grub hub and he's written a book. those are just some of the authors, you can find the full schedule on your program guide. but starting now is an author panel and it is about politics and it's entitled where will the g.o.p. go next. you'll hear from david corn, mark leeb vich and malcolm vance three authors on the campus of the university of arizona in the gallagher theater, live coverage on book tv.

>> welcome to the 2023 tuscon festival of books. i'm jim, a recovering journalist. my great pleasure to be here today with three absolutely incredible authors. first the lawyers have asked me to cover a few points. this panel is where does the g.o.p. go next? please save your questions, we'll have about 15 or 20 minutes at the end for questions. festival organizers like to thank c-span and book tv, you're going out to the nation today and alison, roberto whis ger and

ratsdz i don't know for sponsoring the upcoming discussion. make sure to stop by the book sales area and author signing area after the session. book sales at the festival help support the cost of putting on the festival and the local listsy programs that it funds. you can help keep this event free and open by becoming a friend or sponsor of the festival. please stop by the friends booth or go online for more information. please silence your phones as we begin. our panelists today, we have malcolm nance a globally renowned expert on terrorism extremism and insurgency. 34 year veteran of the u.s. intelligence community's combating terrorism program his previous books include the plot to hack america.

his latest book is they want to kill americans, ma lishas terrorists and biology of the trump insurgency. i think he says you should read it during the day not before you go to bed as it may cause nightmares. also, i think a bottle of whisky? >> hard liquor. we have mark leeb wits before joining as a staff writer. [applause] >> his books include the "new york times" best seller this town about the political culture of modern washington, and his latest is thank you for your servitude donald trump's washington and the price of submission. finally, dave corn a veteran washington journalist and political commentator.

he's the washington bureau chief for mother jones magazine and analyst for msnbc and his latest book is american sigh koes sis, a historical view of how america went crazy. let's start with you, mark, you focus less on trump himself and more on how so many people end up grovelling before him. lindsey graham, ted cruz, enough to fill a book. >> it is. >> and you point out how many of them still end up humiliated afterwards. josh marshall of talking points has a phrase for them the dignity rates they wander the earth wondering where their lost dignity is afterwards. what's your sense of why so many

people bend the knee? >> first, thank you for having us here. welcome to the linda ronstadt overflow room, everyone. you know. >> we promise we won't sing. >> but also thank you to everyone for being here and also to the tuscon book festival which keeps getting better and better. and i just hope to be invited again because it's great and we love it. anyway, the question was why do they keep doing this? essentially, any time you write about politics especially these days, very much in today's republican party, it all sort of gets back to self-interest and self-per petuation, which is not a new story in politics but it has been remarkable to me. and i didn't want to write another trump book, i don't need another psycho analysis of donald trump or even why he's

appealing to so many voters. you know, you don't get to be a party taken over by one person the way the republicans have without a whole lot of help and a whole lot of cowardice. and i wanted to explore what led the people that we've talked about lindsey graham, ted cruz, the like, to do this and what is in it for them. essentially, they were his enablers. i want to focus on the enablers because ultimately it takes a village to destroy a party or some would say save a party, others would take a different view. i think this was the predominant story in washington and america over the last few years, certainly in politics. i think it continues a pace if any of you caught at least little clips of donald trump's speech at cpap, i think the spiral continues and i think it's going to be the front and center issue of where at least one of our two major parties is

today. >> david, your book examines how the republican party has long played to the conservative base with what you call, quote, apprehension, anger, paranoia and grievance. trump was really skilled at tapping into that and used it to write his way to the white house. can you talk about that thread of the politics of grievance and anger that you see in the decades that you've chronicled in the book? >> let me echo mark first to say that the tuscon book festival is just a wonderful experience and event. thank you for coming and the thousands out there to be amongst a community of book lovers and people who love to read and to write, it's more -- this is very unique. we don't -- we authors don't get to do this that often. so i thank you and everyone who helped organize this and our friends at c-span. i write books so i can come

back. [applause] you know, i'll talk about the genesis of my book maybe to answer this question, and that was a little over a year ago, year-and-a-half or two years. i was just thinking about the relationship between the republican party and extremism, and i said well surely somebody has looked at this over the course of the last 70 years or so. and i went looking for a book that explained this relationship and chronicled it and i found while a lot of great political histories out there, rick pearlstein has written great books about american politics over the years, i found no one had really looked at this piece of it. so imagine, create the world you want to live in, sometimes you have to write the book you want to read. and it struck me that the republican party were very much rooted in examining what's

happened to the party in the last few years. mark's done a great job of doing this and malcolm's done a great job of looking at the extremist elements around the party. but for 70 years now, seven decades since the beginning of the 50s the republican party has always, always encouraged and exploited far right extremism, it's waxed, it's waned, but it's always been an element, a component of the party's essential elect ral strategy. mccarthy did this in the 50s but you had the john birch society and barry goldwater. who here knows barry goeldwater? all the hands go up. when he ran for president in 1964, i tell the story in the book, he plotted, that's the word for it, with william f. buckley on how not to disassociate the republican party and the right from the john birch society. buckley eventually did but for

goldwater it was very important to keep them within the party because they were his foot soldiers. he won the decisive california primary in 1964 in part because he had this army of people, the john birch society, which was their day version of q anon. they didn't eat babies and traffic and talk about sex trafficking but they were paranoid to a tremendous extent. comies everywhere, eisenhower was a comy, every union, every university, every corporation was infiltrated with communists and they were controlling the u.s. government. so the republican party made its peace and spoke to them, encouraged that extremism, that paranoid view of the world as mccarthy did for many years in order to keep them as doners and volunteers. and you can go through it sdekade by decade in the 70s, it

was the rise of the new right and religious right that propelled ronald reagan. and these include people who actually in groups that were led by people under god's law uksd kill homosexuals. and ronald reagan would embrace these organizations and they were a big part of his victory in 1980. throughout the 90s and 2000s, both bushes made deals with pat robertson and who was a paranoid conspiracy theorist who put out antismet yishg notions about who controlled the world and they said he was a great american and a patriot. you have newt gingrich dealing with militia groups in the 90s, the tea party and fox news and republicans embracing that, 2009-2010. so it all comes up to trump and by the time he comes around he looks at this history and in 2016 you have jeb bush talking about housing policy, you have marco rubio talking about

foreign policy, and bobby jindal, the star of the republican party who was this close to the nominee talking about tax policy. and he comes in and says no, he goes right to the red meat that they've always thrown and says i'm going throw them the reddest red meat possible. and he encourages the belief that democrats liberals and others want to destroy the company, he feeds into racial and other grievances, and he just lays it all out on the table which has been happening on the side for many decades. so he is a continuation and intensification and acceleration but a continuation. and i think if you want to think about trumpism and the future how to counter it, you need to understand the history that gave it to us. >> malcolm, these guyors journalists and you're a former -- >> thank you, jim. >> well, they're enemies of the american people when you get down to it. you're a former counter

terrorism officer and your book looks at this through a very different lens, one who examines how radicalize the right wing has become and the extremist movements you've seen in other countries. talk about what you're seeing, especially in light of january 6 and what you mean. >> well, first it is great to be here at the book festival. this is just absolutely amazing. them been trying to get me here for four years, i just haven't been able to make it with covid and everything else. and i have one question first. linda ronstadt? is she going now? >> right now. >> yeah, we got screwed. >> all right. who else am i going to miss? so that being said, what i like about this extremely fully packed room is the very fact that you are here in support of books. i love books.

[applause] in fact, i make this comment because people say oh you're a journalist. and i say not a journalist. our you're on ms nbc. i am a spy that talked on television. that's it. and i just gave my opinion from generally that perspective. but, i grew up in philadelphia, in the philadelphia free library near my home i lived in that library. it's where i learned everything. i learned my career field from there, my first decrypt was, i actually went and decrypted a yiddish newspaper from hebrew to english and i learned it doesn't come out in english. and then i had to learn yiddish. so i didn't learn that very well. that being said, i want to have a full disclosure here because another person who was fluent in yiddish was general colin powell. and i actually started my career

in politics as a republican of the general colin powell stripe. hard on national security, socially liberal on other things due to our upbringing. and now if you put the xy oochlice up there where we would have been up to the right of the center, we're way down in the bottom left. and anyone who was a conservative or what was at the time a ronald reagan style national security conservative or republican, they're no longer considered republican. now, i know this is being broadcasted by c-span so i'm going to be speaking to a lot of people who consider themselves republican and at the end of this i hope they reconsider who they are and what they are, because we've been pushed out of the party completely to the point where we are mainstream democrats. and i've affiliated with that. so that being said, now that we all have all the dirty laundry out in the air, one of the things that i did was i did take

a very long look after writing three other books about the trump administration and the election of 2016, how vladmir putin manipulated using his intelligence agency, really mainstream american organizations that we would have seen as extremist at the time. these right wing extremist evangelical churches, the national rifle association, in which the russians were so sure that they could manipulate the republican party they literally sent spies, trained russian intelligence officers to act like they were facilitaters for guns in russia and one of whom the most famous of whom maria butina who was literally a honey trap sleeping her way around was arrested and sent back to russia in a spy swap.

also, the at right, the extremist who in charlottesville were actually preparing. the charlottesville protest was their cotillion, it was their coming out party to show america that they were a force. half the leadership had connections to moscow. david duke had an apartment in moscow, richard spencer, the head of the noo nazi party shared his apartment with his belarusian pro moscow wife. and then you had donald trump himself who had years been courting the russians. he went to moscow in 1987, his first wife her father was actually the -- the czech wife, her father was actually the reporting person for donald trump's spy handler so to speak. i'm not saying donald trump was a spy, but the spies were all watching him because he had

money, he was an american, he's coming behind the iron curtain. that happened for a long time. so of course in 2014 when donald trump shows up in moscow the spy master and chief in russia ex-kgb officer vladmir putin looked and goes how can we manipulate this guy. because putin is a master manipulator, a human intelligence officer maybe not the greatest quality but he knows an idiot when he sees one. and so he says, there's a little acronym we use. mice. right? do you get that person on the basis of their motivation? are they ideologically aligned with you? can you coerce them or coopt them? can you appeal to the ego? the first m is money. and donald trump met all of those things down the book. so why am i bringing all this up? because the republican party has

changed not because its platform has changed. it doesn't have a platform. and i challenge anyone that calls themselves a republican right now to tell us what your platform is. because you don't have one. but what's happened is you're not a party. you've become a tribe. and tribelism has taken over and they have left the constitutional republican, whatever you want to call it, and they are about the cult of an individual. and that individual made them tribalistic for one reason. he gave them permission to be as mean and as nasty and as indecent as they wanted to be and they would be respect bid their peers for being worse than the person next to them. and that's how we got to where erp today. [applause] i don't even consider them americans. look, i spent my entire life defending this country, i'm from philadelphia, i'm a pure originalist in what america is

all about. but that being said, america is about bringing together all of its best elements to create a more perfect union. they don't want that. they want their own union. and that is why the republican party of today, stop calling it the republican party. call it the trump party and be done with it. [applause] what was the question? [laughter] >> the question is the extremist movement that you're seeing in the party. all right, mark, you talk about that as well, that trump just had a willingness to blow past any kind of guard rails or any kind of limitations that other politicians might not. >> i mean, i think in some ways it's very uncomplicated. the reason -- and america, for

as nuanced and as sort of considered our system, our constitution is, it's built very much on good faith, it's built very much on the expectation that leaders, particularly the ultimate leader, the president of the united states, is going to behave in a very baseline decent way and follow certain norms and so forth. and the reason donald trump acts the way he does and has gotten away with what he has gotten away with for now almost eight years running inside the republican party is because he can. and any number of republicans in this party could have stepped in and stopped him. they could have just walked away, they could have not sort of endorsed him the way the party did enmass in 2015 and 2016. and the reason he is, he became

president is because he was the nominee of one of our two major parties and he became the nominee of one of our two major parties because a very large number of act vitss and elected officials ultimately came around and endorsed him. donald trump is -- i mean, i think a classic example in malcolm mentioned charlottesville, he didn't condemn that. i think that to me was a crystallizing moment in that he just wants to keep the coalition together no matter how un-american, how hateful, how violent, how dangerous many aspects of that coalition are. so ultimately this is, it happens because it is allowed to happen. and to me, that is sort of what we're dealing with here and continue to deal with here. >> david. >> let me disagree a little bit. how dare me. how dare i. so that at least you believe that the beltway consensus has some bounce to it. you're right in looking at it

from that sort of top down per spective, but i also think one reason donald trump is who, became who he was politically and got away with it is because of the american people. not you people but other american people. and that, and to your point, mark, you said why did people bend the knee? and it was for political advantage for careerism. we all know you've all heard the stories of what they say about donald trump behind their back, we saw mitch mcconnell after january 6 and kevin mccarthy for like a couple nano seconds say we got him. this is it, no good. we can toss him out. right? and mitch mcconnell said i'm going to impeach him basically and mccarthy, he's responsible, gave a big speech. so they were looking for a way to get rid of him.

why did they not do that? it's the same issue. it's their people. the base of the republican party has become extreme, aggrieved, racist, combination all, and other things, that the people who lead the party don't believe that they can take issue with that without sacrificing their own career. liz cheney for one, right? i mean, when she started doing this i don't believe she thought it was an xis sential threat to herself especially after january 6. so i hate to bring it back to my book, but i to look at it historically that the republican base -- available. i think it comes back to the republican base has over the last few decades, always had this extremist element but it's

been coached along, catered to, exploited, encouraged, and it's gotten deeper and wider. i think the election of barack obama freaked it out to a tremendous degree. and so a lot of this is a reaction to that. and so it's -- to your point, if everybody had gotten together at the leadership level and said we're going to lead and we're going to say no to this, i don't know what would have happened, if the base would have been able to be coaxed away from trump or if they would have turned on them and trump would have had a more hostile takeover than he actually had. but i think there's a political force there that has not empowered but given them reason to be cowards. >> correct. i would just say real quick that i think that this is actually a very passive force, trump is realistic and is terrified of his voters and he gives them what they want and it's not

always a pretty picture. if you look at fox news and look at emails and texts, that have come out in recent days about fox personalities who might say one thing on the air and something completely different behind closed doors, they're terrified of disappointing, challenging their viewers with a world view that might be distasteful to what they want to believe. and which is the opposite of leadership. it's the definition of pandering. and it's pathetic on one hand but it's ultimately -- it's cynical and it's very effective. they just want to sort of keep people watching them no matter what they told them, and it certainly wasn't the truth. so i would add fear to that. >> i know we have an agenda here but let me make a quick comment. and you're both right. >> next question. >> but the base is really idea lonlcly unleashed. and who gave them the ideology?

