 Hi, everyone. Good afternoon and welcome to the 14th episode of informed and engaged today I'm thrilled to have the finest award-winning journalist from Michigan Steve and Steve Henderson and Nolan Finlay Steve and Nolan I first met them about four or five years ago in Detroit when over a what was billed as a whiskey hour they use this as an opportunity to bring together different views of what was happening on the ground in different political perspectives to the major challenges and major opportunities in the city of Detroit this has grown into the Detroit civility project which is a new effort which has allowed Steve and Nolan who bring very different political perspectives but have managed to really have great conversations with each other and to facilitate great conversations among others with different different views and they have facilitated many many conversations over the last year with the Detroit civility project and here we are the day before the first presidential debate and one of the key questions that we're going to talk about today is is the national media getting it right are the polls getting it right both Steve and Nolan are journalists on the ground in a key battleground state in Michigan and they're going to tell us what they're hearing and what is to their their perspective so first let me tell you a little bit about Steve and a little bit about Nolan Steve is a Pulitzer Prize winning former editorial editor of the Detroit Free Press who is the founder and the editor-in-chief of Bridge Detroit which is one of the most exciting new not-for-profit journalism organizations in the country so with Bridge Detroit Bridge Detroit is not only committed to delivering great reporting for the people of Detroit it is committed to informing that reporting by truly listening and really being on the ground and listening to what it is the information the reporting that people in community really need Steve is a very busy person Steve also has morning a morning a morning radio show on WDET and Nolan and Steve as I mentioned they have many projects together including a community affairs show called One Detroit on Detroit Public Television Nolan has been at the Detroit news for more than 40 years and for the last 20 years he has been the editor of the editorial page and one of the most well-read columnists across Michigan so please join me for what is to be a lively a robust but a completely civil conversation about about what is happening in in today's politics in the final weeks of the of the campaign so Nolan let me begin with you so so the national media certainly got it wrong last time so did the polls the polls the most recent polls that I saw today had Joe Biden up by almost 10 points in Michigan Michigan remains a key battleground state does that does the poll findings does that what is being recorded out of Washington in New York is that consistent with what what you're hearing and seeing on the ground well as you mentioned a lot of lot of the national media a lot of folks got it wrong in 2016 including Steve and me so you know we're very cautious I'm very cautious this time about how how to read what's going on Donald Trump should never have won Michigan in 2016 Hillary Clinton should have never won and Donald Trump should not win in 2018 based on what we know about the state its history and presidential elections and everything else but we all saw what happened in 2016 I've been trying to listen more this time and watch things a lot more carefully this time before launching off into prognostication that may not hold up I still think it still feels to me like anything can happen here I don't believe there's a 10-point lead but they're very well could be race also could be tied or Trump could be ahead I mean there is a lot of enthusiasm for the president I wrote Sunday seeing yard signs everywhere giant yard signs I think you mentioned you saw the same thing near your home that may mean a lot may not be much at all because I believe Donald Trump is driving turnout on both sides of the ticket I don't think there's a lot of enthusiasm for Joe Biden in in Michigan in in metro Detroit there was not a whole lot of enthusiasm for Hillary Clinton four years ago but I don't think there's this high as negatives for Biden this time as we saw for Clinton last time and if you look at what happened here in 2018 where Democrats just turned out in droves and took seats they never should have took I mean I don't know that conditions have changed that much in over the last two years in terms of democratic enthusiasm to vote I think what has changed over the last two years is Republican enthusiasm to vote has increased and so I'd be very hesitant to put Michigan in the one column or the other at this point thank you Nolan and just before the the show began Steve we were talking about turnout and as Nolan said the president is driving turnout on both sides of the aisle what has to happen for for Joe Biden to win well you know as Nolan said 2016 was an anomaly in a lot of ways in in Michigan or or at least something we hadn't seen in a really long time or before and there are a couple different dynamics at work one was the the vote in Macomb county which is the sort of northeast suburbs of Detroit which are pretty pretty working class blue collar in a lot of ways and kind of a bellwether for working class and blue collar votes not just in the state but in the country this is the home of the the Reagan Democrats that's where that that phrase was coined in the 1980s as Democrats who crossed over and voted for Ronald Reagan for president we saw them in 2016 after having voted two times for Barack Obama very strongly we saw them switch and vote for for Donald Trump and so that was unexpected was not there was nothing in the polls that said that that was going to happen in the numbers that it did so that had a lot to do with it and then the flip side of that of course is the vote in Detroit where you have you know an overwhelming democratic advantage any Democrat who's going to win the state of Michigan really needs a very strong turnout here in in Detroit and if you get it you're