the trump presidency. and we wrap up our prime time programming at 11:00 p.m. with former white house photographer, amanda, effects of her time covering first lady michelle obama. that'll happen tonight on c-span2's book tv. forty-eight hours of nonfiction authors and books every weekend. television for serious readers. now, here's david the rise of the ultrabright. >> hello, everyone. good evening and welcome to the rare book room. my name is niclas and i help direct advance here at the strand bookstore. book seven loved for 90 years and counting. it's my pleasure to introduce rachel, investigative reporter.

rachel's work has covered a period of topics and she has reported extensively on the activity of the alt-right and their supporters. rachel will be saying a few words about the southern poverty law center before we launch into the discussion for tonight. please welcome rachel to the strand bookstore. [applause] >> hello, everybody. as he said my name is rachel and i'm an investigative reporter with the southern poverty law center and i want to thank all of you coming out here in sporting what we do at the center. i want to take a minute to tell you some of the specifics. we do three things. seeking justice, fighting hate, teaching tolerance. the first and the third of those things we've got lawyers and legal staff that are much more talented than myself that do

litigation on civil rights work all of the south and the rest of the country. teaching tolerance staff introduces materials for educators so that they can promote diversity and inclusion in the classroom. what i do and what dave does is on the fighting hate site. you may be familiar with our hate map. we monitor and track hate groups and extremists across the united states. what we call extremists would be defined as any group that has a belief or practices that is maligns a class or people. we go across the spectrum of any kind of germination that you can imagine that's based on those. and so, you know, the reason why i think dave's book is relevant in one of the reasons why i think some of you guys might be coming out here tonight is i think for a lot of people

the whole trump phenomenon felt like it was coming out of the blue. oh my god, all this hate bubbling up and where did it come from. what dave does so wellin his book is trace how that is not an anomaly and not a sudden flash of lightning and braces woke up and it was an ongoing pattern that you can trace back to our country's history and throughout the hate movement and that's why the work we do at the southern poverty law center in the intelligence project is so important. we can find those patterns and when all these questions arise we can say no and we do about this. one of the things nick might have mentioned is that i cover for of the other areas hate is what is known as the alt-right and night specifically interested in it for a couple of reasons. probably the biggest reason is my age. these people are contemporary the mind and in my generation

and i recognize them and i know the tactics they are using and i see them conjuring up their own brand of hate that is distinct from that of our parents generation and dave actually has a passage here where he defined the all right that i think is extremely accurate. a place for human decency and ethics are considered antiquarian jokes and empathy is only an invitation to assault. those are the kind of things that we're facing right now and i see it all the time when i monitor them. i really appreciate all your support helping us track these folks and make sure they are not just a next media phenomenon. they are serious and they do a lot of damage. it's just as destructive. some ways you can get involved is to donate to the center and

for the intelligence project specifically i would say the biggest thing is to follow our blog and subscribe to our magazine and share it. richard spencer doesn't go on to cnn and become a white activist because people know who he is and he can share with us journalist and get the world out there because we have more information on these people than anyone else out there. thank you guys. it is time for dave. [applause] >> thank you, rachel. tonight we are excited to host award-winning investigative journalist david. he's worked at newspapers and at msnbc as a writer, producer or he earns the national press club award for distinguished online journalism. his edited the political blog crooks and liars and is currently a computing writer for the southern poverty law center blog, hate watch. his own blog run a akayed ullah recognition and awards for best

series and named its annual award after david. he's written several books, one of which from the 2014 international latino book award for general nonfiction. joining david in conversation tonight is joe, editor at large of the investigative fund and the man responsible for inviting david to contribute his work at the investigative fund news. joe has studied and written about the all right extensively as well. amongst several published books are big life, the hunting of the president. his essays also appeared in scores of periodicals including a new republic, the guardian, in "the new york times", to name a few. please join me in welcoming david and joe to the strand. [applause]