it's always been in their head. they don't like to have to say, unless it's someone they approve of, thank you for your service. when donald trump told them that you can disrespect john mccain, this very state, half of it would have thrown him under a bus. i went to the school in kor noddo, california, where i read john mccain's original print classified debrief of what happened to him in the five years in the hanoi hilton. i could not worship that man enough. he gave so much to america, literally with his body, and the moment donald trump said well i don't like people who have been captured, he redefined patriotism towards the military to be whom ever i like. the base glommed on to that, they loved -- i said this yesterday in our panel that new yorker cartoon of the sheep in the field and there's the big sign of the wolf in a suit and the wolf's motto is i will eat

you. and the one sheep says to the other one, well, you know, i really, i've sort of got to say i like that he says what he means. or he means what he says. >> you know where he stands. >> and it's like yeah he's going to eat you. but there's this entire part of the base that wants to be part of the eating. i did extensive research on right wing extremist in what i call titus, the trump insurgency in the united states. if any of you remember three days after the election, i was on realtime with bill marr, going on kumbaya time, let's reach out to the trump voter and understand what they want. i said i've got some doom and gloom for you, we're going into insurgency and that is armed rebellion against the united states. 62 days later it happened. and it was no surprise to them,

they were plotting in the open. they don't see america like you and i see. but that base gave permission to be just as mean and nasty and if you weren't part of that agenda you would be afraid that they would come to your house with guns. i think it worked bottom up and the top glommed on from trump and pushed on. and that last little seem in there was to paul ryan, mitch mcconnells who thought they could manipulate it. it's like manipulating a tsunami in the middle of a hurricane. >> mark, you talk about doing the obligatory waitress in a diner interview in ohio. she as democrat but she doesn't like hillary and she says all politics is bs. and in a way that inok lates trump from the charges that he's a liar. can you elaborate on that? >> i will say just for the

record that i was mocking myself with that illusion to the diner in ohio. i happened to be at a hillary event in toledo and i was early and i went to a diner and there was a waitress and she wanted to talk to me about the political -- anyway, not to sound defensive. >> no. there is just a recurring and, again, this is not a new thought. but there is a recurring theme you hear when you talk to trump voters and you ask them why they support him and why they stand by him through god knows what. and they will always say, well you know you get a sense that he's telling you the truth, that he's really telling you. and this is one of the most documented pathological liars in public life history. public life history. world history. >> history, human history. >> not to overstate this or anything. but, no, it is a very, it's a big irony though that -- and again people who know better like lindsey graham and kevin mccarthy will say people feel

like you know where he stands. he stands with you. so it's a weird jiu-jitsu thing he does. but, again, that's just is the recurring theme. those are the worth you hear over and over again in diners in ohio, and pennsylvania and wisconsin. >> can i just say it's quite purposeful. he's playing that role. he knows what he's doing. i rememberhe knows what he is d. i remember talking to his small number of advisors before he ran. i talked to one a few months before he announced. i said tell me what opposition research do you worry about the most. is it his misogyny? his mob contacts? his bankruptcy? that he lives? his flip-flops supporting abortion rights and the clintons? he said we don't worry about any

of it. this is off the record. what do you worry about? no, no, our theory of the case is people know he is and -- is an asshole. either people want an asshole for president >> or they don't. >>c-span. >> i have heard the f word on c-span. you raised the whole mccain thing. after that happened, i remember the republican party establishment and most pendants said -- most pundants said this shows he can never win. he is outside the bounds of politics. he will be gone by october. he has no discipline. i remember being on hardball with chris matthews. he and i agreed this is going to

play great. this is going to help him in the primaries. i remember talking to one of his advisors sometime later. he said we were really happy most people did not pick up on your point. we knew this was going to work. the fact that the republican establishment were saying he was toast because of that, we knew that helped us. it reinforced us with that base. they did not like john mccain, chris christie, jeb bush. republicans are weak because for the last 20 years the base believed barack obama and other democrats want to destroy the nation, and these other republicans did not say that, did not see that, did not believe that muslims were a terrorist threats, all the things they heard on fox. anything they could do to signal to the base that he was different, they saw that as an asset.

it was this dance between him appealing to the base's fears and prejudices and encouraging them, giving them permission, and benefiting from it. all the people are totally flummoxed. they have never seen this before. they don't know what to do about it. >> absolutely. it is all true. ultimately, i think trump -- people just liked, whether they approved or disapproved of what he said about mccain, they just wanted trump to upset all the people who were already upset. he had done his job already. >> donald trump became an avatar for them. the avatar i give is tribal chief. he earned his way there. what is fascinating about trump

is -- you know he used to do worldwide wrestling. he would be the bad billionaire who would side with the two evil guys on the ring, and the two good guys would almost get beat and then at the last minute win, and donald trump would come out with a giant check and say i was wrong. he could read that audience that he saw as your average walmart shopper. he essentially told them your ballot is a permission slip to be as racist as you want, as disgracefully mean as you want, as sexist as you want, anti-transgendered as you want, anti-faux military as you want with the trappings of

nationalism, and these people ate it for breakfast. many people never voted before voted for that, which tells us something about us. my family has been in the armed forces since april 1864, nonstop . 160 some years of service. this is an order of magnitude different. that is what my book is about. it is a permission slip to destroy america with the weapons you buy at the gun shop. the day that they want to kill americans are your neighbors. we are going to get to the point where we are going to start shooting people, and it will be acceptable also. many people think the next ballot is that permission slip. >> you mentioned trump's speech last night at cpac. there is a quote i saw, he said

i am your champion, i am your warrior. i will be your retribution. i will lead a war on the america you don't accept. that is me. you know where i am. call me. that is what we are talking about. this is not a political agenda in some ways. it is psychological. it transcends ideology. that is what he is trying to do in this restoration campaign of his. >> can i make a quick point on that transcending ideology? here is what upsets me the most. we have been in the armed forces since the civil war. they took the oath to defend this country. there are members out there in the armed forces, generals,

sergeants, i don't care what you are, you give up that oath when you cited with that man. -- you sided with that man. [applause] police officers, dea, active-duty colonel in the marine corp. attacked the u.s. capitol. i invoke everyone of you who thinks you love this country to start thinking about that oath again. why does the black guy have to tell you? we earned it. we built the country. we built the capital. we built the white house. now that i have this little forum, i have faith that we will recalibrate, otherwise you will be recalibrated. that is what my book is about. you are going to get recalibrated. i don't want to see bloodshed.

these people want bloodshed out of loyalty to this tribal chieftain. >> we are in arizona. >> we have noticed. >> i forgot for a minute. >> we know a thing or two about elections and election fraud and accusations of election fraud. i think kari lake is still insisting she is the governor of arizona. what about what is brewing in the 2020 for cycle with this -- the 2024 cycle with this effort to harass election workers? >> there are so many crosscutting currents at the moment in american politics and electoral politics. democrats, progresses cheered

the midterm -- progressives cheered the midterm results. the election deniers that ran for statewide elections all lost, including kari lake. we should let her know at some point, just to save her from the embarrassment of showing up at the governor's mansion. mark fincham who i wrote about lost. he was queuing on adjacent -- q anon adjacent and said things that were arguably anti-semitic. that was all positive for democracy. at the same time, it got downplayed. even though the republican red wave turned out to just be a puddle, a lot of election deniers won house elections coming including in this state, paul gosar and others.

they now control half of one third of the u.s. government. they demonstrated there are tens of millions of americans who vote for election deniers. accepting legitimate election results does not matter to them. they believe the trump narrative. they believe the conspiracy theories. they believe some of the qanon stuff. they remain part of the republican primary electorate but also the general electorate. i don't need to remind you how close these elections are. they are out there. they can be mobilized. georgia, arizona, these are very close elections. the fact that herschel walker --

can i finish the sentence? the fact that herschel walker came even close shows there is this automatic, i don't know how much you estimate, 45% block of people who will vote for anybody with an r after their name no matter how ignorant they are, no matter how conspiratorial, paranoid they are. that will continue to shape the 2024 general election and have a tremendous gravitational pull on the republican nomination fight. >> david, where do you see the gop presidential race? is trump the front runner? >> there are two declared candidates, nikki haley and donald trump. i am happy to wait until desantis shows he is actually

going to run before i start evaluating this. mark has covered presidential politics a long time. there is something unique about presidential politics. you can never tell how someone is going to behave as a presidential candidate until you see them. remember president scott walker, president rick perry? there are a lot of great on paper candidates. i have no idea how great desantis might be as a candidate. we cannot evaluate it. i have a whole theory about why he might not run. to get into the ring with donald trump and survive the mud wrestling that is going to happen is going to take a lot of skill. after that if he can be donald trump, donald trump will say you rigged the election, the republican establishment is against me. it will be all out civil war on

the republican side. he will say don't vote for this person. whoever the republican nominee is if it is not donald trump will have to be donald trump while beating the democrat. >> you have said what trump has done has changed how states are -- how campaigns are run across the country. >> it is a cult of imitators. it is a media campaign. in some ways, i remember in 2016i was trying to pitch my editor at the new york times a story on why this is not a total disaster. it could be seen if you contort yourself enough as some good that maybe might come out of this election. he has struck a blow against big

fundraising, some of the power of the middlemen, the consultant industrial complex. that is where my optimism ended. i pulled the idea for the story after 48 hours and he started hiring steve bannon and ivanka and everybody. there is a template for republicans who dwell, kari lake, getting on tv and so forth. it is somewhat positive that kari lake and herschel walker and dr. oz, some of these follower celebrities lost, barely in some cases. as far as 2024 goes, trump will probably get the nomination. i don't think it is any great mystery. i think desantis is fools gold. people who know him thinks he is a weird dude who is not going to scale well. people who get to know him on a

larger stage outside of the red disney world of florida -- that is sort of a bad analogy. strike that. the red fantasy world of florida. wonder how he will take once he gets beyond the borders of florida. if it is more than two candidates, and i suspect it will be, trump is going to get his 40%, 50%. the rest will be split. hopefully, we will get a note of optimism. how much time do we have? 20 minutes? >> yes, we have somebody with a microphone to take questions from the audience. we are going to do that in a couple minutes. before that, i want to ask malcolm what are you watching for the -- in the 2024

election? what keeps you awake at night in 2024? >> i used the term insurgency. an insurgency is a series of insurrections. it can be political, military, paramilitary, and terrorist. i don't have to worry about it anymore. it happened. we are in the middle of it. all these incidents you are seeing are small ones. the things that keep me up at night is someone is going to say so we are terrorists? ok, we are going to be terrorists. the second sons of liberty or whoever they are going to call themselves will go out and reimagine themselves as the new patriots the way timothy mcveigh did. you know if timothy mcveigh had done what he had done in the past year, he would probably be lauded as a hero. it is not a joke.

i am looking for all the little intelligence indicators. i don't care about the politics of it. donald trump is going to get the nomination. there is no one that is going to stand against him. anybody that does, people are going to have to hire armed security. there is that much of a crazy base out there who feels they are entitled to america through their firearms, and they can intimidate people through their firearms. i would anticipate a catastrophic event. maybe someone who looks like they are gaining traction against trump might get a shot taken at them. maybe people who feel these elections are not worth it anymore, and they start attacking electoral infrastructure. i worried a lot about that last time. whatever is going to happen, the federal government is united in this. the most loyal americans are the ones you would not think much about.

policemen are very jealous of how they guard the law besides the odd guys out, most cops are arbiters of the law. if you bring a semiautomatic weapon to an el paso walmart, they are going to come down on you with everything. that is why we pay swat teams. there is an entire branch of the trump insurgency who thinks they own the military, the cops come and they are going to side with them. what i don't want is for that to happen. maybe it will be an insurrection where they take over the arizona state house, and they lay siege to it, then they get allies in other parts. maybe arizona is not the best example. it could happen. we could have micro insurrections throughout the country where republican governors, blue governors support the insurrection. >> there is some good kettle

corn on the deck out there. you might want to try it. >> you keep trying to uplift. you got to stop. >> i cannot believe we are almost done. can we go another hour? let's get a microphone out and take some questions from the audience. i am sure lots of people have questions. this is our microphone over here. we are coming down. >> fabulous discussion and kudos to the tucson book festival for putting this on. >> i am a retired social studies teacher that feels like everything in the last 10 years since i retired has turned what

i taught upside down. one element that i think is being the elephant in the room, i would like the acknowledgment of this and what we can do about it. it goes back to when trump was first running for office and reaching out. as a teacher i used to take the position that we were split into thirds. a third of the country was republican, a third was democrat, and a third was out of the system, did not care and did their own thing. what happened was trump came into the world, and all of a sudden this population was hit with instead of wah-wah-wah, suddenly this person speaks their language. a colleague of mine did a lek's

i'll indicator, -- a lexile indicator of presidential inaugural address speeches, and they were all collegiate. trump was a fourth grade reading level. all of a sudden that fuzzy dial gets tuned in, and he is speaking their language. can you acknowledge that? if so what can we do about it? >> other people have done similar work and came up with the same conclusions. trump is a carnival barker. he was a bit of a con artist as a developer, and it is all about selling. he comes up with slogans. he comes up with the easy answers. i will be the best. you will have the best.

we will get rid of the people we don't like. he speaks to that most powerful elements of advertising,r fear, resentment, racism. did not make it sound nice. others who have done this in the past have tried to camouflage it a bit. he did it. it worked. he got elected. we had eight years of dealing with him. i don't know what we can do about it. the key thing is the people he appeals to cannot really be changed. on the margins, you can maybe win them over on other issues. the heart of it cannot be changed. it is incumbent on the rest of america, whether they are democrats, moderates, or recovering republicans to band

together on basic principles. not on tax policy, maybe not even on reproductive rights, but the basics of we need to protect our democratic institutions so we can have the fights we need to have over these other issues. over the long run, it is like containment, containment of that when he percent, 30% of the population. recognize -- containment of that 20% of the population, 30% of the population. recognize it. >> it is hard to convert someone who is a hard-core trump supporter after seven years. the electorate is more dynamic than we realize. a lot of older voters are dying. sorry. younger voters under 40 are

voting overwhelmingly not for republicans. this is historic levels in the last few elections. it is not like joe biden is giving them hope and change. joe biden is not exactly the future of the democratic party. there is a level of engagement among younger people that i certainly hope the parties, the democratic party do not take for granted. there is a level of activism and dynamism if people take young people, new voters, black and brown voters, there is a lot of new blood in the electorate that needs to be seized on and taken seriously. >> i think we need to raise the voting age to 50. can we get another question?

[inaudible] >> we will see. can i touch on his question? there are three movies that constantly come up amongst the trump internal communications. these movies have changed the dial for how they view themselves. the movie 300 about the spartans, they love that movie. they think they are all kingly and ida's -- king leonidas, and they think they all have sixpacks. the movie the patriot with mel gibson. as far as they are concerned, we are all a red coat. when they storm the capital, they were shouting 1776 and these things with a confederate flag. finally the tv show the walking dead. there is ammunition they sell out there zombie loads. they talk about world without

rule of law. zombies are there is a crisis, and minorities come from the cities into your area, and you have to shoot them. this is how they talk amongst each other. you know you do. don't deny it. >> there is no one in the tri-state area who did not think of donald trump as a fool. i don't understand how the rest of the world missed this when he showed up on the front page of the post and the daily news. he was on page 16 of the new york times. all of a sudden this person who was laughed at by everyone who lived there is president of the united states. how does the media put that back in the bottle? >> i think it goes back to the fact that he was a salesman.

you can try to sell dog food, but if the dogs don't eat, it does not matter. he came up with a formula to tap into these sentiments. he was savvy about it. to the story i told earlier, they did not know at first whether it would work. you have these 15 conventional candidates talking about policy. he said i am not going to play that game. i think i can get votes doing something different. people bought it. it did not matter that it was not true. this was a guy who failed running a casino. [laughter] you know, and he is the best businessman of all time.

i am not going to knock religion. if you want to believe something, and someone comes along and gives you what you want to believe, you often embrace it, and you deal with it different in terms of an analysis. it is an emotional, psychological transaction. >> we had a question, and it was will he ever be indicted? yeah, so what? >> i think he will be indicted relatively quickly. as we saw him commenting yesterday, so what? there is nothing that stops him. he could be a convicted felon. if you don't get him on the 14th amendment, sedition, there is nothing that is going to stop that. to what you were just saying, this guy is elvis to these people. fat, talentless elvis.

elvis had a lot going for him. he is a myth now. he is becoming a myth. he is reinventing himself. he will win the nomination. >> we are at two minutes until. we are going to end it there. i want to thank our three authors. thank you. [applause] thank all of you for coming. give yourselves around of applause. authors will be proceeding to the sales and signing area. let's clear the room so the next panel can set up. thank you very much.