likely you're likely to win in 2016 there were 20,000 fewer votes cast for president in the city of Detroit then there had been in 2012 or 2008 and so the the combination of the under vote in Detroit and the switch of votes in Macomb County delivered a very narrow victory 10,000 votes statewide to Donald Trump you know I think if you're Donald Trump that's a that's going to be a hard trick to repeat I think he probably he he has a good shot to win Macomb County again but probably not as heavily as he did in 2016 but more more importantly the motivation to get voters out in Detroit is just going to be much more much more focus of the democratic side voting has already started here in the city of Detroit because one of the things we did in 2018 in Michigan is start no reason absentee voting you can vote absentee if you just feel like it and that means there are early votes being cast by people who are not showing up on election day the number of people who have gone to these they've got boxes set up around the city to collect ballots the first day that they were open there was just a real crush of people they are now talking about how to make sure that there are there are officials near those those boxes to make sure that they're available to people and that the lines don't get out of control and things like that so early sign is that you're going to have a strong vote in Detroit which which you know Joe Biden absolutely benefits from but but as Nolan said you know anything can happen and and I think this year has taught us all not to not to predict what's what's coming tomorrow right let alone in in 40 days so I would say Joe Biden has a clear advantage that's what you're seeing in the polls but if he can't get voters out the way that he needs to then then he won't win and Jennifer I'd add too that you've always got to be careful with the polls particularly I think this year I mean Kato had a survey out said more than 50% of Americans are afraid to say publicly who they're voting for and that's 77% of Republicans say that so you know you can't get as good as as good a feeling I think as you know journalists we've got to get out there and stop making assumptions about how people are feeling how people voting start actually talking to people I saw a piece moved today on by the AP on the New York Times a tech story that said well this will hurt Donald Trump with blue collar workers blue collar workers won't like this on and on about blue collar workers without ever quoting one and you know I think we might be making some of the same mistakes we made last time into not getting not getting out and doing the legwork and Nolan we've talked about this over the years about the deep cuts at the Detroit news at the free press and when you and I began working as reporters we were out there you know covering meetings we were there at the school board meetings at the city council meetings at the water authority meetings and and how are journalists how are journalists doing local journalists in Michigan at the news how are they doing that kind of reporting when there have been so many cutbacks well the cuts are one thing and then the COVID restrictions are another it's hard to get out and talk to people face to face there's fewer opportunities to meet people where they live and work and interact obviously you know we don't have the resources no one has the resources anymore to staff elections the way we used to where there's a reporter for the Democratic candidate and the Republican candidate and you know we're following both all over the state in every race as a reporter assigned to that race I mean that's you know 70s and 80s that's not the 2000s and 2020s I mean it's been a long time since we've been trying to to stretch fewer people across more beats and more stories so you know they're but you know the technology does help and you know we've made some some tremendous gains in technology and that's mitigated some of that but we're not getting out as far and wide as we used to in terms of talking to talking to the people and in terms of technology one of the really innovative approaches in Detroit of course is outlier media which has played a major role during COVID and really helping capture through text messages and text message exchanges people's questions and and people's concerns and Steve how has bridge Detroit worked with outlier media to tell the stories that come from that way of listening yeah outlier was one of the partners that helped us put together bridge Detroit and since we've launched there's been you know an effort to try to continue that work and figure out how the information they're getting can guide our reporting one of the things that that has been true of course since we launched bridge Detroit is the overwhelming concerns among the traitors about COVID. COVID is a very different animal in this city than it is in lots of other places the number of losses that we've had I mean there's no one in this city who doesn't have somebody that they've lost I know eight people who are dead since March 15th because of COVID and that's a small number compared to a lot of folks and so that has really dominated outliers focus this year and it's dominated the things that people are talking about and it's not just the the health concerns it's the other things that have come with it it's the economic concerns so the housing issues that have come up because of COVID have really just crystallized how much of a housing crisis we were in before this started which I think a lot of people were not necessarily aware of the the jobs picture here in in southeast Michigan I mean the number of people who are just not able to work or whose jobs have gone away which pushes them further into into poverty and despair the work of both Outlier and Bridge Detroit since COVID started has really been focused on those things and trying to you know trying to lift up the stories that Detroiters themselves have to tell about all of these things you know fronting Detroiters stories in in particular you know the other the other thing that's really happened that not everyone is talking about is the violence