>> good evening. >> thanks for coming everyone. >> yes, thank you. we will get right into it. i'm joe and why did you write this book, dave petrarca i've known dave a long time and we were bloggers together back in the day and not in the same blog, i worked for salon and dave was doing his own brilliant blog and that's when we met in the blogging heyday. i know he's been working on this kind of political research since back then. he knows as much about this as anyone in the country and so why this book now? >> to tell you the truth i didn't and certainly did not plan to write this book. [laughter] my last book on the far right

really had did terribly at the box office and i followed it up partly because it was a difficult book to write with a book about killer whales because i had been environmental reporter for years when i got into writing about the far right i first started writing about them as this anti- environmental backlash story of the northwest and so i did this and it was a hard book to write because of a harrowing story. when i was done writing it i said i need to do something different so i wrote the book about killer whales that i had been wanting to write for long time. and it was fun. unlike writing books about hate groups in hate crimes. it was fun to go out and tell it and talk to people about the

coolest animals on the planet. it sold really well so i was like, okay, my next book i will write a book about humpback whales. [laughter] that is what i wanted to do. and i was assembling the notes and talking to scientists and getting it ready all the fall at 15 but i was watching and i was working for [inaudible] and doing this work and watching what was going on with not just trump but what was going on in the ground with the far right groups in the way they were gathering steam in organizing and we were seeing this new phenomenon called the all right gathering traction and gaining steam and we needed to watch this and by that spring it was obvious by spring of 2016, january, february is obviously had a very serious problem on our hands. partly because trump was being

successful, not just at gaining votes but also at providing a banner under which the struggling extremists could rally in organized and feel inspired. so, yeah, i decided well, i don't want to go probably do those stories again but. >> all this time you are working on the piece for us that took years to do. >> yeah, five years. >> i worked with the investigative fund and we had to find dave to do a analysis for us of domestic terrorism because it had occurred to me that there was a lot more domestic terrorism by the far right than by any other group including islamic terrorists. but i asked dave to go into that

and it took a while but he did so during the soul. you are going through that and that must've had an effect on you this book, as well yeah, sure, part of what we are swimming upstream against we write this material is the resistance to acknowledge the reality on the ground which includes the reality that domestic terrorism occurs twice as often by extremists in by islam us and the pool of potential domestic terrorists out there who are right extremists is just vastly larger, usually larger than what you get when you see from the islamists. it's something that gerald johnson, to permit a plant security analyst, former analyst who helped me with the database together and he was the guy that

authored that 2009 memo that there is a huge storm media storm saying that veterans are being recruited and fox news and anyway -- darrell would point out to me that this is part of what he was seeing them as well, that the numbers, sheer numbers, of right wing extremist out there and we can them in the hundreds of thousands and radical islamists are probably in the thousands. really a significant difference just in the potential pool of extremists out there and it makes sense for law enforcement to take them seriously and to deal with it in an adequate basis but what we're seeing is this ridiculous bias where right-wing extremists are being investigated at all by anyone

but the fbi. the fbi is a pretty good job of staying on top of them when you need to fight the rest of the law enforcement agencies in this country really fall down on the job. >> do think that is because of the way this issue is covered in the national media? is because there's a reluctance on the part of -- i have noticed this but part of mainstream national media organizations to name this and describe it and describe the breadth of it? >> yeah, a lot of that has to do that. you know this joke and i worked in newsrooms for years and years and one of the things that's been happening in the '90s was that if you did this kind of work it -- obviously i was having difficulty getting my editors to permit because they were running scared about being accused of liberal media bias.

the toxicity that that claims the literal bolt media bias p.m. affecting newsrooms in the 1990s so badly that by the end of the decade i left the newsroom altogether. >> so that means you're a liberal. >> yeah, or if you talk about your nazis then it's liberal media bias and you know i grew up in a republican in idaho sounds like okay, really? obviously, i'm not in anymore. [laughter] >> where does the title come from? which is alt america? i don't like calling them that because i've banned the alt-right except when someone else is saying it because i just think it's a synonym for

neo-nazi and so tell me why i'm wrong and i want to call them nazis when they are not these s- >> let me first explain the concept here and then we'll get into that because that's sort of a separate subject. but in important one. so, alt america grew out of the realization that i had really covered militias in the 1990s and they created this alternative universe themselves to live in. it's a physiological bubble that let them live alongside the day-to-day life but really their daily lives and worldviews are totally different universe and of course i saw this in the '90s with the militias talking about new world order and is bill clinton part of the various plot to enslave all mankind and so on and so forth.