>> you're watching book tv's live coverage of the tuscon festival of books. one of the authors joining us in just a minute for a call-in, and that's malcolm nance, his most recent book called they want to kill americans. and that will begin in just a few minutes. if you listened to the panel and you have a comment you would like a comment you would like to make, here's how you can do so. the numbers are on your screen.

several more hours of live coverage coming up. we'll have another call-in opportunity with chris whiple who has written a pook about the biden administration, the fight of his life it's called and that will be coming up. but you'll also hear about election 2024, a forecast, major garrett of cbs will be on that panel. it's actually hosted or moderated by ron barber who was a congressman, democrat, from this area. he replaced tulsie gab ert after she was retired. and after that, big business innovaters, author panel, and that will include mike evans whose the founder of grub hub

and his book is called hangry. that's all coming up still this afternoon but in just a minute malcolm will be joining us. he was on an author discussion yesterday, and here's a little bit of what he had to say right after this. we'll be back to take your calls. >> malcolm, when you talk about the trump insurgency, you sometimes roll it all the way up to all republican voters. now, there may be some, i sense we have a pretty friendly crowd for some of these arguments, but for those people who might be republicans, if wandered into perhaps the wrong session, and they're kind of looking around and they're wondering, this is another kind of conspiracy, i'm not identifying with some of this way of thinking, how do we build a majority that's more expansive that includes and sustains relationships with the independents and the moderates who are actually responsible for

the democrats winning the last election? if we stay fixated with the trump insurgency how does that carry us into the future? >> first, you can't ignore an imminent and immediate threat. and we have already seen this threat manifest itself. we've seen people knock down power for 100, 200,000 people, in north carolina just a few months ago they shot the power plants. i wrote four different incidents where that occurred in the last five years in the united states. it's part of this whole militia belief system in there. full disclosure, i was once a republican, all right? i was a colin powell style republican, strong on national security, socially liberal. we now on the xy axis come down way in the lower left corner over there with ronald reagan and richard nixon. where republicanism has moved today is so far off the chart that the people who they call

rhinos, you mentionedle michael steel, not allowed to come to any party rain deer games. they don't want him. they don't want anyone who does not espouse the tribalism of titu, trump insurgency in the united states. to answer phillip's question, he made a good point of that. it's the energy of these people. you're right, some people may come into it because they're anti-vaksers, some because they believe that aliens are coming and that donald trump is a hero rescuing children from ped fooils and saving them from having their blood drunk, which all of these are q-anonabsorbed these thingses. but when i say the republican party, i mean the republican party of today, this minute. ok? wendy rodgers level republican party. crazy with a capital k, all right?

and but they have moved so far away from conseconservatism. why they don't change the party name to trump is beyond me. you have the ron desant tiss of the world and others who are espousing pure trumpism which is a full whole hearted step into fascism. desantis the other day is trying to pass a bill where no writer or blogger, anyone who gets paid even if it's like a newsletter that can criticize him. right? i mean, just wait for that to pass, minute one, second one, i'm going to hit transmit and take it to the supreme court. but the point is they're not just moving, they are knocking down the wall and creating the overton french doors. and allowing as much crazy to come in there in order to

overwhelm common-sense and common decency. you the majority of you on the other hand who are here are clearly nice people who have a lot of common sense. look, they just saved the state, right? for the most part. which will motivate the crazies to be even crazier. so that being said, you know, and i know we're going to be on c-span tomorrow they're going to ask me this question and i'm going to look into that camera and i'm going to say my family has defended this nation nonstop from 1864 to today and you don't represent any of those values that were espoused when i lived in philadelphia, where when i was a kid could go to the independence hall and ponder what the meaning of why i was allowed to participate in this country in this government

equally, whether you liked it or not. even though we had to fight. they don't believe in that any more, not at all. to be quite honest, i don't think they're americans. i think they're trumpists. >> malcolm nance, author of they want to kill americans, in your book and in that presentation we saw from yesterday morning you paint the republican party with a pretty broad brush. >> i really wish that i could paint the republican party with a very narrow brush. i started out my political career when i joined the armed forces as a republican, i was a colin powell style heavy on national security, sort of soft on social liberal subjects. my family is a very old military family going back to the civil war, non-stop. but the party's changed and i actually think, the word change is even wrong. the party has transformed and it

has moved away from what it used to be. there's no platform on the party any more, the only thing i think exists really is the word republican. what it is is it's transformed into trumpism and i think they should go ahead and change the name. >> do you think that all happened in 2016 guest: i think it happened over time. you saw that between 2016 and 2020 donald trump acquired 7 million more voters. what's really happened here isn't politics. i think it's tribalism, where you know the platform of fiscally conservative, national security, strong, holding up the nation's code with honor, those are thrown out the window when donald trump attacked john mccain, who spent five years in the hanoi hilton for america, serving the armed forces of the united states, keeping faith with his other prisoners of war. and then it became a joke. it became sort of a show. my problem is as somebody i

spent my entire life in the armed forces, i swore an oath to protect and defend the constitution of the united states, i'm a philadelphiaen so i'm an originalist on this particular subject. it really has gone to where the man has become their version of what america represents and but that america as it was designed, as it was planned, as it was going on very nicely until 2016, they no longer want to be part of that, they want to invent their own version of this. i would call it a constitutional autocracy where they can, they don't have a president, they just have a leader who will rule over 65% of the country with his 35%. >> so in reading they want to kill americans, i got the sense that you saw january 6th as a prelude. >> yes. >> rather than a final event. >> yeah, and in fact i was on realtime with bill maher after the election and he was doing

his let's kumbaya, time to reach out to the donald trump voter and see what they want. how can we bring the nation back to form a more perfect union, and i had to break it to him, this nation is moving into insurgency. and that's a long-range series of political destableation designed to bring down or discredit a government through a series of insurrections, both political insurrections which we're liing right now with this new congress, political upheavel in elections as we see here in arizona where leighton refuses to concede election. and armed action and human action as we saw on january 6. the park service says 40,000 people attended that rally, 10,000 people laid seige to our nation's capital. right? as many as 2,000 penetrated that

building with the intent to overthrow the government of the united states. there are people who swore an oath to the constitution to protect and defend this nation who thought that was great. how these two things could survive from the founding of this nation until january 6 to where they thought it was better to throw america out everything that it ever had become to listen to one man's version of it and betray their oath. i don't understand that as a former member of the armed forces, it's disgusting to me. >> so what's next? >> what's next is we're going to have to see just whether americans or the people who claim that they're americans -- and i don't use that term loosely, ok? to be an american means to believe in the core values of this nation. and some of those core values are not written down in the constitution. the constitution doesn't say that you have to be decent to

other american citizens. but those are values that were shown all over the world as we, when from the storming of the beaches of normandy. my grandfather fought in world war one as an african american, 200,000 african american soldiers were in france in world war one and i still meet people who talk in fascination about the black troops of world war one. but that doesn't also mean that you have to disrespect your fellow citizen. my fear and the reason i wrote this book, i have watched their own words, i have watched their own policies, their ideologies, what they say in their little private chat forums, there are many of them who would loved to kill other americans in large numbers and create their own little constitutional autocracy, in which the constitution is a fig leaf and their autocracy controls other people. >> so a racial component to this. >> very racial. you know, donald trump promised

his base essentially that the ballot for him gives you a permission slip to do whatever you want, to be as racist as you want. fundamentally. we're not going to deny this. my dad joined the navy when he was 15, he was allowed one job to be a mess cook, that's it. that's all that he was allowed. my grandfather was allowed to be a laborer and his brother was allowed to run horses with bombs out and back. there were compromises, but we would always advance. now, it's let's go backwards. that's their only message. they want to go backwards. that is not america. fundamentally un-american. we are not a nation of one religion. we have no national religion. the first amendment of the constitution says that. we are no race dominates this country. we have to understand that the american experiment which i gave my life to defend, i would give my life to defend, i defend it

every moment of my life, is a grand and glorious plan that we try to spread around the world. now we're starting to embrace the basic tenants of fash yiment. and there are people who are very happy about that. >> the newest book, they want to kill americans. first call comes from joseph in albuquerque. you're on the air. please go ahead. caller: thank you. i'm calling with a question for mr. nance and that is how can we explain the swing in this country from the election of president obama and being reelected and then the turn to this donald trump nonsense that's taken over 30, 40% of the

country. >> well, i think it's simple. they became the people that voted for donald trump in the election became more motivated to elect the person that they wanted to see in office who would promise them what he's promised. and the question is not the voter at that time. it's the promises made to them and what they saw in him as an avatar of his platform. now, we've seen since 2016 to 2020 that tsh here's what we got from him. a person who is documentably the president of the united states told more documented lies than any person in american history, we have people, a person who created more racial division, more social division, crashed the economy, and thinks he is the greatest person in the world. we have to deal in reality. the world i come from, when i was in the military, hard reality. i don't have time for fantasy. and i think the american people need to do something about that.

>> now, malcolm nance has mentioned he spent his career in the military, 30 years in the intelligence community, u.s. navy terrorism, intelligence collector code breaker interrogator, studied russian, chinese, spanish, french, arabic, trained on and used waterboarding, testified before congress that waterboarding is torture. next call scott, pennsylvania, please go ahead. caller: yeah, how are you doing. i would like to say what an honor it is to speak with a true american patriot. i really appreciate you and what you have to say. i would just like to say mr. trump, it's incredible just how extraordinarily dangerous this man really is. i think back to the meeting in he will -- helsinki with mr. putten and how there was nobody in the room two hours except the

interpreters. now, nobody knows to this day what was discussed with that despicable -- you can't even call mr. putin a human being. but the connection with mr. trump and russia and the authoritarianism and fascism, i mean, this is really scary stuff. and i would just like your thoughts on the russian connection, the authoritarianism, the fascism, and what we're dealing with here domestically. and like i said, just keep doing what you're doing. i would like to see you run for president, to be honest with you. >> go ahead. guest: i appreciate that. philly. but the issue surrounding donald trump's relationship with russian has been documented deeply. all i hope is that you as an american really embrace what

america is before you go, align yourself solely with an individual. host: is it fair to say we're using the dateline of domestic terrorism to describe your book, they want to kill americans? guest: yes. absolutely. because what we're seeing, and again most of that book was written from internal communications from these militia groups, these terrorist groups. what's more fascinating is the level of conspiracy which i document in that book. that book was started in december 2021. all of the people mentioned in it and the proud boys and the oath keepers have all been convicted or indicted for se digs for the government which means overthrow the government of the united states. i don't care what your party affiliation is, that sentence should offend you. that's not what we stand for.

the last time that happened was the american civil war. if you stand for that you'll stand for anything. >> what is the difference in your view of the proud boys and january 6th, and what happened in portland and seattle and some of our major cities where anarchy took over? >> sure. well, you know as a person who wrote text books in terrorism, counter terrorism, one of the things i made very clear is that there are certain categories of civil disobedience that are not terrorism, right? i'm from philadelphia, i have seen super bowl and baseball championships which have devastated downtown philadelphia, police cars set on fire, you know, in philadelphia before this a couple years ago before a super bowl they had -- no, the world series, they had literally greased every pole in downtown philadelphia. so that's civil disobedience even on a massive scale, even on a destructive scale, you can

have political protests, you can have political opposition, but something we had was an order of magnitude difference. we had a conspiracy to stop the all of the processes the constitution put in place to ensure that peaceful transfer of power. for the first time in the history of the united states. even the civil war didn't do this. and there was great disagreement about lincoln being elected president of the united states, when several states actually separated from the country. we saw people who thought they were going to overthrow the government and donald trump would come down from the white house and they would install him as essentially king donald i, which again to anyone who knows anything about american history, we broke away from a king, it should be offensive to you that armed people or even mass action would go into our center of democracy for the world and would attempt to overthrow it.

>> the only other person i can recall on television who has labeled the trump phenomenon fascist is joe scar bro on morning joe on msnbc. donald trump for me is indeed a classic fascist, whether it's the muse lynnie type or the hitler type or some other type. he is a fascist and his supporters are fascists, and we have in this country a problem that we have a very large percentage of our people who are fascists for one reason or another, and they will destroy us unless we destroy them. >> if before you hang up, what's

your definition of fascism? >> whose orders are to be obeyed by everyone. everyone who does not obey these orders are singled out for persecution and possibly even for genocide. and i don't put it past our own fascists that if they had the power they would do exactly what hitler did. >> i believe muse lynnie actually when he coined the term defined it as a dictatorship of the corporate right. that's all. just a dictatorship. >> linda from texas. >> actually i live near fort hood. i appreciate the opportunity to express my feelings, because i am a republican, i've been

republican but i have not voted for president trump. in fact, when he ran i couldn't believe that anyone could support him. however, i'm particularly concerned when you're talking about toems domestic terrorism, well, you can imagine what it's like in texas but i'm afraid to talk politics with anyone. i try not to. i did lose a friend back in 2016 because i told her i could not put my mark by his name. and but i just don't talk about it pause it's actually dangerous. i would not mention that. i'm afraid of what the fringes would do. i am a john mccain republican, colin powell republican, and but i am afraid to mention anything about trump.

ll a democrat so i consider myself to be a conservative independent but i am a registered republican. so anyway, i just, i'm wondering if your guest there would consider the republican party becoming more cult-like. i don't want to call them a cult but some of their behavior is cult-like, and here in texas i just read in the paper the other day where i think his name was gonzalez, he's a state representative, he was censored because he was opposed to some of the gun -- i don't know, i can't exactly express. >> tell you what, linda, lot to work with there, let's hear from our guest. >> i understand how she feels. i understand how you feel. that's why i left the party. i'm right up there with michael

steele. former chairman of the republican national committee not allowed to any, any events that they hold. they don't consider him a republican. a feel the trump republican party should change its name. there was a movement they had a couple years ago to change the name with the symbol of the lion as the trump party. and that would give the non-trump republican as home. it would at least give them a place they could self-identify. i am a gun owner, i'm a responsible gun owner. many people who are out there now in this branch of the party, the dominant branch of the party, the trump party, they really like to brandish a concept of using their weapons. and i represent several times in my book there was one gentleman who said, when can we start using our guns? they don't keep them as avatars any more. it's almost as if they want to

create trouble. and i also say this to my african american brothers and sisters, the one saving grace we have in this country that keeps that from happening is that law enforcement in this country is a very jealous body, all right? they're not going to side with you if you go to a walmart and you start shooting people. they're not going to side with you if you throw an insurrection, they're going to come and recalibrate you as we like to say in the military and but many of the people in the trump insurgency think that the military will side with them. many of these presepts come from an old book called the turner diaries. the book that timothy mcvay read when he blew up the building in oklahoma city. mcvay thought that the armed forces was going to have a racial uprising by him blowing up that building he would kick off a race war in america. he was wrong. it was the cops who came after him. >> also in your book you use the

term tiet titus. >> trump insurgency in the united states. i use that as collective for those people who are out there saying, saying openly and publicly we have our arms, these are the guys who worship the ground kyle ritenhouse walks on because he's emblematic of titus. they take their weapons, go somewhere they were never invited to go, using the laws to open carry. and then when they get into a situation which may or may not be self-defense, they use them. there is a class of people in this country who are ready to use their firearms and i don't advocate people going out and buying more guns, i don't advocate anybody doing anything but working within the laws. and we have a police force in this country, we have a government that are going to do that but there are people out there who are plotting terror. >> renee is calling in from south dakota. please go ahead with your

question or comment. >> yes, my question is this. i'm a democrat in western south dakota so you can imagine as well as native american and in the elderly population. what do you think that we can do now to best take action during the trump insurrection of the white house i was the only one out picketing all through downtown spear fish. i felt like, i don't care about the danger at this point, i have to take action because everything that you've said is totally true. and who in the world can run in any party that can hope to overpower the numbers that trump has? >> you know, there's only one weapon to be used here, in any

circumstance, and that's the power of the vote. at your age where you live, i don't care what the environment is, you have high schoolers that are all becoming 18-year-olds here. go out and find them, talk to them, find the people who don't know how their lives are going to be affected. find the young college students, find the guys who are working down at the walmart. you know, this is not limited to a class of people or a color of people or race of people. this is about real ideas. another thing is that i wish that people certainly in the democratic party would coopt the american flag again, right? it wasn't given to one party. certainly don't ever bring the confederate out in front of me, my family fought in the civil war. you have to show that you believe in the right to protest, to believe in the right to redress and the right to speak your voice as an american citizen. i live near the norman rock well

museum in western massachusetts and every time i walk in to the center rotunda where he has the four freedoms there, which are emblematic of all of america, nothing catches my heart more than freedom of speech. i think you need to exercise this. >> this is malcolm nance's eighth book, they want to kill americans is the name. [applause] >> we appreciate you being on book tv here at the tuscon festival of books. >> it is my pleasure. >> we go back into the theater here at the university of arizona and it's a look ahead to election 2024. some of the authors you'll hear from include major garrett of cbs and phillip of the "washington post". live coverage on book tv.