this summer in Detroit has just been at a level that we have not seen in recent years more shootings more murders than than we are even used to in a city where that's that's just a part of life and so some of the effort has been to also really focus on what's going on what's what's happening that's causing that and what are the effects of it just a few weeks ago at Bridge Detroit we published a story that fronted the stories of mothers who have lost children to murder in the city that's a story that comes directly from people themselves the Detroiters themselves the things that they're experiencing and gives them a platform that to be honest they didn't have before the media other media hasn't really focused on it from that side of things and so you know we continue to try to figure out our way forward with not just Outlier but lots of other partners here in Detroit trying to make sure that that the stories that Detroiters have to tell themselves are the ones that that are getting air tell me how the Detroit Civility Project is working and how it may how you're helping facilitate conversations around these important policy issues and perhaps away from the politics and that's just driving polarization just to get at some of these policy solutions and you've been writing as the as a columnist and as the editor of the editorial page Nolan for so many years how how is the Detroit Civility Project helping these important issues get addressed? Well it's a small effort we hope leads to big things in our in our community and you know we're not trying to resolve all the disagreements we're not trying to bring everybody into one place but what we are trying to encourage people to do is not lose their minds over politics and not find it so easy to hate people who don't agree with you because we know what that leads to you know that sort of hate leads to dehumanization and then that leads to all kinds of bad things in our society and you know I've come to believe anything is possible in terms of things going bad and going wrong when the COVID hit we didn't know how we would continue this project we had just basically started it with the help from Delta Dental Plans of Michigan we'd got this underway in January I believe and then of course had to shut it down in terms of in-person sessions in February but we very quickly found that this Zoom format works very well for the civility project and that we really do find it to be you know it sounds funny but more intimate than the in-person sessions were in greater participation greater engagement and you know basically we're just trying to based on what we've been able to do together over our relationship over the last dozen years trying to to show people that you can have disagreements and passionate discourse without with people who disagree somebody you disagree with without sort of letting that deteriorate into something very negative and very hateful that you can be friends across the political divide and we need people to have relationships across that divide because what we have to have is productive discourse that leads to pragmatic solutions and you don't get there if you're just standing there in your own self-righteousness screaming across the divide calling names across the divide this has really been an awful year for civility and we're just trying to make what difference we can in this community and you know we've actually now started doing it across you know outside of Michigan across the country talking to groups so uh yeah again zoom makes that easy yeah and how do you address systemic racism in your conversations when you have the president of the united states running a very clear strategy to uh it's very very clear um to not only um his base but uh but beyond his his base how do you how do you address that i remember i still remember steve uh the front page editorial that you produced when you were editorial page editor at the pre-press after uh i think it was then candidate trump called on the muslim band and of course michigan has a very large um muslim community so so how do you how do you just talk about racism yeah well i mean you know um one thing that nolan and i always say is that civility does not mean avoidance civility does not mean staying away from uh topics that we see differently or or that we have different passions about uh and there's no way to have a conversation about this election there's no way to have a conversation about this president there's no way to have a conversation about the massive movement that we have seen take place coalesce this year around police brutality and systemic racism without talking about how it spreads to other parts of our society and and so we just do it and and that does not mean that we um you know like i said it doesn't mean we just get along i mean we get after each other and we have real genuine and deep disagreements about uh about these things we have things that we just can't see eye to eye on uh and and there are times when our conversations about this are passionate there are times when they are angry uh there there are times when those those conversations uh get to the point where it seems like it may be uh uncivil and and we're not saying that there's anything wrong with that we're saying people need to be able to do that you need to be able to confront these things in that way but you need to be able to do it uh inside uh the context of a relationship that itself is simple Nolan and I respect each other we actually like each other uh and and even when we get into you know heated debates and angry exchanges over things the the context of that relationship is more important than whatever it is that we're fighting about and i think that's an agreement uh that's understood between the two of us and that we don't um you know we never walk away permanently from the conversation um uh we talk about these things we argue about these things um but we are always um willing to listen to each other and to to have that exchange without it coming to to blows uh or something like that so and what we talk about what we when we when we're addressing a group is you have to