and it never went away. that bubble never died and that the patriot movement and it never went away. it shifted gears to become this entity that 911 is really in the conspiracy theories but that was where the bubble moved to and it didn't really capture or entail the mainstream conservative until the election of barack obama or really barack obama candidacy first started seeing it and then once you selected it really took off and the tea party movement which followed obama's election was this thing set up by corporations and grassroots movement but within

months of that movement starting up this was a project i did for the investigative fund i was seeing the wholesale movement of ideology taking over and that will movement is a within a year i was going to these tea party gatherings in montana and idaho and places like that and there wasn't a difference between those gatherings in the militia gatherings that i was see in the '90s. they were selling the same books and touting the same conspiracy theories and they were talking the same talk. it was just like the same so i was like this is what is happening and it is now mainstream and this used to be a fringe movement in the tea party really enabled the mainstream in a huge way. first, when trump came along in 2011 adopting the conspiracies

theories in the hall once he became the candidates in the 2015 that it really became started taking off and then the rise of the alt right movement supplemented this in a powerful way so that it became the patriot movement was distinct from the alt right and there's a lot of weight over but there's a different movement but they all operate and live in that same czar alternative universe where obama was a muslim and hillary was a part of -- part of the pedophilia conspiracy so on and so forth. that's what alt america is, an

alternative universe created for themselves. it does play off the term physics which is -- i understand the objection to the alt-right and joe you can talk about this more. >> it's meant to sound innocent and normal but that's not what they are so -- their description of themselves is meant to be anodyne and they want to slip under the reindeer in a way with swastikas and all the other paraphernalia that would be objectionable to most people if they understood that is what it was. that's one of the things i wanted to ask you was how do the richer dispensers and the various elements that was kind

of old, old alt-right in their ideology, far, far right and reflect some strains that have existed for a long time in this country in like the american nazi party and other elements of the vanguard party itself. how do they suddenly rise up in the midst of all of this? what were they doing trump? >> well, the traditional neo-nazis and white supremacist, the clan, the nativists, they really they had been relegated to the flinched for a long time and certainly successfully and so honestly a lot of the time for most of the last 20-30 years it's a lot of dealing with these crotchety old haters who you're

just waiting for them to keel over and maybe the movement would go away. >> little i literally true. the leading neo-nazi in the country is dead and yet his thing went away, his liberty lobby doesn't exist anymore but the holocaust revisionists in the other sort of nazi leaning outfits ideologies that help to foster still around and explain how that happened. >> part of this had to do with the internet. previously for the internet came along these people were spread out geographically and had a difficult time getting together and certainly a difficult time spinning ideology and the internet from close barriers down so that they could reach

out to each other instantly across the country and organize frequently -- but what also happened was we've been doing with the less years the alt-right is not your grandfather's clan. they are really night and day difference between the crotchety old backwards looking old far right movements that we are accustomed to and they were always looking back and the alt-right is very different and it rose out of the internet and mostly it has its origins in [inaudible] gate and a misogynist culture that surrounds [inaudible] gate and it became his huge opportunity. >> you might need to explain that. you do that in the book but let everyone know.

>> this is a controversy that happened within the video gaming world around 2013 that was all about the ability of game designers, feminist game designers, to come up with ideas and structures for video games other than your mail shoot them up games, right? and the video gaming community, the mail who live in their parents basement rose up in righteous anger against these feminists and started harassing them in their homes and attacking them and there was a really powerful antifeminist proponent to this that they started it off with these conspiracy there is including one that was really invented by white nationalists in the cultural marxism and you probably heard the term trust me

if you hear the term culturalism marks it's something you should know is that it was basically an invention of the white nationalist movement -- >> to describe things they don't like about america. >> yes, explaining political correctness and multiculturalism. >> and feminism yes, and feminism. so it became internet forums like credit and in the video game chat rooms these white nationalists really began successfully gaming the recruits on this misogynist ellen element of the community and becoming part of the gaining traction for the white nationalist police system and so pretty soon you saw all this forums this pollution of racist ideology

gaining huge numbers of hits and very large audience and that's how the alt-right started. one of the things it does this movement uses social media in very clever ways and they use humor and it's not humor that i think any of us in this room would actually much of the above because it's transgressive and ugly racist, bigoted humor but the kind of humor that would appeal to a 14 -year-old boy who likes humor. beavis and butthead type. that really is their recruitment that young, white males between 16 and 30 in their very successful at recording them. especially because they happen to be suburban and well-educated a lot of them come from very