>> hello, everybody, welcome. i was going to do my john oliver impersonation. welcome, welcome, welcome, and here we are. not quite john oliver. my british accent went a lng time ago. so glad to see you here. what a great crowd. we've got some terrific authors and their work here to talk about this afternoon. let me say a few housekeeping things. first of all, on behalf of the tuscon festival of books, i

welcome you here to the 2003 -- 2023. this panel is all about what we can expect in 2024. that does not include slitting our wrists. so we want to thank the organizers obviously and c-span televising this or recording this, and the sponsers of this location and this session, i want you to stop by the book sales and the authors signing after this, i believe we -- do we have a volunteer who is going to take the authors to their sign sng where is it? by the u of a book tent is where the authors will be signing their books after the session. so again welcome, it's my

pleasure and my honor to introduce our panelists this afternoon and their books. let me start with the big truth. the full title is the big truth upholding democracy in the age of the big lie, and major garrett and david becker are the coauthors of this book. [applause] >> mr. garrett is a washington correspondent for cbs news, host and creator of takeout -- the takeout and debrief podcasts. he has also written a book which i have not yet read but title intrigues me. mr. trump's wild ride. and the other book is the 15 biggest lies in politics. david beck who is sitting next to me, i said you've got the best jacket, executive director and founder of the nonpartisan center, national expert on

elections has worked in elections for more than 25 years and litigated major cases as a trial attorney in the department of justice under the obama and bush, gw bush administrations. our second author, this is the book that kind of appeals to some of us, maybe one or two, is called the aftermath. the last days of the baby boom and the future of power in america. mr. bump is -- [applause] i picked it up with some trepdation because i'm in that age group. but it's the last days of the boomers in some ways. so if you're wanting to know what our last days look like. in that book. and phillip is a "washington post" journalist columnist for

the post based in new york, he writes how to read this chart. and before working for the post phillip previously wrote for the atlantic, has worked also, i like this part particularly worked for the south bay labor counsel, silicon valley labor organization. so welcome. and in case you wanted to -- [applause] in case you haven't reader enough about q-anon, this is a must read by will summer called the rise of q-anonand the conspiracy that unhinged america. it's called trust the plan. it's got a great photograph of a flag on the front. be sure to buy his book and get it signed. mr. summer has been working as a political reporter for the daily beast since may of 2018 and previously he was the champion,

campaign editor for the hill. as a political columnist for the washington city paper in his journalism he covers the topics of political radicalization and right wing conspiracy theories in the united states. you may have heard him last week on fresh air. very good interview that session was. [applause] so i'm going to go around here and individually ask questions of our panelists. we're going to do our best to get 15 minutes at the end of the session so you can ask questions. a lot of that depends how quickly we get through some of the important information they have to share with you. if you do come up to ask a question, or ask a question, please make it a question, ok? because sometimes they're not.

anyway, i want to start with mr. summer i'll ask a couple questions and then go on and so forth. so you've described the adherence of q anon-is run by a kabul of say tannic cannibal ped fooils who torture children in say tannic rituals. that they're in the democratic party in hollywood and in banking and have controlled the world for centuries. ok. so my first question is how does such a set of absurd beliefs get so many across the country and in the world not only to accept them but also to act in sometimes violent ways to promote their beliefs? >> that's sort of the kwannedry at the heart of my book that i wanted to find out. you have these ridiculous

conspiracy theories and yet we end up with millions believing it. we end up with something like this january 6th, we have believers in congress. so i looked into it in my book. to give you the short version of it, q anonstarts in 2017 with an anonymous clue posted by a figure named q. and people start to believe this is someone in the trump administration, and they're sketching out this world view where as you said hillary clinton, barack obama, even tom hanks, they eat children and they worship the devil and they use this to -- they're controlling the world to get this magical substance to keep them alive forever. hard to believe as it sounds it spreads and grows, and we have people like marjorie taylor green who i mentioned who is a really hard-core believer and now one of the most prominent republicans in the country. and in the book i get into the

downstream effects, destroyed families, murders, plots to kidnap people. and so it really is, it's a fascinating topic and one that i think it does challenge, it's hard to understand how so many people get into it. >> let me add to that, you've indicated in your pook that many evangelical christians and older republicans are more likely to be attracted to q annan compared to other ones. why do you think this is the case? >> a great question. there is a huge religious overlap which feels like a religion itself. it's been compared to a cult, people believe that they're fighting the devil is a real guy and he's out there doing mischief, plotting against america. and that by joining up with q anon, and the trump cause they call themselves soldiers, you are personally doing bat wl

demons. so there is a religious aspect to it and an apocalyptic element. so there is that overlap. in terms of why it often is sort of an older crowd, you know, there's a huge overlap between trump supporters, the average believer often looks like someone at a trump rally, older, whiter, evangelical christian. to be frank i think often they were sort of fooled by what they saw in a way younger people are what have you on line but look, the q anon demo now can be anyone. it's expanded in a lot of ways so that younger people are more diverse crowd, i say that a pooztive thing, obviously it's not. but it is, it really has expanded. yoga q anon. wellness q anon. it's big on instagram. it really can pull anyone in. >> wow, that's a scary thought for sure. let me move next to phillip and

i want to start off by saying this. as a wanna be boomer myself, i am not a boomer technically, i was born in 1945, one year or two early. my wife today is a real boomer. i'm often reminded though, as i think about being a boomer and what it means for all of us what carl riener who is a comic writer, tv star and all that wrote about the life of an ageing boomer. he wrote in his auto biography that he gets up in the morning and he would never do anything before he opens the paper. and the first thing he does is turn to the owe bitries, and he says if i'm not there, i make coffee and have breakfast. how many of you do this? right? well, let me start with how many of you look at the obituary in the morning. guilty myself. in your book, boomer influences

discussed in terms of economic impact, how, did their large numbers affect infrastructure, health care, and the acquisition of wealth. and what does that say about a country in which boomers no longer drive the economy culture and infrastructure and many more thing sns >> so again the book goes on the leptsdz of this which is obviously why i thought it was important to talk about. but i think when we consider what the baby boom is, even baby boomers don't understand the scale. it was an enormous disruption in the american population. 1945, about 140 million people in america total population. over the course of the next 19 years, 76 million more babies are born. but you think about what that means. what does it mean? five years later you're going to have a lot more kinder gartance, more schools, more teachers, when they hit middle school, you have to do that with middle school, high school.

over the course, los angeles was opening one new school, elementary middle or high school every single month. when we think for example, think about all the schools that backlash brown versus board of education named after confederate leaders, they had to build all these schools happening at the moment of tension. the baby boom emerged 1946 to 1964 at a period when immigration was restrict td. in the 1920s new restrictions imposed as a backlash against immigrants from eastern and southern europe. so that didn't get lifted until after the boom was over. so it's much whiter than other americans. the generation itself is much less densely immigrant heavy and while baby boomers started the trend of going to college they're also much less likely to go to college than younger americans. so we can see as we look at this pattern over time, the surging, it becoming the focus of american tension, power, money,

marketers. you remember the show 30-something? came out in 1987, the 30 years exactly after the biggest year of birth in the baby boom. there's a reason it came out when it did because the baby boom was the target audience. so now what do we have? now we have this very unique and unsettling moment when the baby boom generation ceases. there's a lot of different types. people who led the resistance of donald trump are baby boomers. but when we talk about this moment, we have especially since the election of barack obama an older whiter generation of americans who see a younger more diverse and more socially liberal generation of americans coming up and they feel unsettled and see change. not all of them see the change, but a lot see change and are wor aedz about change and that influences. you can see all the factors i said, college educator, whiter, overlap with partisan politics.

so now the question is we're in this moment of tension, of generational shift, another one, what happens next? that's what the book tries to explore. the baby boom has to compete for power with younger generation. >> your book is filled with graphs and data and i love that part because so many times we just mix statements and you don't know if is there empirical data behind it. if you're interested in data, this is the book for you. i want to expand on the last question and talk a little bit more about what happens when the baby boomers meet their demise. >> sure. >> ok? sorry to say we're all going to do that, looking out across. none of us up here of course. so you've made some very important insights about what happens when boomers meet their demise. what's next?

when they decline in their dominance in our society and culture. what should we expect to happen then? how will younger generations influence politics, economics, housing, and other critical aspects of our country? >> this is the big question, right? in terms of expecting what's going to happen over the intermediate term is what happened as americans get older. remember i said five years after the boom started you had to build all these kinder gardens. now they're retiring. so people born in 1957 hit 65 last year, so we're at the heart of retirees, and now america once again had to adjust to that, has to accommodate that how to deal with this bigger senior population. there's a lot of questions. it's extremely awkward to write a book in which you have to talk about a massive group of people who have to die. dem graphs, are like yeah that's going to happen. we don't know how long americans are going to live generally much

less as a collective but there's repercussions for that. we think about the wealth held you've probably heard this, also very wealthy but there's an enormous number. so per capita, n not wealthier but where does that wealth go? one factor is how long people live. if you were planning your retirement to live until you're 80 and you end up living to 90 and then have some medical crisis that throws your economics out of whack. so all of these conversations over the course of the next 20 years expect to be more than $50 trillion transferred from baby boomers to other places, institutions, family members, but that's very dependent upon this question of how long people live. and so we don't know that, is it the case that when baby boomers sell their houses it's going to be a glut in housing market? is no, because people are going to live a long time and the market is going to accommodate that. the real question that speaks to this panel is what happens with politics, and that is much more intricate than people realize.

we have a younger generation, more liberal, more diverse. but we've seen states, and the state that most looks like what the census bureau expects the demography of the country to look like in 2060 the state that looks like that most right now is the state of florida. florida is not a democratic state, right? i think you know this. but, but, but florida is also very different because their older population is much whiter, will be in the 60s, and it is also the hispanic population, cuban america, a much more conservative group. so what does that mean? what will that look like? it's not as clear cut as younger americans are going to stay liberal, although i think it's more like that they will. but it's not the case the republican party of today will be the republican party of 20 years from now either. >> let's move on to major garrett and david becker. i start with saying this.

in your book you create a hypothetical scenario in which things go terribly wrong at the voting, at a voting site and the nation byed -- nation wide fallout. what does this tell us about what could have gone wrong had it been a reality in 2020 or 2022? >> well, so we did pose a hypothetical and one of the things that struck us, we wrote this book mostly in the early part of 2022, and it came out in september. and i think major and i both agree we were very concerned about as people were focusing all on 2024 that we still had to guest past 22. and the, one of the big concerns we had and i've been working on my whole career about especially in the last few years, i'm not particularly concerned that people are going to be anointed the winners of an election in which they lost.

there are many, many checks against that, that's very unlikely. but the specter of political violence hangs over everything in the last few years, perhaps nowhere more so than here in arizona. and we were very concerned about how that could be catalyzed. i mean, there's a scenario in which a specific instance kind of provides the spark, there's also a hypothetical where no specific instance was necessary, that things could have gone off the rails very badly. i think it's also important to thoet, when we talk about the 2022 election, i know we feel this way and i suppose many of you in this room feel this way. we are far better off than we thought we might be five months ago, and that's a very good thing. that doesn't mean we're out of the woods. in fact when we start talking about 2024 we're definitely not

out of the woods. we're still in a very, very perilous point in our history as a democratic nation. but things are a little bit better than we thought they might be, the streets of phoenix were not set on fire, the election -- put ago side who anyone might have voted for, the election results were verified and confirmed just like they were in 2020 and the people who actually won, even when they won by very, very narrow margins took office. that's a good sign but we're going to have to be very vigilant going forward. >> one thing i would say on behalf of the book is the facts that you'll find in there about what happened in 2020, who made it happen, when i say who made it happen, what david and i mean is americans all over this country who do the hard work of putting elections together. in our country we do this on a decentralized basis, at the local level first and the local level has professionals, civil

servants. but has a great number of volunteers who are poll workers, who assist in this process, in their neighborhoods. and we essentially wrote the book initially, the original idea for it was just to write a love letter to the people in 2020 who made the election happen. the largest turnout in our history, the most diverse population to ever participate in an election, with very little day of election snarls or problems and the teeth of a global pandemic when we still did not have vaccinations and election administration is by definition a non-socially distance experience. you have to do it face to face at great peril. and many people got sick and were hospitalized in the service of this work. we in this country trained 400,000 new poll workers because 400,000 opted out. who were those 400,000? longstanding traditional poll workers who were aged, 60, 70,