we ask people um this is an interactive that's not a lecture um it's an interactive these sessions are interactive and we ask people to you know before you get into the really difficult dangerous conversations sit down with a person that that you'd like to have a relationship with but your views are keeping you apart and try to figure out that person i mean steven i did this uh he hooked us up with story cores uh several several years ago four or five years ago and we didn't sit there and talk back and forth about our our different political positions on our policy disagreements we had a conversation about who we are as people and what it was in our backgrounds and in our values that informed our decision making what makes him a liberal me a conservative and once if you start with that and try to get people uh to reach an understanding about where the other person is coming from you do develop a kind of respect but more importantly a trust in which you can have difficult uh uh conversations because you know because it's it's our point that you know everybody comes to their opinions the same way you know they take the facts they take the information the data apply their own values and experience to it and come up with opinion if it's different than mine if it's different than yours doesn't make them evil stupid doesn't mean they hate america doesn't you know doesn't mean anything except that you know these for the most part are good people who have different experiences and values perhaps then then the person that another person does and you get to that point and people you know start becoming more comfortable and and more honest in their conversations because you know as steve said many times that you know learning to talk starts with learning to listen absolutely and speaking of trust of course there has been declining trust in the news media especially among um republicans a recent night gallup poll showed that there's agreement that the news media is critical however nearly half of those surveyed including both republicans and democrats believe the news media is is biased and of course um of course nearly 71 percent of republicans uh do not have faith in the traditional news media um what how might the civility project what what might journalists do to help rebuild trust in journalism well i mean i i have different views of this obviously coming from a conservative perspective and and reading stories that sometimes set my teeth on edge as well i think the worst thing we can do as journalists is assume we don't have a problem that it's their problem a perception problem and if we're okay saying well it's it's all right that half the people don't in a country don't trust us and maybe even more than that don't trust us then i think we have a real issue i think we got to get back to our our values and our standards in this profession i think we have to be one we have to stop making as many mistakes as we make in this rush to be first i think we need to be very judicious with the use of anonymous sources i think they've caused us a lot of problems particularly over the last four years uh you know i just think good solid reporting in the public interest will uh help rebuild trust i think the worst thing we did as a profession as an industry is take the president's bait on this war between the the white house and journalists uh you know we got oh when did we ever care what a president thought of us and we seem to be obsessively uh we care obsessively about how donald trump feels about us you know i think we just we know how to do our jobs i think we just do them and do them with uh you know the values that have guided this profession i think we we restore trust but there's always going to be certain percentage of population that doesn't trust you because they don't like to hear you know a lot of people like to hear the truth and you know so there's always going to be a percentage it shouldn't be as high as it is and i think we've learned that you know one of the things i think is really key is the and this is a you know i think a national phenomenon is the the trust in local news right and the relationships that are possible in local news and and the pulling away from those relationships that you've seen a lot of local news organizations have to do because of lack of resources but also kind of double down on in some in some cases and i think that has as much to do with the lack of trust as anything when i grew up here in the in the city in Detroit people thought of the free press or the news whichever paper you you took at your house as kind of a member of of the community there was a personality associated with it there were faces and names associated with it sometimes there were people you knew i think there's so much less of that right now than there used to be and that makes people it makes people more wary you know with bridge to trey one of the things that we are doing is kind of turning that on its head and saying we're going to start with the relationship we're going to start with the idea that that we're in touch with people that we are asking them about their lives and then we're going to try to inform them about things and inform other people about things and maybe that builds trust in a different way kind of an old school way but of course there are all kinds of bells and whistles now that we have that we didn't have you know 20 or 30 years ago but but i think doubling down on that and saying that you've got to have a relationship with the people you call your readers or your listeners or your viewers is one of the things that media really needs to do to to to move that trust needle in the opposite direction and jennifer you hit it right at the beginning in your opening question when you talked about you know back in the days when we were coming up and we were in the community we were at those meetings i think that is a crucial element that's missing in a lot of papers big and small in this country now uh we're not in the community they don't see us visibly there they read our product perhaps but they can't attach a face to the name as often as they did when we