economic stable and very rich background and all of these have the white men who are under siege and culture is under siege and they are standing up against it. >> that is interesting what you said about their economic circumstances because of course there's been a big discussion in our country everybody was upset about the fact that trump is president is trying to figure out why there's been a debate about this and is as much of of economic anxieties or racial anxieties or just plain racism or what in clearly all those elements play some part in the election but in this subset of the alt-right for the neo-nazi right, as i prefer to call it, that's not the case. richard spencer, princeton, is very well-off. and so were most of the people

who seem to be associated with this. what is the economic class of the far far right. the clan was working-class to a great degree, not david duke but others and the white citizens council were more of the upper-middle-class types. >> well, it's complex. >> we are not going anywhere. [laughter] >> well, this is part of why i prefer to use alt-right rather than neo-nazi because for me i've been writing about neo-nazis since the 1970s when we had the very nations in the northern idaho and i had to deal with those folks that was early in my reporting career and for me neo-nazis needs a specific bandwidth of ideology. the worship hitler, swastika armbands and they do all the

nasty stuff in these guides don't all. some of them do but richard spencer's are more willing to go out there and chant blood in the soil and all that but a lot of these guys -- >> we saw them in private with c kyle. >> yeah, and they do that but not all of them do that and some are the steve bannon segments that they call the alt-right place they are not a white nationalist but a white nationalist. they throw all kinds of complexity because it is so much more complex than just neo-nazis. there's a lot of elements and so my feeling is just look, we have the same sort of problem in the '90s when we're dealing with the patriot movement. they call themselves the patriot movement and trust me you never met a morse's dishes funds of pastors in your life. they were the opposite of

patriots. but that's what they call themselves and ultimately we had to default to that because languages are fairly elastic thing and it shines a light of them you can't help but text by that name. when people hear patriot movement now they think militias and hopefully when they hear alt-right after if we sign enough light on them they will think [inaudible] >> neil, neo-nazi yeah, and i think that's a perfectly accurate term. >> so, how did the right wing media create a platform for this? you're talking about the epistemic bubble and that is very much a product of certain types of right wing media, fox news, more and more in that

direction, limbaugh all the way down to info wars and what is that and how does that create and set the scene for the alt-right? >> well, it gets everybody within the moment a sort of rationalization in explanation for news events and this is something i saw them doing in the militia movement in the '90s that they could take any days new cement and translate it through the prison of that ideology so that a hurricane in florida could be proof that the government was secretly manipulating the weather as the new world order. literally anything so this is part of the universe that they have created for themselves and they definitely -- it's what

pulls them and reels them in and keep them within the movements because it creates self reinforcing community. the only people who are part of the community are people who think like you and now you can contact them on the internet. >> but they have a problem, don't they? when they predicted obama will take everyone's guns and that he doesn't. he doesn't take anyone's guns. >> they don't care. [laughter] >> i know that people are putting out in the don't care what about those who are the recipients of the propaganda? how do they shut out what they experienced as opposed to what they're being told and what they want to believe? >> this gets into the underlying dynamic. this is one of those underlying of it all is that white ring authoritarianism entails this compartmentalized working for

you can seemingly hold to contradictory ideas together in the same place and right wing authoritarian is which is to say the followers that the army of followers who are believers and members of alt america and those folks that is their thing. and when they get together. >> you said you think there are hundreds of thousands of them and when they have an event or a march or something only a few hundred ever show up and i would say half of those are the old, old right, league of the south, clan people, all the confederate types date back and they are not

new. >> yes, charlottesville. >> counsel can circle of citizens and they think to come together for these events even though the alt-right is different from those folks and but they don't seem to be able to get a really big group of people to come out and no, although i have to say the friday night march in charlottesville is very disturbing, the tiki torch marched because that was a pretty large number that was about a thousand people. >> was in a thousand? >> yeah, that was disturbing. i hadn't seen that numbers before and i've covered a number of these events including a pretty horrific night of the inauguration where man was shot 10 feet away from me. >> there's a gripping part of the book about that.

