really believe that Trump will succeed in reversing the outcome of an election of actually overturning it. Now at this time it didn't happen in 2020 and somehow I believe we will get through 2024 without it happening. I don't know exactly how because there are a lot of indications of risk, but I believe that somehow we will rise to the occasion and maintain our democratic traditions in this country. I think everybody has to just pay attention and find a way to get involved. Yeah, you know there's a quote that says something along the lines of the mark of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice. I always love that quote, but I have to say that in recent years I have turned against it a little bit because I think it suggests that it's self-executing, that justice will be there if we just wait long enough. And in fact I think quite the opposite is true. I think it only gets there if we push it there. And that you know this invasion of Ukraine by Vladimir Putin and the efforts by Donald Trump to subvert the election I think are great reminders that there are forces out there that do not want justice. They want power or glory or money or whatever it is and they're willing to sacrifice justice to get what they want. And so I think it's incumbent on all of us to take part in bending that arc of justice. I don't know if you have any thoughts on that part. Well I think you've got it exactly right. I mean when Martin Luther King said that he didn't sit back and wait for the arc to bend toward justice. He devoted his life and risked death and was martyred for the cause of forcing events of protesting and organizing and spending every waking hour actually. Trying to push the system one degree and one degree and one degree closer to a time when there would be equal civil rights for all. He did not think that the moral universe was bending all by itself. He believed in significant exertions toward that end and we can do a lot worse than that example. Well we've got two minutes till close Bart and I'll close it at five but I'm wondering if you just have any maybe closing remarks you want to share with our audience. Either warnings to heed or hope for optimism. We'll take whichever you care to share with us. Well we've covered the ground pretty well. I would actually be interested in talking with you a little bit about drawing on your experience at the wall. Because there are a lot of people who think that the solution to any of these problems is just whatever is legal that the judiciary will resolve any of these disputes about who won the election. And I wonder if you think the courts are a good place to adjudicate the brotherhood of our democracy. Well I think like all of the institutions in our government they have a role but they also have some limitations so I don't know if they can solve every problem. You know for example there has been some speculation that the Attorney General Merrick Garland and the Department of Justice are not investigating Donald Trump for his role in attempting to defraud the American people over the election. I like to believe that there is such an investigation underway you know it's Department of Justice policy to neither confirm nor deny the existence of an investigation. And Merrick Garland has also said that he follows those norms especially during times that are extraordinary. He is vowed to hold accountable anyone who attacked our democracy at any level whether they were present at the Capitol or not on January 6. I think there is a valid legal theory to charge Donald Trump and others with a conspiracy to defraud the United States by obstructing the vote on January 6. It does not require a conspiracy with the violent protesters but simply a conspiracy to pressure Mike Pence to abuse his power as vice president by refusing to certify the election results. The key to any of these things is proving knowledge and intent which means that Donald Trump had to know that he didn't win the election. I think that there is a mounting body of evidence that that is true but I think that's the question that the Justice Department will have to resolve that they can prove that beyond a reasonable doubt to a unanimous jury of 12 people. And I like to think that they're working on that. Well, we are out of time so I'll, I'll, any last word on that part. It would require not only that they'd be really good at keeping a secret to believe this but also that they could be running a grand jury with witnesses not saying anything. How is it we haven't heard from witnesses. I ran hundreds of grand jury investigations that nobody ever heard from only if you are calling controversial witnesses would I expect you to hear from them. Grand jury secrecy rules if you're calling people who are perhaps Mike Pence is in our circle they don't want to talk about that. So, I agree with you I don't think they've subpoenaed Steve Bannon or Ivanka Trump I think they go kicking and screaming, but it may be that they haven't gotten to that stage yet because they want to keep it covert. Well, how about you and I will keep talking about this because I think that's really interesting. We'll find out one of these days, but we are out of time so Bart I want to thank you so much for sharing your time and thoughts with us. And also for your incredible writing. I really enjoyed reading what you have written. Not only from a insight perspective but just also just lyrically your writing is amazing. And I really commend to all of you to read his work in the Atlantic, it will make you think, and you'll enjoy reading it out to boot. So thank you for joining us today thank you for your time. Thank you to the Ford School. Thank you for this series of talks. Thank you to Wallace House. And thanks to all of you for joining us today. It's so heartening to see that there's so many people who are interested in being engaged in the issues, educating themselves and empowering themselves to make sure that they are active participants in our democracy. Thank you and have a good evening.