were at those kind of meetings you talk i think that was essential to build trust and to establish a relationship many many papers now don't even have publishers or editors you know their newsrooms their business operations are run out of a corporate office so you don't even have that figurehead going to you know the chicken dinners and and you know sitting on boards and establishing the the institution uh in a community and i think you can you can track the erosion of trust to the erosion of presence justice seems that that absolutely that whole role of community leadership has been has been lost in in so many communities around the around the country so we are open to take your questions so please put your questions in the chat uh and we'll get to them we have a question from brian alman who has who who notes that as we talk about civility it's quite a challenge it must be to lead a civility project when at the time the president of the united states is not leading necessarily in the same manner um i always say to that you know uh when did Donald Trump become our our ideal or who we emulate you know what i mean a productive civil discussion in the sessions we leave starts with sort of losing this idea that you're right you're all right and other guys all wrong you know the other person is is as nothing of value to add to the conversation so it starts with losing that self-righteousness that smugness and saying okay i want to talk to this person not because i want to convert or because i want to preach because there's perhaps i might learn something or i might gain some sort of understanding so you have to start with that that some honesty in your goals and if you're out to convert i mean i've been talking to steve for a dozen years and changed even never will and i've i've stopped wanting to it wouldn't be doing as much fun if i converted but if you're out to convert lecture and you know if you have this this smugness that man i'm the guy who's right and the other guys all the problems there's a lot of problems coming from both sides of the political aisle you can say well we'll weigh it but you know there's a depending on who's who's operating the scale is you know how things have come out i think your goal needs to be an honest conversation that leads to some sort sort of um learning something you didn't know yeah you know i would say that the president's insubility is every bit the reason to try to to try to do something different and and talk about things in a different context one of the things we talk about with the civility project is that you know none of us has control over what the president's going to do or how people will react to the president but what we do have control over are the interactions that each of us has in our communities with people who often we don't agree with and and that's where we're asking people to to kind of focus and say is there a better way for me to have that exchange with my neighbor who i think doesn't have the right idea about these things or the person at work who is is talking about stuff that i that i don't agree with the member of my family who i think is is nuts because they they support this or that um those are the things that i think each of us can can really grab hold of and say there's a different way to do these things and we can screen out some of the things that that are happening at the national level there's no question that this is the most uncivil chief executive we've seen in the history of the united states i don't think there's any debate about that i think even his supporters uh would have to acknowledge that that that you know what he's doing is is inappropriate they just don't think it's the most important thing about him uh but but i think you've got to take that out of the equation in your own life uh to be able to say how can i how can i relate to these these uh these people in my life who uh we just don't agree with me don't see things the way i do now somebody else's incivility is no excuse for your own and we've had too much of that but you know yeah but stuff going on and uh you know we're responsible for our own behavior and for maintaining decency in our own relationships and how might the detroit civility project address the very important national reckoning that's taking place now on on systemic racial discrimination on racial in injustice well one and you know i'm obviously we're not going to present our you know our participants with okay here's how you have to feel what we want them is to be able to talk to each other about it to try to gain understanding and unfortunately a lot of people that you know there's a lot of danger in having that conversation there's a lot of risk you know a lot of people have good people have said the wrong thing and have suffered some some very harsh uh consequences because of it uh and so you get people pulling further and further back and they're shale and say and instead of having you know a conversation that leads to understanding and information oh yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah i agree okay and you know they're not having this sort of sort of um uh those sort of discussions instead you know they're harboring whatever resentments or or or um you know negative feelings they're harboring inside sharing them only with the people they're certain agree with them that sort of thing you drive that underground and it festers and it becomes something ugly i mean we want people to be able to talk about um race and you know we we see a lot of people who um very honestly want to reach some sort of healthy place and but are afraid to have the discussions get there they don't know how to ask the questions and uh you know they're afraid to express their own views so they could be so those views can be debated and and better understood and so just trying to take the fear out of interactions and again that starts with building the trust that you know you can have making you say something it's not going to be a gotcha moment well and there's also you know there's also some modeling here i mean uh in most of the sessions that we've had uh this has come