80. of course they opted out because their health was jeopardized by the pandemic. so we trained 400,000 poll workers, most of them via zoom. highly difficult mechanism by which to convey the intricacies of being a poll worker. but we did it. it was a great civic accomplishment for this country, a great civic accomplishment. something when i was a child in this country we would universally celebrate across party lines as doing something uniquely american. not accepting failure, working through hard problems, living within a deadline, finding creative ways around hard problems, and working together, clabt illinois and create illinois. that's exactly what happened in 2020. it's something that should be celebrated and not may lined as a krien because it wasn't a crime. it was an american civic triumph, fact, and that will

never change. but those who want to demean it, those who want to slander it will always change their orientation. and i offer as proof the former president of the united states last night talking to his most rabid supporters at cpac and saying republicans have to master mail-in balloting and ballot harvesting. ok? that's not what he's been saying for two years, ok? why is he saying it? because he understands the politics of doing what republicans used to do. which is sort of mail-in balloting. look at the state, republicans were very good at mail-in balloting for decades. none of the apparatus or the laws or the procedures changed. only the outcome left one person and one party childishly aggrieved. well, that grievance threatens the future of this country, and our book is an answer to that

grievance. and the facts you will find in that book will never move. they will but we won't. >> can i ask, how many people in this -- please [applause] how many people in this room have volunteered to be a poll worker in the past? [applause] i mean, the facts that drove us to write this book is that the reality is our elections are secured, verified, and transparent as they've ever been in american history, that is the result of professionalism, that election officials, volunteer poll workers have built over the course of decades, and that's what led to the triumph, 160 million people casting a ballot in the middle of a global pandemic. 20 million more ballots, the highest turnout rate we've seen before, and the reason we're so

concerned about democracy is as we sit here there are tens of millions of americans who believe the exact opposite from the verifiable truth, which is that even when you have an election as for instance with the arizona attorney general's race that is very close, it is an election -- the election officials prayer, if you know election officials, if you know any of them find them and give them a hug. the official prayer is let the margins be wide. they don't care who wins as long as the margins are wide. when you get a statewide election decided by just over 200 votes, that's a nightmare, it represents a very closely divided state. there's nothing election officials can do about it, there's no laws that can enable you to know who won at 200 vote margin statewide race on election night. there's no way that can be done. there's just ballots that come in late that have to be verified and confirmed. and they did it. and the fact that there are

still tens of millions of americans, hundreds of thousands of people here in arizona that doubt the outcomes of elections regardless of whether margins are wide or narrow is an ongoing concern. >> thanks. i want to bring it back to arizona again a little bit because we had a situation here where four of the six top statewide offices or candidates i should say, republican candidates, were endorsed by former president trump. and four lost. all four lost. as you say, one, the attorney general's vote was 280 different i think, i had one of those myself back in 2014. but you wait for the recount and you honor the results. and that's not happening. some are still out there saying the election was stolen. so i want to be optimistic about what happened in 2022 and how it

might affect 2024. what would you say about such optimism? is that likely to play out in 2024? i know you don't have a crystal ball but what do you think? >> so i'm that optimistic for this country because i believe the country is durable, resilient, optimistic and forward moving. it always has been. fits and starts for sure. but this has been a traumatic time for this country, no question about it. but these arguments against the election in 2020 and 2022, they simply don't wear well. they've got nowhere to go because they are based on a foundation of fraud lnsy and they always will be. that doesn't mean some people won't buy into it but the durability of that cannot last. that's my belief. that's why i'm a net optimist about this. that's why in nevada, pennsylvania, michigan, wisconsin, when deniers lost, they more or less, more often

than not, conceded. and that was a very important part of this process. not only is the way we cast and count ballots important, but the recognition, if there's a recount, and then a concession, a concession is part of theglu that holds our system together. it's about the larger system. when you concede you are not a weakling, let me say that again. when you concede you are not a weakling, you are a strong american who is giving your voice to a process that you didn't prevail through but you're strong enough to say the system is bigger than i am. and the structure is bigger than i am. and that adds strength to america. it does not take it away. and i believe we'll see more of that in the future. [applause] >> i mean, i think major and i both share optimism, and now that i've said that i'm going to

say something pessimistic. there are still areas of this country where denial can lead to potential political violence, potential attempts to tsh that i think will ultimately fail but attempts to play games with the election system. i'm particularly concerned about this state, i'm particularly concerned about wisconsin. i think those two states are number one and number two on my list, not necessarily in that order. and one of the other dynamics that in my day job as leading a nonprofit, the center for election innovation research, we've done polling on this and one of the things that often shows up is that people's confidence in the election system diminishes farther away than where they live. this is what led this is what led to something we talk about in the book, the texas attorney general filed a lawsuit in december 2020 arguing

that election rules that everyone had an known about did not satisfy people in texas and some other states. imagine by the way being the chief law enforcement officer in a state and saying to another state, we don't like your election rules. this is one of the least conservative, least federalist 80 as you can imagine. that was quickly struck down by the supreme court. this doubt about election processes is spread by allies. that's how we get to something like january 6. it is not that people in arizona thought the arizona election was stolen and they went to washington. it is that people in wyoming caught the arizona election was stolen, thought the nevada election was stolen, and the pennsylvania election was stolen. they traveled all the way across the country to washington in january of 2021.

but that potential is still with us. we will have to remain extremely vigilant about it over the next two years especially as we have at least one declared presidential candidate and perhaps more that are willing to undermine the processes for the election. >> thank you. can we turn to will again and talk about your findings, that qanon influenced, and the followers were present at the insurrection, on january 6, and that violence has been connected to their beliefs that joe biden would be arrested by donald trump at the inauguration or that trump would be reinstated as president from whence forth? and share what you know about this bizarre notion that rfk, john kennedy, and michael jackson others would come back to dallas? >> sure.

[laughter] >> i don't get it but maybe you do. what happened there? >> it is a lot to cover. briefly jumping off the arizona election point, people say it could have been horse after the helmet should. you had a guy running for secretary of state who among other things was part of a coalition organized by a guy who impersonates jfk junior. he puts together -- he was called the qanon coalition. we usually could have had that run elections here. in terms of january 6, i think you and on, it would be hard to decipher their codes and what have you, it was an under registered factor. we look at the indictments on january 6 and it seems as though the proud boys and other groups uncovered, they and the oath keepers allegedly saw that there

would be gaps and they would like to spark. a lot of that restless energy and desire for violence came from qanon. i spoke to a woman who believes in qanon. i opened the book this way. she had come from across the country because she thought that they would be the storm. for q and nonbelievers, that is the day they think donald trump would execute all his enemies, including barack obama, hillary clinton, or send them to guantanamo bay and author in a fascist utopia. they like this idea. this woman thought so and she was there to rescue the children being kept in underground tunnels. all this crazy stuff. she would ultimately be arrested. when you look at other people who are charged, over 60 q and nonbelievers who were arrested because of the roles and generate sixth, several people died including ashli babbitt who were convinced of the storm.

qanon had a big role providing that manpower. when you promise people all of your problems will be solved and your debts will be abolished, your political enemies and people you hate, it will help lead up to the violence. should we move to jfk junior? so a faction of q and nonbelievers, for the life of me i don't understand, they think jfk junior faked his death in the 1990's in a plane crash to reemerge and help donald trump take on the cabal. where it gets really interesting, roughly 30% of q and nonbelievers, where it gets interesting is there are specific guys they think are jfk juniors. these guys will be out and about . i already mentioned one who was meddling in elections.

there's another guy who wears a fedora whose name is vincent. he shows up at these things and everyone says well, it is jfk junior. he's nice personally but he won't admit it. he's obviously not jfk junior. [laughter] i ran into him once at one of these events. all these women were like, it is jfk junior, like he's a heartthrob. i said, you know that's not him, right? it doesn't even look like him. and they say, haven't you ever heard of hollywood? they have some special effects going on here, like i'm the dupe. [laughter] this belief, you mentioned the dallas crew, a cultlike group within qanon, not only jfk junior, jfk senior, all of these celebrities who died tragically were going to come back to dallas and return to life. these people mobbed the city of

dallas and anyone they see, that guy looks like robin williams, that's him. there is a sad aspect to this. i got a call from a guy who was like, my wife disappeared into this group and i have not heard from her in weeks. sad stories. in the book i try and balance, there is comedy and ridiculousness to it, but it's sad for a personal level and the country as a whole. >> wow. read this book. [laughter] you need to scare the hell out of yourself. i want to turn next to philip. your book, with data and analysis, explaining the baby boom and how it impacted every aspect of our country from 1946 on. do you use data to explain how pervasive the boomer impact on who we are as americans, for example, and this is something that will probably resonate with the audience, you discussed the

influence of boomer music on our culture. as one of the many here this afternoon who still live music of our time, can you talk about this particular boomer influence ? >> ok. it is sort of hard to encapsulate. i think it is an important part of this. when we talk about the baby boom importance, we talk about everything that is america today. everything until recently is about a massive group of people. one of the most telling quotes, in which the way the media environment has changed, you can sit in your room in cleveland and get $1 million overnight.

which is true. social media empowers anyone to become a face and a voice and someone who can say things, crazy cumin on things, or that the election has been stolen. but that is different. when the ab boomers were young, they were gatekeepers. -- baby boomers were young, they were gatekeepers. there were all these ways in which they were very limited avenues forward. you have things like the beatles, the rolling stones, i still know all these bands because my parents were born in 1948 and it was what i grew up listening to because the boomer influence is so big and i'm generation x. the point is that nowadays, you can record your own song, being your own musician. there was a great example in the times a couple years ago. this guy in a eastern european

country took a hip-hop song and it became a number one song after remixing it. i think the important thing here is not only the consistent and pervasive influence of baby boomers, not only music but movies and everything else, they were a big market for so long, that everyone wanted to sell things to them, but the important thing is when we talk about how those gatekeepers are fractured, and how young people in particular can challenge older people and use this tool, lack of a gatekeeper to speak directly to older generations, that is not something baby boomers could do. when the vietnam war protest emerged, you would just go and protest and hope the san francisco chronicle would pick it up.part of the generational tension we are seeing in this moment is rooted in the fact that you can be confronted like that. when you think about something like the ok boomer phenomena, what was that? people on tiktok. all of a sudden it was a place

were more older people were creating content and younger people native to tiktok were irritated by it. they take the content from older people, and they take terrible songs, and say ok boomer to this. it is just because of their ability to speak directly to older generations. obviously the musical influence is huge, but it is undergirding the erosion of gatekeepers that speaks to the challenges we are seeing right now. > in your epilogue, this is for major and david, you discussed the notion in the talk , on tv and online and social media that we are on the verge of the civil war. you say this is the language of fatalism and retreat. now we have a q&a on member of the house of representatives, in a position of authority, certainly gets airtime, calling for a national divorce between red states and blue states.

what can be done about this kind of rhetoric and pushback on this kind of notion? i know that you believe we have a solid system, but it is being further eroded by these kinds of comments. >> it is true. one of the things we are seeing, it has always been around, but we are seeing this more so now than ever, that we have kind of media silos telling us our fellow americans, neighbors, friends, family, are our avenue mise -- are our enemies. it is not exclusively on the right. it is across the political spectrum. we all siloed to some degree, including myself. it is difficult to be challenged constantly. major and i went down rabbit holes of election denials to write this book and it is not fun. that is a very very dangerous philosophy. it is something our enemies and try to get us to believe for a

long time. if you look at back at the russian disinformation and other disinformation prominent in 2016 and onward, a lot of it is designed not so much to pursue a particular policy but to get americans split between policies. you see them promoting a black lives matter readily across the street from in all lives matter rally in the same city. they don't care which one wins. they just want us to be angry at each other. this can lead to talk of civil war of dividing our nation in a variety of ways, and seeing, let's be honest, 74 million people voted for donald trump in 2020. they are not all insurrectionists. they are not all bad people. they have different policy prescriptions. they are good americans. major and i participated in a focus group in phoenix a couple weeks ago with people who had

serious doubts about the election put on by the cronkite school of journalism and franklin's. we sat with him and to be honest it was not fun for them either. they were challenged for two hours. we did not change minds. we did reach understandings and some goodwill was built over time. one of them visited the maricopa county elections office and his understanding now the checks and balances that go into elections that the things he had hearing ballots, dead venezuelan dictators, ballots made out of bamboo, i wish i was making this stuff up. it is something all of us can do which is it is easy to look on people that we disagree with as the other and enemies. to some degree, we will have to come together a little beyond that and that means being

comfortable in some opposing views. it is uncomfortable because of these held. >> beliefs one of>> the reasons david and i committed to doing it is because we wanted to hear what people thought who either reject or deny the 2020 and 2022 election. they mostly deny and reject both. we wanted to hear why, and if anything, lower the temperature a little bit. i don't think we change anyone of their minds, but they were heard and they had a chance to express themselves and be to their satisfaction respected. on the other set of that event, david and i said, what did we really accomplish? with the accomplishment of having interacted, listened, interactive discourse, nobody yelled or threw a punch, we just sorted the sound. if i would say anything about this position -- part of what

marjorie taylor greene does is relentlessly push the boundaries of outrageousness because that is a method for her to do short-term things. raise money and increase her visibility. lots of politicians have short term goals. that is something in american politics. hers is a particularly egregious form of short-term goal seeking and making. she will have to defend it. you might expect her republicans colleagues say that's outrageous, we should not talk about a national divorce. my point is don't wait for other political leaders to rescue this country. you will have to rescue this country. the reliance i have and the optimism i have is not based on political leadership. it is based on you. it is based on your attendance. it is based on your faith in this country. it is based on your sense of what this great american experiment is about and why it matters and deserves to be preserved.

don't wait for them to rescue this country. rescue it yourselves. i beg of you. [applause] >> we want to go to questions, but i want to do a rapid round with each of our panelists to answer questions that is the subject of this panel today. what can we expect in 2024? tell us what should we expect from your perspective, what should we expect in 2024? >> i'm low on ron desantis' chances. i recommend people watch a video of him talking and calibrate your thoughts on that. also just from my topic area, we will see a resurgence of these conspiracy theory groups that have been under the radar and as trump returns to prominence and we get more political tension in the country every day, we will see groups like proud boys

perhaps or some splinter groups become more visible and active. >> i will say it is important to remember that 2020 and 2024 is four years and that is a long time. it does not seem like it. but it is a long time and a lot of things can happen over four years. i mean that in two ways. december 20 19th, none of us could have predicted what happened in 2020. i also mean the demography and people change. now we have an expectation in the same way that it happened in 2016, with efforts to reshape the narrative, this not effective effort by the russians to change what happened, it is not the same thing that happened in 2020. if you look at what happened in 2020 and 2022, something changed . a lot of americans recognize what occurred from 2020, november 3, 2020 until january 6 2021 was a huge crisis.

a lot of americans responded to that. maybe they did not love democrats but they came out to vote in the midterms because they were more worried about what might happen to american democracy. i got out of the production business on november 8, 20 16. [laughter] but we should say that the elections will continue to get younger and americans are now very cognizant that this is a real room -- moment of risk. >> so to answer the question what should we expect in 2024, i want to take you back to february 11, 2020.that's when joe biden came in fifth in the new hampshire primary. all of you then, i'm sure, predicted within a month, he would be the democratic nominee. [laughter] right? you were all sure of it. you all knew. i wish you had called me. my point is, politics shifts and

it shifts rapidly. whether this rube is comfortable or uncomfortable -- room is comfortable or uncomfortable, you have to consider trump the republican favorite until he's defeated and someone stands on stage, and says you are wrong, i am right, i have the coalition behind me to elevate me to the primary and that is a long way away. nikki haley is saying we need a new generation of leadership is not say that p republicans don't know how to say what they need to say to replace them with the former president. you have to knock him out. you have to defeat the front runner. that's not easy business. it's hard business. you need a strategy and tenacity. you need means i which are just to raise money. ron desantis is very good at raising money. so was jeb bush. so was hillary clinton. they are not presidents.