>> but it was and that was actually one of the largest from the alt-right crowds i had seen but i covered a couple in berkeley and portland. >> but one in seattle which was milo and there are quick curiosity singer seekers but art necessarily committed to neofascist but there drawn to this -- >> yeah, some of them want to come out in your something outrageous and a lot of these folks are just because they hate political correctness so they want to go out and participate in this transgressive act something they know is politically correct. >> how big a threat is it that? you clearly wrote this book because you think it's an issue we have to deal with in one way or another and have to talk about how and how big is it?

you say hundreds of thousands yet most of them won't show their face and i think they are still afraid of losing their jobs but this is really not acceptable in america at this point in spite of the president and his various, you know, his son they retweet these people and mostly. >> mostly, it's hard to put it in a blob of mercury. you can't put a finger on in terms of its actual size because we are seeing these massive audience numbers on the internet primarily in the were the main indications and that's the alt-right element the other element of the radical right that really as part of this is the patriot militia movement which when i go out rural america i have to tell you it's everywhere now. it's kind of become these

constitutionalist ideas and the idea that you heard of the bundy folks talking about both in nevada and oregon spouting the citideological stuff about the sheriff is the supreme law the county and the federal government doesn't have any right on public land and this is their version of what they call constitutionalism and it is everywhere. it's become the default attitude in much of rural america in every region of the country, south, midwest, southwest, i don't know about the eastern and i know there is militia but i haven't had a lot of experience here in this region in terms of on the ground but in other regions i've been in the ground can tell you it is everywhere. yeah, it's troubling how persuasive it has become a lot of it has to do with the constant reinforcement that they

get from supposedly mainstream media organizations such as fox news and it seems over in places like cnn, too. someone like jeffrey lord gets on cnn and that's the same thing as far as i'm concerned. >> so, in the book you say very clearly that you don't think donald trump is a fascist. it disappointed me a little bit because in 2015 i thought he was probably a fascist but your explanation is cogent and in this technical way he's not. >> in the end it doesn't make a difference yeah, let's talk about that. what is he and why does it make a difference? >> he is a raving populist. a fascist is one of the things you look forward fascist is someone like richard spencer, a real ideologue who believes in

the ideology and answers to spreading the ideology and the only ideology that donald trump as is the worship of donald trump and make more money for donald trump and everyone loved me. that is donald trump. >> i would say that the führer principle but you're a version of it is the american tv version. >> it's what we call the social dominance orientation which is a classic leaders for right wing authoritarian and it's a different personality profile than the rwa but they are made for each other. but no one really gets the classic party populist demagogue in the mold of huey long and others that have come up in the course of our history but he's far and away the most successful that we've ever had in our

history and the problem is that people have this misconception about what fascism is and one of the worst post gets around on the internet is this quote that says bashes supposedly mussolini said that fascism is the marriage of corporatism and government. totally fake quote. he never said that. not only that he would have said that because what fascism, although maybe if he did say it it was part of his you know fascists are prodigious liars. it's not exactly the most credible source anyway. what fascism really is is ultimately a kind of right-wing populism on metastatic or cancerous. wildly out of control where that certainly if you look at the history of fascism in italy and

germany they are both fundamentally right-wing populist movements that went crazy and in the end it doesn't make a lot of difference because even though trump himself is not a fascist he has raised this army of followers that are fundamentally proto- fascist movement and in some ways it does make a difference because real fascists would not have been able to do that. a real fascist would have turned off a lot of americans and developed a much more negative public image by being within the range the right-wing populist is. he's been able to raise this army without having been himself fascist in a way that an actual

process could. >> i know you don't have any way of answering this but i'm still interested in what your opinion what do you think the trumps are doing when they cultivate these anti-semites and others on the internet? don junior they have put out these anti- semitic and proto- fascist names and they have retweet the stuff and they push it forward and i don't know -- trump has no idea julius epilogue was in one band and talk about stuff like that but nevertheless they know they have some idea of what is going on here, i think. if they don't someone has pulled them so what do you think they are up to with all of this? do you think they are consciously cultivating a fascist constituency? >> i don't know that they are. there was a really interesting quote and a lot of time my

friend and i used to joke that if you wanted to find a lead a new york times story that's where the leaders and there's a real good piece that immerman and fresh did about talking about trump and the nfl and how he was making him feel to his base when he was talking about the nfl and their very near the end of that story was this privately all of trumps advisors will admit essentially openly admit that he sees himself as representing the interest of white people now and he feels that this is forced on him by barack obama but he will be perceived and he's going to be the white people's president. fundamentally that's what they were saying. that is what americans need to