up uh because it is the i keep saying that when history looks back at 2020 um it will look equally at this movement that has has grown out of the the the issues of police brutality and and system of racism as it does at the pandemic i mean 23 million people have participated in BLM uh events uh in six months uh this is this is the the thing that will define uh this generation of young people it will define our politics for years to come and we are um you know um in our civility sessions Nolan and i uh get after each other about i mean we don't agree i don't know an awful lot of things about this we see it fundamentally differently partially because of who we are and where we're from but also because of the the way we come at these things and the the discussions we have uh the arguments we have uh are are you know passionate and and sometimes even bitter but at the same time what we're modeling is that you can have those arguments that you can have those disagreements uh and not do damage to the interaction between the two people that um that neither one of us ever walks away and says well i'm done with that i'm done with that person i'm not talking to that person anymore about these things we always come back and say all right well we'll go at it again and i think that is a critical part of what what media needs to make possible uh during all of this is the ability for people to to to find the the the space to do that with each other and not let it devolve into into destructive behavior or destructive interaction and there's a moment here um you know i think as we've expressed there's a very important moment here and an opportunity that risk being squandered if we can't engage people in productive conversations that lead to you know the sort of pragmatic solutions that we're all looking for uh and and people have to sit down and talk and of course uh journalism can play a major role in increasing public understanding as as so many great books that have just been published in the last year on this topic i'm um in the middle of reading isabel wilkerson's um credible book titled cast and my goodness we had a national book club i guess Oprah Winfrey does have a national book club um just how in isabel worked at the times as a just incredible reporter and did many stories out of out of Detroit as a national and she's just it's just an example of just incredible reporting and great writing and and what are the stories i guess that's the other thing that i ask or what are the stories that is journalists we should be doing we should be um really looking for um for our local uh journalism um outlets to do to help increase um public understanding of what systemic racism is so that people can better understand uh the systems over many years that have just upheld um in injustice and um so it's so we have a good example of that um the radio show that i host on public radio here in Detroit each summer we have a book club uh where we ask the community to read with us this year we chose Invisible Man by Ralph Allison which is this wonderful tale of the origins of systemic racism the way that it travels from south to north in this country the way that it travels across time and you know it was there was a little bit of a risk in picking a book like that as old as it is um and as obscure as it is to a lot of people i mean there are a lot of our listeners who've never even heard of it but we had an incredible summer of conversation on air online uh on zoom uh where we would get together to talk about that book and other books we had 600 people in a facebook group also talking about Invisible Man and the different chapters and things like that we had authors like Colson Whitehead join us on the on the air to talk about their own work and how it dovetails with the with Invisible Man we tried to get Isabel late this summer she's a little busy she's gonna come on i hope in the winter to talk about it as well but i mean that's a huge role that local media play in all of this is exposing people the number of people who told me during this book club that they did not know about this book that they had not read it before and really had not heard of it before was staggering uh and that you know just the exposure just letting them take a take a crack at it and see what it's like is uh is one of the i think it's one of the roles that we really have to have local media playing right now and Jeff i also think people have reached the point where they're uh ready for action okay yes walk about this and talk about this and talk about this what are the specific things we're looking to do to bring um you know equality uh across across all areas of our society i mean i as a conservative and somebody who speaks to the business community i've always tried to position this as an economic issue that having a permanent underclass is bad for the economy it's bad for business and people respond to that we've also tried to pitch it as you know good conservatives have embraced for years now education reform haven't always gotten it right but it is a uh it has been a core issue and so this this idea of uh the role education plays in keeping people down and in uh working against economic empowerment uh and also now you're seeing conservatives uh leading in many places particularly in michigan this effort at criminal justice reform that this idea that we pushed in the 80s and 90s that we had to lock millions of people up to have a safe society has not worked in fact it's worked to to create the conditions for criminal criminal activity because it's fueled poverty and it's fueled uh you know a disappearance of of men in our community who should be there contributing to their communities and their families and so those are things people can get their hands on and understand and changes that they can make and I think it's it's it's time we reached a point where we start pushing for that sort of change and talking about how that sort of change comes about I mean we now have uh a major criminal justice reform uh movement moving or legislative piece of legislation package of legislation moving to the mission and uh legislature