it is hard business. it will be the hardest thing republicans, if they want to have a post trump or alternate trump republican party, have to do. they don't have a means or roadmap to do it. for president biden, everyone expects him to run. i fully expect him to run. there are a lot of ways in which the 2024 campaign will look different than when he was less required to be less -- to be visible. it was not an active campaign. no one was doing rallies and events and traveling. issues of his age and acuity will inevitably be a part of presidential campaigns that will be viewed from lots of different ways across the political spectrum with unpredictable results. my only point is predicting

anything in 2024 is extremely difficult because of the turnout model. the electorate is engaged, showing up in larger and more volatile numbers, all of it makes it difficult with any degree of confidence to tell you what will happen in 2024. i know you were all sure that biden would roll everyone up in new hampshire. [laughter] >> i will avoid like philip any political predictions. i'm notoriously bad at them. but i will talk about the health of our democracy overall. one thing we know is the incentive structure is out of whack. there's an ecosystem of grifters getting very rich and perceive the opportunity for political power even if they are wrong.

by spreading lies about the health of our democracy and the outcomes of elections, that will continue. election officials in this country are currently under threat. we are over 850 days since the november 2020 election. that has not abated they are getting threats today as we sit here. there are people prosecuting -- prosecuted for making threats. there are people raising a ton of money either in political power or not by spreading lies. they will continue to do this. people forget often in 2020, donald trump was delegitimizing the election process back in march of 2020 and that wasn't even the beginning. he was saying elections were rigged in 2016. he was using the birther conspiracy as a narrative in 2012. these were things we were going to say. the question is not whether or not we will be millions of

americans who doubt the outcome of elections in 2024. the question is whether there are just a few million americans or major political parties reject the fringe movements or whether there are tens of millions of americans and one of the major parties flirts with tractor channel that. what we are seeing as there is no channeling that. that is a force that were overwhelmed -- will overwhelm any chance to redeem them and will corrupt them overwhelmingly. i say to everyone although this is not 50-50 between political parties, not even close, it is also not 100-0. there are elements on the left. there have been elements of individuals who denied elections in the past. there are people who refused to concede in the past.

so it's not equivalent at all but it can be all of us. who among us has not experienced a bitter election in the last 10 years? we will just have to process it and be ok with it. sometimes the candidates we believe in lose. they are good americans who voted for candidates who lost. they realize hopefully the right thing to do is fight for the next election. >> thank you. we have time for a couple questions. yes, ma'am. >> [inaudible] -help me understand- why it is that the parties are accepting the down ballot election results but not the up ballot election results. how can i understand how they can justify that? >> yes. the question was, how can people

believe in the integrity of a race that was down ballot on the same ballot where they doubt the integrity of the races up the ballot? this came up in the focus groups. there was an individual who doubted donald trump had lost in 2020 and doubted kari lake had lost, but he talked about a arizona congressperson he really liked, and because this person really fights for his values. i asked him, do you think this person was legitimately elected in 2020 and 2022, because he was literally on the same piece of paper as these other races, literally a couple lines down? you can kind of see him for a second. he kind of realized where i was going with that. he said at that point, actually now that you mentioned it, i don't know that i believe he was legitimately elected. >> wow! >> we were trying to engage. this is not a criticism of this

individual. i asked, who benefits when we all doubt the outcome of virtually any election, because we can't process the outcome of one race? the answer goes back to what i was saying earlier. our adversaries benefit. our adversaries tried to say that we failed and now we are doing it for ourselves. you have all voted in arizona. arizona had paper ballots for decades. very few changes in the election pasta's in 2020 because of covid -- process in 2020 because of covid. republik and started the mail ballot system. the same pieces of paper elected members of congress had been elected to the electoral count just a few weeks later and there's no reconciling that cognitive dissonance. >> another question quickly?

>> gerrymandering. is there a way to address this problem effectively before 2024? >> no. >> no. >> no. [laughter] >> can i make a point about this? reason know is because it's done with the census. i went back and looked, there is a theory that when you gender -- gerrymander, you get more ideologically extreme. i found that was true on the democratic side. the gerrymandered districts that were heavily democratic went more ideologically liberal. the moderate ones did not. on the republican side, they went far more conservative regardless of how they were gerrymandered. just an interesting thing i discovered. >> one more quick question. >> i ask my question as a poll worker who believes that the

audit process and the recount processes, i think we can stand up to that kind of a challenge. what scares me more are the things called board of canvassers or houses of representatives, state houses, who have tried to overturn the results of our precincts. i'm just wondering how -- should we be worried about that? >> we have to be vigilant about it. worried is probably a strong word. we've seen efforts notably in new mexico and arizona where the county boards or boards of canvases or elections are called different things in different places sought to essentially cast doubt or a to certified results that professionals had come up with. the poll workers who were trained and clerks who were trained and professional and there were efforts. the good news is everyone of

those has been challenged in court and failed. that's the good sign. we will still see efforts along the lines to challenge -- and thank you for being a poll worker and all of you who have done that. [applause] those of you who served, there's a reason you get trained for hours before the election. there's a reason you show up hours before the polls open on election day, which means you are waking up at 3:00 or 4:00 in the morning. there's a reason you stay for hours after the polls close. there's a reason you have people observing you and watching throughout the day. there are checks and balances. close elections are close elections.nothing . there's -- nothing we can do about them. there's a process we have. i'm not worried somehow losers will be anointed winners. i am worried these efforts will undermine confidence and lead to

political violence. >> i'm sorry, we have run out of time, but i want to have you join me in thanking our panelists. they've done a great job. [applause] thank you all. [captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. visit ncicap.org] [captions copyright national cable satellite corp. 2023] >> thanks for joining us here in tucson for the tucson festival of books on the campus of the university of arizona. this is book tv's live coverage. another author discussion is coming up in about half an hour. it is on big business and innovators. one of the people you will hear speaking is the founder of grubhub. his name is mike evans. his book is called "hangry."

in the meantime, joining us is author chris whipple. his most recent book is "the fight of his life: the inside story of joe biden's white house." this is one of the first books about the biden administration, isn't it? >> great to be with you. i was looking over my shoulder expecting to see bob woodward or someone else creeping up from behind. i've got two other books. the gatekeepers and white house chief of staff. the spy masters and cia directors. those are cumulatively more than 100 years of history. this book covers two and yet this was more difficult. this was a bigger challenge. writing a book about a white house in progress is kind of like designing an airplane in midflight. you get it blown off course by events in real-time, an invasion

of ukraine. you are hoping you can land the plane safely and compounding the challenge is that this is one of the most distant -- batten down, disciplined, on script, leakproof white houses in modern history. despite that, i was able to get pretty candid stories from almost all of joe biden's inner circle. >> were you able to talk to the president himself? >> it was an unusual arrangement we arrived at, which was written answers he would give me to my written questions. in the end, i think i got some quite revealing things from the president. > where did the title come from? the fight of his life? >> you can think of joe biden's life, his whole career, as a kind of fight against adversity, against tragedy, bad luck. he lost his wife and infant

daughter in a car crash. he lost his son to a brain tumor. . he lost two attempts at the presidency. his father always said get up. he did. he ultimately won the presidency. for joe biden, when vladimir putin invaded ukraine in february 2022, that became the fight of joe biden's life. >> 9/11 happened on george w. bush's white house, early on. is this the defining moment for the biden white house? >> absolutely. my book and the biden presidency is kind of a political thriller in three acts. the first was the fraught transition from donald trump, to biden a transition that almost did not happen as we know. act two is the first year of the biden presidency, which was very

tough, overshadowed by the debacle of the afghanistan withdrawal, decline in approval ratings. the third act i believe began on february 24, 2022 with putin's invasion. joe biden rose to meet that moment in a way i think no one else could have. i think certainly one of the defining tests. the other two i think historians will look at are the once in a century pandemic, and how did he deal with that. finally the third defining test of the biden presidency is how he has faced down or met the challenge, the persistence of trumpism and maga which is very much with us. >> fight of his life, there's a lot about donald trump in this book. ways that? -- why is that? >> that's right.

one thing that shocked joe biden more than anything else is the lasting power of trumpism. biden thought it would be in the rearview mirror along time ago. he had this old-school belief that he had won by 7 million votes. he had a mandate. he thought it would pass. throughout his presidency, you can tell he tried to do contradictory things. one was to unify the country. the other was to call out mag a and the threat to democracy. each tried to do both and increasingly the latter. >> you have been in washington a long time and describe the biden administration as somewhat leakproof. how does that happen? >> joe biden has been around long enough, in government service for decades.

he's seen the great white house come and go. he's seen the bad ones come and go. ron klain had a lot to do with the way this white house is run from day one. i put him in the company of the great white house chief of staff including james baker the third under ryan -- ronald reagan, leon panetta under bill clinton. he has a rare set of schools that includes white house experience, knowledge of capitol hill, deep political savvy, a very even temperament, and maybe most importantly a long relationship with the boss. what that enables the white house chief of staff to do among other things is tell the president what he does not want to hear which is the most important thing. i think the new chief of staff has very big shoes to fill. >> what do you know about him? >> he is regarded as a managerial genius.

he's made a lot of money in the private sector but he's a guy who's brilliant at making government work. when the obama health care website imploded, nobody had the foggiest idea how to fix it. they called him and he fix it. he ran the coronavirus response team and got 220 million americans vaccinated. he has a temperament that is syria -- similar. he's well-liked. the only thing he may lack is his deep political savvy and the decades long relationship with the boss. >> chris whipple is our guest. chris whipple has a 40 year journalism career. he worked in foreign policy magazine, life magazine, 60 minutes, abc news primetime, etc. we are talking about his newest

book, "the fight of his life: the inside story of joe biden's white house." phone numbers are on the screen. 202 is the area code for all numbers. (202) 748-8000 four democrats. we will begin taking your calls in just a few minutes. if you want to text a message in, you can do so. 202-748-8903. include your first name and city if you will text a message. two years in, how was the biden administration doing. >> it has been a journey and evolution. joe biden is a much better president today than he was in late 2021. i was there at the white house the weekend that joe biden flew to europe to the climate conference in glasgow

empty-handed while the build back better bill and bipartisan infrastructure bills were twisting in the wind. some people thought his presidency was in jeopardy. ron klain was on the verge of resigning. he decided to stay. he's come a long way since. i think he was uniquely prepared to rally nato in defense of ukraine and western democracy. he did that magnificently. afghanistan is another story. since then, he's had a remarkable string of legislative success which culminated in the unexpected defiance of the odds in the november 2022 midterms. i think biden goes into his third year with momentum. >> is he going to run again? >> almost without a doubt. the only person who could talk him out of it is his most

influential advisor, dr. jill biden. all indications are that she is on board. presidents do not generally walk away from the oval office easily. the last person who did it voluntarily is richard nixon. joe biden loves being president and i think he feels he has unfinished business. >> i think you meant lyndon johnson in 1968. involuntarily for the next president. >> that's right. >> let's hear from our viewers. let's begin with kathleen here in tucson. you are on with author chris whipple. >> hello. i'm so glad to get on. as you talk about, you indicated that ron barber replaced all see gabbard. ron barber replaced gabby gifford. >> i am so sorry.

that was me. of course it was gabby gifford. sorry about that. i know he was the chief of staff. i apologize for the. thank you. >> no problem. we are in tucson and we love gabby so we wanted to make sure we got that straight. thank you. >> thank you. anything for our guest? that was just for me and my mistake. [laughter] here i am correcting you and i made the mistake. let's hear from great falls, montana. talking about the biden administration. >> yes. i've been a lifelong republican until the last 10 years. i became disillusioned with that. i still live in a republican state, republican majority even where i live. i'm just wondering, what is it going to take before people in this country will put the

betterment of the country first in place of personality? >> and before we hang up on you, why did you become disillusioned with the republican party? >> because republicans, from what i have observed in montana, are more about lowering taxes for businesses than they are about providing services for people on medicaid or social security, who need a safety net. they would rather cut those and keep them solo that the living standard is so meager. the quality of life is very poor. we are losing -- >> charlene, one final question. what is your view about joe biden?

>> i am so proud of joe biden. i can't even tell you. and i have never been a democrat. i was proud of him when he went after trumpism when he was running. he called it for what it was. i'm proud that he's showing his experience in diplomacy. i thought i would never feel that way about a democrat. i couldn't even vote for jimmy carter and i was a farmer's wife. so it is a pride of change. >> thank you, charlene. chris whipple, what did you hear from that viewer regarding the republicans,, president trump and president biden? >> it seems to me her question was when will republicans stop voting for personalities and start voting for issues that matter. i think there's no question about the fact that the republican party has been captive to a cult of personality in the form of trump. i think that the biden white

house presumes, or at least is planning, on facing trump as the likely republican nominee. which is not to say it will definitely happen but i think he is still the front-runner. i think he still has a viselike grip on a large portion of the republican base. so that is the bad news. the good news is the recent midterms are referred to before, at least some indication that normal is starting to beat crazy, as mike barnicle put it at one point on morning joe. let's a story i tell in my book. joe biden, before the midterms, wanted to go everywhere and talk about everything. he wanted to brag about his achievements. ron klain is what the white

house chief sat him down and said mr. president, you will go to the following states, you will talk about women's reproductive rights and the threat to democracy from maga. joe biden ended up following that script and the rest is history. the democrats defied the odds in the november midterms. there's a good chance that will happen in 2024. >> is the biden white house hoping donald trump will be the nominee in 2024 >>? hoping would be the wrong word. i think they just assume that biden is -- that trump is a front-runner. he's wounded. he is politically weakened, but he's dangerous. i don't think anybody knows whether ron desantis for example , one of his principal challengers, whether he's ready

for prime time, whether he can really take a punch when he's on stage with donald trump. there are still uncertainties. i think it is prudent for the biden white house to plan on trump. >> brett is calling from des moines, iowa. good afternoon. >> hello. i'm shocked i got on even. thank you chris and to the moderator. thank you again. i have been a republican all my life. i voted democrat since obama. you need to get rid of maga. and get rid of qanon. there is hope, you just need to get a split and run with it. >> are you saying that if donald trump were the nominee in 2024

would you support joe biden? >> i supported joe biden last time and i am a staunch republican. >> why is that? >> because i've seen it goes so far to the other side with all this twitter and youtube and all the other things. >> thank you so much. appreciate your time. one of the things you write about is the meeting that ron klain had with all the former chief of staff going in. what was that like? >> it is fascinating. one month before the inauguration in december 2020, ron klain had a's doom call -- a zoom call with 19 of the 22 white house chiefs of staff.

i don't think trump knew they were on the call or they would have put an end to it. they gave a wide range of advice. one thing that was fines -- fascinating is lyndon johnson's white house chief said look, you have got to make sure you take care of joe biden and make sure he gets his rest. i'm 82 years old, i recognize him. i am an expert at stumbling when i walk up the stairs. i see him reaching for words that are not on the tip of his tongue. i am make sure that lbj got a nap every afternoon and you need to be careful with joe biden. believe it or not, lbj was guess how old when he left office? 60. joe biden will be 82 when he runs for reelection. it will be a bruising reelection battle. i think age is a legitimate

issue. but all of biden's inner circle will tell you that this is a guy with plenty of energy and is firing on all cylinders mentally. >> donald trump continued a tradition of leaving a letter for his successor. didn't he? >> this is an amazing story that got very little attention. it was the afternoon of january 20th, joe biden was walking into the january office -- office the first time us president. he broke down briefly. it was emotional. one of his staffers said, mr. president, here's a letter. he walked around the resolute desk, pulled out the drawer and there was a letter, two pages, oversized and small handwriting from donald trump. he read it, he looked up at his staff, and said, this was

gracious. shockingly gracious. biden has not told anyone so far as we know what was in that letter. perhaps joe biden knows. but my question is, how do you write a shockingly gracious letter to joe biden without acknowledging that he's president of the united states? i would think if i were merrick garland, i would want to read that letter. >> that tradition has continued, hasn't it. the president leaves a letter for his successor and at the same time does not share the contents. do we know the contents of any of those? >> yes, we do and eventually we will know the contents of this. some presidents have shared the contents later. jen psaki, that then press secretary, immediately asked joe biden, would you like us to put out a statement? and biden said no, it is between him and me.

that is joe biden. he's old school when it comes to keeping confidences no matter who the other person is. >> anthony is calling in from indianapolis. go ahead with your question or comment. >> chris, thank you for writing the book. your book is titled the fight of his life. is he prepared, and i think he's making very good moves, to win or support ukrainians' unequivocal victory in ukraine, i.e. the complete expulsion of russian forces from the donbass? >> it's a great question. really important question. there's a lot of nonsense in my view being written about a negotiated settlement between ukraine and russia, while russia still occupies land that is clearly ukraine's.

when i spoke to bill burns, the cia director, about this, he said he believed that if there were any settlement, it would be a pause before vladimir putin went back for the rest of ukraine. that occupying all of ukraine is an existential thing for vladimir putin. i think joe biden believes stopping vladimir putin is existential not only for ukraine but for western democracy. i think he's been clear eyed about putin more so than any predecessors. he never looked into vladimir putin's eyes and saw his soul. joe biden knows that putin respects one thing and one thing only. that is for spirit >> what is a -- that is force. >> what is a critique you have about joe biden's administration?