know. to me that is what is going on and that to me -- he does these things and falls into these things more out of nature like a scorpion who can't change his nature. >> there's a lot more you talk about but i love to take questions people have questions. someone will bring mike to you and we can questions for a while. we don't ask the right questions i will have to more. >> i don't know this is the right question but what is the relationship with the religious right and these groups you are talking about and there's such a potent area because i read recently that huckabee sanders, sarah huckabee sanders can stand up there and she's a proud evangelist and say these things because she not only believes that donald trump should be

protected but she believes that he was chosen by god so it's her duty to stand up there and defend him. >> let me just -- the question in case everyone could hear was how does the religious right factor into this and citing the example sarah huckabee sanders and i'll tell you i take everything that comes from the huckabee's with many grains of salt. i spent a lot of time in arkansas and i'll tell you they are full of it but answer, please. >> sarah got this question last night with sarah, the one i did a piece with those published in mother jones some of which is in the book and sarah is really special, more so than i am and i can tell you is there is this ongoing debate within the evangelical community over continuing to support trump but

really the underlying dynamic is sort of something inherent in evangelical christianity which is the authoritarianism. functionally speaking evangelical christianity has a authoritarian version of religion and so -- >> you should say right-wing evangelical christian. that pulling. >> right, right-wing, conservative, evangelical, southern evangelical and sarah huckabee sanders want to talk about authoritarianism you notice are saying well, i don't thank you should question a four-star general. that's authoritarianism right there and authoritarianism is really one of the keys to understanding this movement because the people who are attracted to trump are primarily

doing so because they have the rwa personality type. there's a very specific profile for it and there are three components to right-wing authoritarianism personalities which is basically authoritarian submission which is the belief that you need to submit to legitimate authorities and then authoritarian aggression which is you aggression against anyone who does not submit or anyone who is not a legitimate leader, barack obama, bill clinton and finally the third component is conventional wisdom which is this belief that they represent real america that they are a part of and that they really represent the real feelings of society. those are the core of that mentality and it's very much common for right-wing

authoritarians to also be christian evangelicals and there's a huge amount of overlap there. >> you also have to remember that the southern evangelicals, the right-wing evangelicals, grew out of a racist attempt to force school desegregation. the movement became the bulwark of desegregation in the south and has a lot of overlap with people i was talking about before the council of conservative citizens and even the clan so there's a shared ideology there as well. other questions? yes. >> i'm curious what the origin of the word populist is because for me it sounds like popular but it's not really popular. where does that come from? >> it just means of the people

that were the man of the people and it can be selective and generally speaking authoritarianism is openly democratic and open to all kinds of people right-wing populist has become a different creature and relies on this narrative experiences him that basically the ordinary for working-class people are being oppressed by the elites at the top or manipulating the underclass beneath them and damaging them in between that it's called the producers narrative and that's fundamental to right-wing populist. >> my question is basically what you think can be done about

this? i think that what trump did was let people feel like it is okay and not that they weren't there before but what do you recommend? >> he lifted the lid off the national lid. the creepy qualities came out. that's i feel. no, so i think there are two levels which reconnects. first to understand there is a fundamentally anti- democratic movement. everything about it they are openly hostile to democracy and its institutions. so it's really essential for people to read this book and come away with any message i hope they get that understanding that we are under assault by this movement. our to my questions democratic

institutions that we've had for hundreds of years and now taking for granted that they will continue to have a democracy even as the authoritarianism and openly hostile proto- fascist movement we are deluding ourselves to think can do that. it will decay and succumb to that attack unless we stand up and defend it. there are two ways to do that. one is organizing a large-scale and as joe suggested and i seen this in all these rallies there's a lot more of us than there is of them but we have 40% of the country doesn't go out and vote. imagine can provide for democracy in a way that people feel -- people feel like politics doesn't actually affect their real lives. they feel that it's irrelevant

and trump has done nothing else it's waking people to the reality that it does affect my life so we can take advantage of that awakening and organize and get people out to the polls that will be our first step. they want to use the tools of democracy like free speech to actually destroy democracy. we need to use the assets of democracy in particularly the vote in the empowerment of every individual that democracy represents to defeat them and so that is on the larger scale. i think on the really hard work is the interpersonal scale because ultimately can change these people's minds. once they get into this epistemic bubble it's really hard to get them out. especially if you have grandparents and relatives who are called into the stuff and you've experienced this you can talk to a wall.