most bipartisan piece of legislation I think we've seen around here in years that will have the most impact you know things like that start actually happening and you can build momentum for change but we've got to move beyond talk and into action so that seems like a perfect answer to one of the questions here how to evaluate the effectiveness of your approach and if so how and it's action right it's spurring people to action it's that and it's you know very much this is very much a grassroots project I mean in many ways I mean we get people to come back to dinner again together at the Thanksgiving table you know that would be a nice accomplishment too I mean it's not all macro and there's a question here of race and and the fact is is that something is hard to listen to and it does it does not make it not true sorry the double negative here so people are looking for you know when something's true when it's true it can be extraordinarily difficult to listen to and when when can people get uh when can black Americans get the truth and reconciliation that needs to come out of these conversations and these and these actions and yeah how might conversation get us there or these types of conversations get so you know I don't know the answer to that I don't know how it how it gets from there to the truth and reconciliation that we need I do know that we won't have truth and reconciliation without that conversation though I know that that conversation is one step along the way to to getting things to to be better that there's no way to do it without being able to exchange ideas in a way that is not resulting in destructive behavior and I'm somebody who you know and this is a place where Nolan and I do disagree but I absolutely understand the violence that that people are drawn to in response to systemic racism and police brutality I have felt at different times this year absolutely drawn to the idea that there there has to be some retribution for some of what's going on and that that violence is a means of expression of of liberty that that's not a radical notion to me it's actually the notion that started this country 240 some years ago as well but but that violence also has to lead to to some way to to craft a country we all got to live here we all got to live together in this country and in order to craft a better republic that is more respectful of majority and minority interests we've got to be able to have a conversation and talk about really difficult things like race and like the history of racism in this country I again I don't know how you get there and it may be that violence is part of that path too I don't know but you won't get there without conversation you will not get there without healthy exchange of ideas and again you know this is what we often say is that Steve and I rarely disagree on outcomes where we want to end up but often agree on approaches and this as he said is is one of those areas after the the killing of George Floyd and the start of these marches and the BLM of visibility it's 70 some percent of white Americans saying I'm with you this is wrong we got to fix this it's now down below 50 percent I would blame the images of the ongoing violence and and in what have you in our cities that don't seem to be heading toward any sort of closure or purpose and again I think that's at the risk of squandering an opportunity here because when have you ever seen seventy some percent of white Americans say yeah I support this racial justice movement that was an opportunity that I fear is slipping away uh because we're giving people an excuse to turn away from from you know where they started well there's much to learn from Detroit's history of course Steve yeah I mean this is something that we've seen over and over we've seen this in this country before and and the truth is that I mean we could argue for hours about whether this is actually truly a violent movement it's not there there are some marginal instances of violence that have been blown up I think for the purpose of of undermining the movement itself but but no one's right that the reaction among white Americans has been to kind of abandon this but I would also say that we're at a point where I don't think it matters what white America thinks about this this is not a popularity contest this is not a democratic question the oppression that black and brown people face in this country is going to stop and black and brown people are going to make sure that that happens it'd be great if white America came along with us but I don't think it's I don't think that's a key ingredient and that may be a key ingredient to the solutions on the other side of us getting rid of all of this to coming up together around a new kind of paradigm in this country or a new country you know a new republic that that is configured really differently than what we see now but I think that that the thing that's clear and that we are making clear is this will stop and it will stop one way or another well thank you Nolan and Steve so much for joining us today and I hope we can get you back together here um after November 3rd and and would love to learn more about how the civility project can be taken beyond Detroit to have these really important conversations about politics and about race and about our future thank you Jeff we have a website I never can remember the URLs Steve do you remember it yeah and I think we've put it in the in the chat here yep yep I'm looking it up right now just in case you know here it is it's it's great lakes civility project dot com that's great lake civility project dot com so please go to great lake civility project dot com we also have the link in our in our chat to learn more about the civility project and how you might take the civility project to your community thank you everyone and I sure hope to get back to Detroit in the coming year and to to resume this conversation at one of your whiskey hours come in there you go or bourbon hours bourbon hours there you go there you go we've had to put them on hiatus because it's a stupid pandemic but i'll get first here you go thank you for joining us yep