>> i think i'm pretty clear eyed in the book about his successes and failures. we are trying to talk about a debacle of the withdrawal from afghanistan. i call it a whole of government failure where everyone did almost everything wrong. that began with the intelligence. tony blinken told me, the secretary of state, that everything we did was based off a fatally flawed intelligence assessment that the afghan government would last for 18 months. this was news to cia director bill burns when i sat down with him. there was a lot of finger-pointing as you can imagine after the fact as there always is when you have a defeat like that. i think i'm clear i'd about it with failures as well as successes. >> j is in rock island, illinois. you are on with chris whipple. >> i'm calling in because to me,

trump is just like hitler's. in fact, if trump gets back in, they will bring back putin because putin is exactly like trump. we have to stop somebody like that. america needs to get more educated and read up on what hitler was like. hitler went to prison before he became a dictator of germany. trump is just like hitler. american people need to stop voting for a party and religion. they need to vote for what's best for america. america is a great country if we put the right people in to run it. when you have people like trump, trump is never ever done anything for anybody except for himself. he does not care about the people of america. the working people of america. we worked to put this together

don't take it apart. and biden is a wonderful president. he has moved many things. nobody's perfect. he had to learn how other people live besides himself. he has learned all that. he's done all this. i really appreciate him as a president of the united states. and please, people get better educated. stop voting just -- >> we are going to leave it there. we appreciate it. any comments? >> well, you are not alone in that view. [laughter] i write about it in the book. the moment that triggered joe biden's run for the presidency in 2020 was the charlottesville events. it really shocked biden. i think he felt, as one of his aides put it, that was a door he

had to move faster close. >> next call, mary, las vegas. good afternoon. >> yes. hello. biden's age doesn't bother me at all. nikki haley's comments about being tested for acuity or whatever she said is a bunch of campaign rhetoric. i can see where all politicians could probably take lie detector tests, but i think he's done a phenomenal job. i don't know that i blame him all that much for afghanistan. if i'm correct, didn't we get 180,000 people out? >> that's true. >> that's a lot of people to get out and i don't know a perfect way to get them out. . also trump negotiated a surrender with the taliban. how good could it have gone anyway since they were being let out of jail? and trump sent the kurds to their deaths.

so i think biden is doing a phenomenal job. >> can i address that? she is absolutely right about this. in fairness to biden and his team when it comes to afghanistan, when donald trump had his half-baked negotiation with the taliban and set a deadline of march 1, 2020 one for the u.s. withdrawal, the handwriting was on the wall for everyone to read and the afghan government and armed forces read it. they realized the u.s. was going to hit the road and they hit the road first. i do think she has a point that it was extremely difficult for biden because that stage had already been set. >> two years into the biden administration, there are three surviving, at this point, former democratic presidents. two republicans, i believe. has president biden reached out

to his predecessors? >> that's a great question. he has. he's been very private about it. he has certainly spoken to obama. they have a really fascinating relationship. it's been described as a kind of bromance. but it is more complicated than that. they have a bond because among other things, barack obama really took biden under his wing when his son beau was terminally ill. it's a close relationship. but there's always some competition between presidents. barack obama was not thrilled at the beginning when joe biden's aides were going around saying, he's going to be like fdr, and that guy obama, that stimulus he did was small potatoes. we are going bigger. that did not sit well with barack obama. >> didn't barack obama also say

there's no situation joe biden has looked at and not gotten wrong? something about that? >> i think it is true but that was bob yates who said that -- bob gates, who said that. the former secretary who said biden has been wrong about everything. we don't have time to get into that but i could give him a pretty good argument. >> the fight of his life is the name of the book inside joe biden's white house. book tv's live coverage. for an author discussion on big business and innovators includes mike evans, founder of grubhub, talking about his book.

>> good afternoon and welcome to the final hour -- we have three very distinguished authors writing about big business. they are experts and i'm ford burkart with a silenced cell phone. i hope you have the same. i have only had three sessions with phones that went off in the middle of sessions. how about you?

first is mike evans, in the middle. his book is called "hangry" and that is a word you knew before you wrote the book. you said it -- >> i think everyone has felt it. [laughter] dinner is an hour and a half late. >> you didn't make up the word. it was around in your georgia days? >> that's right. >> i accused him of using an informal word in his book so he could sell it to ordinary folks in north carolina. it is about starting the powerhouse, grubhub, on his own nickel. from just a few hundred dollars of his own, it was worth $2

billion and a lot more. he was soon at the very top of the food delivery business. he has degrees from the university of chicago -- >> m.i.t. just m.i.t. >> he's also a heck writer. his book is called "hangry" and that's a clue -- he told us his journey that he did after he sold grubhub was from the atlantic to the pacific, every inch of it. took him weeks, months. >> three months by bike. >> it is a dramatic personal journey which makes this wonderful story about technology and resourcefulness and resilience.

it is a really good raid. he is now starting a new venture called fixer.com. i hope you will tell us about that as the day goes along. our second author is jamie fiore higgins. her book is bully market. it takes us inside goldman sachs, one of the top three or four banks in the world and document its mistreatment of women and workers generally. jamie from goldman, as she was known. lives in new jersey with her husband and four children. she coaches leadership skills, high school and college graduates getting into new careers and professionals entering the workforce. bully more -- bully market, my

story of money and misogyny at goldman sachs, published by simon & schuster, last august. just an aside, if you have a daughter granddaughter, niece who is graduating from college and thinking about success on wall street, give her this book. as a roadmap and warning of the dangers in the road. third is eric conway, noted historian of science and technology. he works for the california institute of technology or caltech. something new for our audience today, he has just told me he served as an enlisted man in the navy and rose to be an officer in the navy. to me, that says he is a smart maverick in his book says that

as well. his new -- new book is the big myth -- how american business taught us to loathe government and love the free market. it is just out a few weeks ago. 550 pages -- it is a piece of history that is one of the most formidable pieces of research and writing i've seen and i was at the university here. i asked if he is the top author writing about the big myth -- the big myth is the belief business knows everything, they can just get on the way and let them solve global warming and covid and they will just take care of it. sure they will. he said i don't know if i am the number one. i said it is the biggest book on

the big myth. that is partly because there has been a lot more history. that's what the book is all about. one thing about you, your big adventure, you have managed to convince your wife to do a book tour across austria. the urge to make dramatic and wonderful journeys continues. before i move on to my other questions, i want to say the authors will proceed to a sale and signing area on the mall. it's out the door, turn right, head south and look for the ua bookstore tent and that will be

it and we will all go home happy. eric, i would like to aim a question to you. mike was kind enough to send me a starter question for his other two options. in his book, there's a strong criticism of capitalism gone rampant in a way that hurts individuals at scale. if it isn't the invisible hand of the market, what elements need to come together for a business to be a force for good? eric, then jamie, then mike. >> that's a rough question for a historian because our job is to

fundamentally explain how the world got to be the way it is and not so much telling how to fix it. and yet, we get asked this kind of futurist question all the time. what are actors did fundamentally was figure out how to change the way americans thought about the relationship between business and government and the market. through very long term strategic use of propaganda of a particular distorted and select form in order to convince americans that the government was bad, even though the government is us and in democratic society, we choose the government, at least that is the idea. we had to explain how did it come to be when someone he

americans understand the state is the enemy? how to fix it, there is this propaganda machine out there and inoculate yourself against it by reading our book and others. so you are not part of that problem and in that way, especially if people read the book and take this lesson out of it, we can return to a form of capitalism like we used to have that had more community spirit by business in which businesses saw it as part of their function to build in their community and reinvest in their community and you can get to a fairer, friendlier version of capitalism . part of what we do is suggest to you europeans have a different form of capitalism. we almost all have great order

-- greater social protections and labor protections and yet are still capitalistic and so, we will be branded as socialists and communists talking about our book, but we are not. we are pointing out there are lots of varieties of capitalism. we understand you can make a better capitalism than the one we have had today. >> let me go to jamie. what has to happen to make a business more than a profitable entity to be an actual force for good? >> when i think about the big business i worked at, goldman sachs, they do a lot of things that are very philanthropic in terms of a sense of community, they have a huge philanthropic office to donate loads and loads of money, but the rabbit is it's

not going on within the four walls. this great tagline at the top of the organization, how things get lost in translation. the c suite does all the right things about hiring people of diverse backgrounds, but yes, the actual day today is really structured that only the typical cis white man can be successful. from the outside, look at all the good they are doing. on the inside, although you are paid well, it cost you a lot personally. >> in the book, i talk about what it is like to make an app in the app gets bigger, like

very big, really scaled out of my wildest dreams. not to have to much of a spoiler but one of the conclusions i come to in the end is to be a force for good, businesses need to have intentionality built into their dna from the very beginning. in the years since grubhub, since i started my new company, i've gotten involved with impact investing. it is those businesses where the profit they create and social benefit they create cannot be divorced. for example, in the company i recently started, it is five years ago now, it is an on-demand, in person service with a full-time workforce and benefits. it is so hard to find any person, so what if we just trained people from scratch? our competitive differentiator

and training, creating a gender inclusive packed, they are the same thing and cannot be divorced. there's no way for our business to grow unless we train tradespeople. those kinds of business are emerging as ever more successful and everything from the venture capital to private equity all the way through esg investing in public markets, there is a hunger for businesses like this, even from the investment side from the societal need perspective. >> i want to say i love what you are saying about intentionality. i think that is the big difference -- from my experience, you say the right thing but there's not really an intention action to bring it forth. that is the key to get all these goals and marry them with clear, actionable steps. so what they espouse to be

becomes what they really are. >> quick question -- you train people pre-well to be on the job strike -- on the jobsite. my wife is out there hoping you will tell me something about not getting on a ladder at age 81. >> we do very thorough training and people would be shocked to learn how much training we do on ladders. ladders are the number one cause of injury in the workplace, so a 10 foot long lever arm, you can tear a rotator cuff, there are all kinds of things you can do with ladders, so yes, we have substantial training material on ladders if you would like to engage. >> no dangerous ladders. i thought about your company and picked up the phone.

what is it going to take to get your company into new cities? >> we are in phoenix now. seattle, denver -- do you have to get some management people? how do you branch out? >> we have cities in our experience willing to train and mentor new candidates. >> my wife threw in a question and said what was the secret sauce -- her father was in the food business in chicago and a lot of people failed. what was the secret sauce and why was it you that was going to make history? >> at first, when i started, it turns out calling on the phone

is terrible. nobody agreed with me. everybody is like i don't see the big problem until you realize you get put on hold, they take your credit card information and they might write something down wrong, the food shows up wrong, there is no audible history of what was ordered, there's all sorts of challenges ordering by phone. so we shifted from ordering by phone to ordering by computer and when smartphones went out, we went back to the phone, but not with the phone app. ultimately, when it came down to was restaurants create a certain level of quality and convenience on top of just going to a grocery store. so we had to do that for restaurants. we had to highlight the most effective, the best tasting. it just came about investing in customer service. there is a big anecdote about

this in the book -- it means removing the problems before there are problems, making sure the ties coffee is not high iced tea, solving that problem before it is a problem. it is a dogged focused effort on making sure the right food got there on time no matter what. that is why we became the largest delivery app. >> jamie, what is your answer? why me when so many people go to wall street and hit the rocks? >> in truth, a lot of my peers in the business experience this type of harassment, intimidation and bullying. a lot of times, they make complaints, they get fired, they get a package or they see you and get a package and with that package comes a nondisclosure

agreement. a lot of the people i'm representing, and i know i am representing them because i've heard from hundreds, have signed and nda and are not able to speak. i didn't get any goodies but i got the ability to write the book. i know i'm the only one talking but i'm not the only one with something to say. >> it really is a heck book. it is for very interesting books wrapped together. it makes a good read. it would make a good movie. >> from your lips. >> number one, how it is a bright woman climb the wall street letter. how do you save a marriage and her huge stress -- it is

inevitable and it wall street and how do you confront mean, nasty coworkers and win? and finally how do you honor an immigrant family to whom you owe a lot for getting you up to the door of goldman sachs? my book three idea -- how do you win the game against those sop's. i was in new york seven years with associated press and i saw a few. a lot of them. i was at the new york times for 11 years and they are very, very nice to you at the new york times while you exchange smiles but then something else happens. how did you win that game against those mean, nasty coworkers?