that is hard work and to pull people out of that alternative universe is really hard work. ultimately it will come down to have to find a way to talk to each other again. we have to find a way to find a common ground where we can agree on what is real and what is not in what is a fact and what is not. how do we know what is truthful and accurate and what is false. that is what apostolic veggie is and that's the crisis point that we are out in this country is that we have and up histological crisis and we need to deal with it. and it can be done from the top down. it has to come from the bottom up and every individual out there has to be engaging in people's lives and those who you do business with and all of those things. >> i was going to ask you quickly before the next question what you think of this technique of taxing the people online,

showing faces, naming people who show up at the rallies. >> i'm good. >> you're good? me too. i'm opposed -- not violent. >> i'm opposed to putting out these. >> i think it seems to me as a very directly breaking the bubble is to show who they are and what they do and let them face the consequences. >> absolutely. i don't think in terms of their home address and stuff like that is appropriate but yes, exposing them in their jobs and in their communities is absolutely correct because these guys sneak in under the radar. one of the things was really good piece in the stranger in seattle that the weekly

newspaper in seattle went undercover with these old right and we've got a cluster of them in seattle and this guy named greg johnson is a serious old writer and he moved to seattle a year ago and he got undercover with them and did this great report to the stranger and they were talking about how they recruited these guys amazon and the tech firms for their in seattle partly because one of the real gateways to this was libertarianism and libertarians are really easy to draw into this movement and as you know the tech business, tech world, has a lot of libertarians and it and so this is certainly part of the path we are seeing. yeah, they are talking about doing things like being secret agents at their work where they don't actually are not open about their racism.

they just don't ever hire any black people and they don't hire lesbians or gay people and it just happens that way to be because they are secret agents. let's expose them all we want to one question from the back. here he comes. >> yeah, my question has to deal with the republican parties was the in all of this and he talks about libertarianism and if you read ron paul newsletters those are chock-full of gray speeding ideas. >> i did reporting on that. >> anyway, that was you? the whole resistance now and this is mostly focused on trump as a figurehead chopping his head off and the butterfly will fly in the sky and everything

will be fine but i don't see that as what will happen even if were able to retake the senate or whatever and have electoral pushback and a lot of these are deeply ingrained so i guess the question is how do we excises from the republican party just as democrats need more aggressive in what they classify republicans as and does that furthered the division, i don't know. >> i wish i knew. honestly, i'm not a very good political strategist but yeah, it's obviously a problem and like you said this is one of the reasons why i wrote the book and even if trump disappears tomorrow this will remain in this army of followers will be there and that's who are concerned about, much more than trump. the problem with trump is that he is empowering and enabling

and getting them in the administration. it's a very dangerous time i think, yeah, we've got to buy them from power. step one. >> i would say you have to make all the individual republican officeholders own the stuff. that is the way to eventually force them either to fully own it or separate. in each case every race, electoral race, they have to be, the democratic candidate ought to be forcing them to answer about this and not just about trump but about the dog whistles and everything that is empowered this and look for every opportunity to raise that as an issue. ultimately they start to lose elections they will run from it fast so.

>> yes, ultimately that is the answer. >> will take two more questions. >> hello, i wanted to say thank you for coming here. i wanted to follow up to something that you said in the issue now is what is real and what is fact and what i have noticed in the last couple of days on the television has been the entire telly issue where he is gas lighting the reason for the civil war and one of the things i always think about is the failure of the educational system in this country to truly teach exactly what the civil war was and what exactly happened in the civil war so my question is do you think that this trump

phenomenon, alt-right, neo-nazis and nothing else this was going to happen whether or not trump was elected. i think it is a disease that would have reared his other head at the point anyway. >> yeah, we deftly had the movement building before trump came on the scene and gaining momentum. ...

>> >> they usually end up killing each other but there is a deeper answer to the question which is we never had dean not suffocation but they were treated as brothers in the hope they would reconcile themselves to the union and have one country instead of following the advice of robert easy to don't build monuments become one country again they

go forward with the lost cause narrative and a lot of other stuff the country has never dealt with that. this is why you have to have a kneeling protest in the nfl to have a real failure but now it is coming back and it is still quite small but we have a much bigger problem than that. >> but for me was the utter failure of reconstruction. so i wrote this terrific account from years ago there

was a book called the letty shirt. and we got gone with the wind version of reconstruction that they put their feet up on the desk so then they stand up to stop this from happening and join the carpetbaggers. so i was handed that and certainly i thought in idaho the real cost of the civil war. this is the latency of the revisionism that took place during the 20th century but even before that there was a campaign of extreme violence

against black people that drove them completely out of power starting the jim crow laws and continued oppression of the black people in the south but if traditions but with that migration from the south into the rural areas they were mostly farmers with the vast majority originally settled as farmers in rural areas and there is another hidden part of history that is called son downtown that would actually happened there was a.

of ethnic cleansing from the rural areas in the rest of the country so they would say don't let the sun set on you here. or no negroes allowed after sundown. so we create the demographic situation we have today were they closer to the cities for their own self-preservation to take out the factory workers because they could no longer farmer -- farm. this really is the legacy and another reason we have to have the kneeling at the nfl games.

>> my question isn't really political but at nyu we are talking about the importance and i was struck by your opening line in which you emphasize the notion of trump so what is your thought process obviously it is very provocative and what type of reaction you are hoping to induce and then your thoughts on the opening lines? >> that is something when i sat down to write the book that i discovered i was

creating a timeline that trump announces but the very next day was like wow that is an amazing coincidence because it actually speaks to the subject of the book that even though they don't seem connected on the surface but they are deeply connected. part of what i was doing is going into self recognition because we are all familiar with those events but we don't connect them. so it is a shock to get people to think as a basic narrative

technique every writer wants to get a hold of their audience right away to say listen. >> thanks for that question. a writer likes to get a literary question other than how can you fix the world? [laughter] thanks for coming [applause]. [inaudible conversations]

>> a first-time author is book is called mr. chairman. mr. hershey who is he? >> and unassuming one of the

behind-the-scenes masterminds of the republican party and a pioneer of political polling but best known for putting the republican party together again after the 64 goldwater debacle at that time many thought there may not be another republican party but they call on bliss and he put the party back together and developed the coordinating committee to get people together with barry goldwater to know he had to have a united party. so largely with his help nixon was elected president 1968. but he held a grudge against the list because when he was chairman he wanted the national committee to pay for an airplane to fly him around the country and bliss told him no he would have to give one

to others and he said i will not forget this and he didn't. in 1969 after bliss pulled off this miraculous -- miracle nixon forced him to resign he wanted to make him ambassador to denmark. but bliss said i would rather go back to selling insurance though that is what he did. he was friends with eisenhower and robert taft also very behind the scenes. >> there was always a little bit of tension between eisenhower and taft did he try to bridge that? >> that's a good .2 times he tried to get them the nomination and as you just said he lost both times. and was very disappointed that

in 1952 eisenhower was the nominee coming into ohio just before he got there where the campaign was a arctic he liked orderliness. things moved right along on schedule and they became fast friends and went to gettysburg and they implored bliss to become national chairman 1965. so then when nixon would not come to the meetings he would have eisenhower call him to put the party back together. he was the enforcer. >> earlier it sounds like he was a precursor to reagan. >> yes. he said he was very conservative himself so he

needed to win 1965 and i talked to john lindsay top political aide guy called to say this is ray bliss. he did not believe him because he is conservative and said can i call you back? he thought somebody was pulling his leg so he called the number back and said it is really you? who can i tell? he said tell anybody that you want. and he said this is ray price he helped him to raise money to be elected mayor and i spoke to lindsay about ray bliss 20 or 30 years ago he said he believed the republican party should be big enough for everybody probably the earliest a spouse or no

ill of fellow republicans but beyond that he believed passionately in the two-party system and one said the democratic party was in trouble he would work for them just to make sure we had two parties in this country driscoll what is the difference then and now? >> all the special interest groups, have usurped power from the party. he fired against that and one of his most colorful fights was against the john birch society as you may be familiar with president eisenhower said he was not communist and after barry goldwater asked him to be chairman goldwater looked up and bliss got the finance chairman the former general to denounce that but looking at

the social issues like abortion or gun control they would have driven him crazy because he says the party is supposed to be something everybody can be a part of i don't know what he would do it is a good point. >> william hershey is the author. [inaudible conversations]