you were one of the few women to be the managing director. of the goldman sachs top five banks in the world. i have to add before i forget that jamie was ranked -- this year or last year -- ranked one of the 25 most influential women in the world. [applause] >> i think you might be my number one fan. my husband is in the audience. >> i kind of like the book. >> to enter the question how did i win, i think back to how i got my first job offer at goldman sachs at 22. i wanted to make my family so proud. my parents grew up in poverty,

they didn't even have plumbing. so to get a job at this place, i will never forget what my grandmother said. she said i know you are going to go there and make a lot of money, but what is it going to cost you? it was an interesting comment from my grandmother who was one of my best friends. the answer is i did win, but it cost me a lot. i would like to say i had an incredibly amazing work ethic. i had a good head for numbers. i had a great rapport with my clients but i also kept my mouth shut a lot and looks the other way and that i am not proud of. so yes, i was successful but what it cost me was almost everything. it was my family, it was my marriage and, to your point, a

lot of people have careers on wall street but it is really hard to walk out of that without being completely unscathed. >> we will get to your questions and just a couple of minutes. can we switch to the big broad brush question from the individual questions? why did it take everybody including business and the government so long to respond to climate change? eric's book suggests we are losing the tools we need to take on problems like climate change. your book may explain this to an extent. the big myth the private sector is going to take care of it, let's leave it to them. why is it taking so long for the

government and business to respond to change? >> in our first book, we chased down the story to those who spent their entire careers casting doubt on various kinds of sciences environmental damages, acid rain, ozone depletion, climate change. what we concluded and that gives they are market fundamentalists. they believe in the idea markets had to be free, otherwise america was on this slippery slope of totalitarianism and communism. the big myth is almost part two to that. we decided to trace down the myth and tell the story of where that belief system came from. we start with the opposition to child labor laws and work with

safety rules. we follow the story as one of the leading formulators against this idea of market fundamentalism. the national association of manufacturers begins a propaganda campaign in the 1930's. in order to forestall federal regulation. they lose and keep losing a long time but one of the things they learn out of world war ii -- our book was too short -- they learned the power of propaganda during world war ii. the roosevelt administration built an enormous engine of public propaganda and they came to realize what marketing experts would begin to understand, you don't just have to sell specific products. the idea of marketing isn't even necessary about selling or

whatever but the idea of capitalism itself, a particular brand of free-market capitalism. they begin investing after the war in a widespread propaganda apparatus, think tanks attempting to sway universities by lobbying trustees and remove books that they were disagreeable with. and economists whose economic textbook gets removed in favor of a more free-market friendly one. that, over the long stretch we covered begins shifting american culture itself because not just in marketing on radio, here in the university curriculum, we talk about that. they hear it from their churches because there's a deliberate effort to bring aboard the seminaries and embed free-market principles, so we all hear from

the public on sundays. americans are slowly, over time, we have our whole mindset shifted toward this idea that is a construct, markets should be free of government intervention, when in reality, humans have always had markets. unlike squirrels and birds and so forth, we make markets ourselves. they are social constructs, they always have regulators, whether the government were the guys that break your knees if you don't pay up. the whole notion government shouldn't regulate when government makes the markets to begin with is an absurdity. in our opinion. and yet, huge numbers of our fellow americans believe markets are somehow states of nature and should be independent of us and they can never be. so they are saying we are losing the tools to combat climate

change and i would say no, markets are a powerful tool for that but markets have to be altered in order to have that desired respect and have to be altered by public policy because it is policy that creates and shapes markets. an interesting take. just what i was hoping you would go into. this is a whale of a book. this is why i was a history major and this is one of the grandest histories i've ever read through all these decades. it is more exciting than the godfather, which we just watched a little bit ago. why would i say that? it has a lot in common with the godfather because this really happened. it wasn't just a movie and it is still shaping our lives and our politics, sometimes for good,

often for harm. for everybody, let me ask a general question -- what should big business be doing now to make a truly better world and in the marketplace on wall street, can you do good while doing really well? isn't business all about its own profits? everybody want to take one sentence? [laughter] i have to get to their questions. anyone want to tackle that? what is the main tool big business should be employing? >> from my perspective, i wish goldman sachs and other firms like that had a yes and approach to their business. yes, we want innovative thought leaders and we want these

people. so i feel like at goldman, it was not a yes and and a lot of bad actors were considered thought leaders and really strategic that their bad behavior was tolerated. there were so money smart, innovative people in this world who were decent humans. i feel like business should not only think about the work they do in terms of bottom-line but look at the character of people. that was longer than one line. >> that was terrific. >> two playoff eric's title, the big myth, what was the biggest myth you confronted at goldman sachs as a brand-new employee? secondly, what were you led to believe that turned out to be untrue? >> the big myth at goldman sachs is that it was a meritocracy and

people were going to do well. when i was interviewed at goldman sachs, their tagline was mind light -- mind wide open. bring anybody, any background, all are welcome. to me, in order to succeed, it was about assimilation, fitting in and toeing the party line. how do they do that at goldman sachs? they do it through money, power and influence. paydays and emotions were dangled in front of me in payment for my silence, whether i was assaulted by a colleague and pinned against the wall by my throat and advised not to report it and i'm embarrassed to say i didn't. when i witnessed the mistreatment of others, time and time again, i ignored it. i became part of this culture that observed havey or, ignored it, normalized it and that

behavior got escalated. to me, that was the biggest myth -- your individual qualities were going to be celebrated and that's how you are going to get motored when it was just a big group think tank. >> today, how many years out of goldman sachs now? x six. >> do you give goldman sachs higher marks today? >> i like to think my assault would not be tolerated today. i like to think that guy would have been escorted out the door. spoiler alert -- that guy is still doing very well on wall street. i think companies in the wake of social justice movements have gotten better keeping this behavior under wraps. i feel like the death of the woman on wall street or anyone made to feel other in that predominantly white male

environment, i think there is a death of careers happening, but it is the death by paper cuts rather than death by force trauma. after i wrote my book, i received hundreds of messages, personal messages. no one does a big facebook or instagram post to tell me this is very much going on. >> let's change gears a little bit. there's so much material in these books. mike, how do you sell a service or anything? your book suggests get them hooked, make a pitch, tell them what you told them, don't forget step 4 -- writing a check. for anybody thinking about starting a business, how do you do it? >> there are three steps.

they are listen, that is the first one. share how you listen, then solve them, those three things. most people start at just telling people what they can do. or they skip step three and don't ask for the money, which just makes it a friendly chat. i share in the book there is an anecdote of two different investment banks that come and pitch us during the bake-off, which is the term for when they are trying to convince you. goldman came and told us how great they were. then city came and they told us how great we were and we picked city because they took a second to figure out who we were and took videos of our restaurants

and the chief banker, the managing director said to me i rarely met a company where the companies just love them so much. you kept restaurants busy during the downturn. i believed him. i believe he did the research. the book is not a how to, it is more about if there is a theme in it. there are probably a few themes. one of the themes is the idea that go to stanford, get an nba, right a business plan, get millions of dollars from venture capitalists, skip a couple of years and you are a billionaire. very few people have access and even once you have access, it doesn't work out. ultimately, starting a business is about saying the world is wrong in some way. nobody else can see, but i can

see it. it takes an incredible amount of arrogance and you have to have the humility to listen to your customers and adapt and the areas of humility don't play well. some of it was going along and some of it was learning. you cannot sell anyone, restaurant or company about to go through an ipo unless you start with listing. >> one more for you -- one of the great scenes in the book resonated with my life, when i was told that articulate and forceful people that you are full of it and we need people who are smart and right and correct to tell us that. that has happened a number of times. there was a chicago professor in

your book -- you took a plan to him and he said this product is pure crab. -- pure crap. the next day you came back and had a brand-new pitch -- maybe it took a couple of days but i remember the story -- you came back with a better version from day one. what was wrong the first time and what was -- what did you take away from that experience? >> i've had the opportunity to make a lot of mistakes. everything from when i was first signing up a great pizza restaurant and the owner was telling me you sure talk fast. i didn't start with the learning. i didn't go to the university of

charlotte, my business partner did. we entered this competition and the professor told me you have 28 pages for a 10 minute presentation. cut out 90% of it. all the way through the day without telling anyone, i changed the default tip percentages for delivery drivers on my own and my software developer locked me out of the system the next morning, which is an infuriating moment in the book. but he was right, not because he was wrong. just starting something new, creating something from nothing takes a weird mix of arrogance and humility where you say that you can change the world, no one else has done it but you have to adapt and listen and learn and not go in every day with a cup

full. you have to be willing to learn and take these things on. there is a lot of the book where i'm making mistakes and figuring it out as i go along. hopefully someone will read it and skip some of the mistakes. >> can you remember a moment when you proudly took your proposal and you thought it was really great. they said this is junk. they said come back with something better and it was beneficial to you. >> obviously i am talking about what happened at goldman in a negative way. there were a lot of opportunities to learn and grow. what i did was in sales and you try your best. but another way you are successful is having that resilience to say if things aren't working out, what can i do to better and improve. the people at goldman sachs are

second to none in terms of their creativity and intelligence and helped me continue to improve what i'm able to offer my clients. >> either mike or jamie, was there an aha moment when you saw clearly what success requires in america and how you have to innovate and what you do on days when it's not always pretty, can you give us an actual example? >> being successful takes tenacity and being willing to quit things. i can think of an example off the top of my head which was when the company was doing really well and yet we were getting pressure from investors who grow even faster. and it this time, we were doubling every year which is quite fast. we were trying to figure out how

to go faster and said we are going to add take out in addition to delivery so you can skip the line. immediately, our sales team started selling to take out only restaurants. that wasn't our brand and not what we did. so we had to stop it dead in its tracks after spending a lot of energy and time and dollars making it work. that was an aha moment to me. everybody and life needs to have the tenacity to knock through borders and barriers that be willing to abandon something and not just keep at it simply because you have been doing it for a long time. the take-out example was the big aha moment for me. >> anything to add? >> it rings true to me in a

different way. it was hard to walk away from goldman sachs when i knew things were not working personally because i was susceptible to the lie goldman told me that said you are nothing but a little bit of arrogance. you are nothing without goldman sachs. we can replace you at any minute and you will never make a dime outside these walls. i actually believed it, i was nothing without their name, nothing without their money. so yes, i can see how when i should have walked away, it was years and years before i did. i see that clearly. >> another stunning point in your book -- you took a year and bonus in 2003 of $11,000, which is a tiny amount of money but it was important to you. plus an $11,000 bonus from your

friend. you were amazed, right? >> i'm still a little shocked. like are you seeing this? i knew i was onto something. there was a restaurant called pete pizza and just before the housing crisis in late 2006, we send them over a million dollars in pizza orders. that was one restaurant and i was like this is going to be really big. at that point, i realized i had a tiger by the tail. my passion, one type paid off my student at, which is what i was trying to do, my passion became helping independent restaurants

succeed in drive. it worked. we kept restaurants in business. i had restaurant wringing me flowers. it was very touching. it was profound and still humbling. it seems like it was eager than the sum of its parts. >> your trip was pretty amazing. did you expect that? did you set out to reach that lofty goal? >> i just wanted to make my parents proud. when you are providing for your family of origin, they were so proud of me that i just kept at it. i had a family of my own to support. they used to tease me when i first started at goldman because most of my colleagues either had parents who work there at where

had children of clients. and they would say you don't know a stock from a rock. you're so behind, you will never catch up. there's one thing you shouldn't do is underestimate me. so i made it my mission to prove them wrong. so much so that i went off course away from my values, which is something i wanted to attain. >> we were chatting over coffee -- the moments for me, the best moments were times when you and some real friends were able to exercise those friendships. can you hang onto good friendships or its does wall street play by its own rules and something else happens? >> she -- i still keep in touch with my mentor. she really cared about me and

tried to look out for me. she was so enmeshed in that organization, we were both looking at the world with started classes. i still keep in touch with my clients. i can't say how many clients i've heard from. >> shift gears to the dark side. a new york times review said pursuit of big money on wall street can be harmful to your health. the money will chase you down a dark alleyway and throttle you. should a smart young woman take a long look at those challenges before heading down that dark alleyway? in your coaching, will you tell that young woman to go for it or not? >> i just heard from a young woman from columbia university starting at goldman this summer. she read my book and now she doesn't want to go. i said that's not the answer.

i talked about how oldman sachs -- i said let's get very clear about what could possibly be and be prepared with your reaction and your responses. i truly believe you have to be there to be part of the change. that is what i do now for my clients, the who i wish i had been, support outside the organization to make sure these people are on the right path, that they are nothing without their company's name. if you are able to have that right mindset and support when you go in, let's go. goldman sachs hires 50% women. less than 20% at the partnership. i want to see that number change.

>> goldman sachs has, since the publication of your book, not been too happy with it. they have disputed your characterizations of what is called the misogyny at goldman sachs. they refused to respond to -- >> you know that review. anonymous allegations. what kind of english do they speak at goldman sachs? i think that's a weird word. do you give goldman sachs hire arcs for anything for what you hear as an outsider? >> i respect their opinion. they are entitled to theirs, i'm entitled to mine. i feel like i'm in a good place because for 18 years of my life, i got that job at 21 and lived at -- left at 40.

i lived and breathed what that firm thought of me and it feels good not to care what they think of me anymore. but i respect their opinion. [applause] >> eric, to come back to the grand scope of things, you are the leading historian of the big myths. what were you thinking as you first took aim at this huge project? was this bigger than any of the books you had done before in scope? >> naomi is the leading historian of the big myths. is it eager? yes, in volume, and i think scope. most of my scope has been narrower in time. that's because as we dug into the story, we found it went back

further than we anticipated. the whole idea of market fundamentalism went back further than we were anticipating to be clear. it became a different book as we came to understand the subject and one of the drawbacks -- it's a bigger book i would probably hurt you if you dropped it on your foot. we submitted it to the press and they were kind of horrified. it hurts a little too have your words just go proof into the electronic ether. a lot of what happened is there are so many examples of the way the myth of market fundamentalism has been promoted in the united states that probably we are stronger for having fewer examples. yet constantly wondering did

that example get taking out -- get taken out? it is such a big book. critics do you still downhill ski and scuba dive? >> i still downhill ski. mostly at mammoth mountain in california, which may or may not have power today. the snow has been incredible and destructive and glorious and beautiful. thank heavens it is also our water supply. haven't had much opportunity to scuba dive. partly because of the pandemic and partly it's more inconvenient to do it. but i took up high-powered rocketry instead. it involves a little more standing and less sitting in front of the computer, which is one of the drawbacks. everything is one machine and you have to sit in front of it. for far too long and it starts

to hurt. >> just an aside -- icu have studied certain kinds of objects -- near terrestrial objects. anything to tell us about balloons? [laughter] >> nothing about balloons but balloons are one-way instruments for astronomy get tested. if you are not familiar with the history of astronomy, you can get my last book that nasa commissioned me to do. that was done pre-pandemic but because of delays caused by the pandemic did not come out until last july. that was a free download. they probably didn't print more than a couple of thousand of them. writing about space stuff and space technology, very fun.

>> why do you americans believe all of this? hot air or something worse? why do americans believe what they are told about the magic of the marketplace? are we so gullible or is there some reason we wanted to be true? >> i would say we have been in culture rated to it. we started in the late 19th century, which is generations of our parents. we've grown up in a sea of expectations and we all believe the kind of story that has been sold to us. we don't go into great detail into how it was sold through movies, through books, through churches, etc.. when you are raised to believe certain things, it is difficult to begin to question.

that's the short answer. >> to me the brief story and we will come back to mike -- the biggest fan was ronald reagan and he did not start out as a big myths supporter, right? >> he was a new deal democrat. service to the general electric telegraph converted him. >> great. are we ok on time? where is mr. mcardle? we have seven minutes. the person with the sign that says audience questions didn't come down. it is all for you.

hang on. he is coming. >> [inaudible] is the divorce rate higher on wall street van national

statistics? >> i don't know but i will say that environment is not conducive to anyone's view on what a healthy family situation should be. just the hours and requirements are a lot. i think wall street is right for this type of environment because of the compensation. i don't mean in terms of absolute value, but if you make $5 million, it's not 5 million divided by 24. it's not you get a paycheck every two weeks, it is a very little amount, may be 10% of that. most people's bonuses represent 90% or 80% of their compensation. that influences employees and makes it right for manipulation because you are always dangling that carrot. when you are in an environment,

what is the first thing you do? look around. what i observed was people would ignore things and when things get ignored -- this is the way it is on wall street. this is why you make the money on l street and when that is normalized, it is escalated. start off with a little bit inappropriate behavior -- no one said anything and now i'm going to up the ante. it is the money and structure of the compensation why this happens on wall street. >> your questions now. >> a question for eric conway.

how does the mainstream media plan the spread of propaganda and are there sources of alternative explanations or alternative takes on capitalism? >> good and tough questions. we dealt a little more with the media in the merchants of doubt because they were so incorporated and effective at spreading the deny list messages. partly because of their own institutional values. the idea there are two sides to every story, which itself derives from a two-party, democratic state. in europe, there are many parties. most european countries have many parties and there are many newspapers to go along with those that you get a cacophony of voices. we talk about that in merchants out. in this book, we don't do much

with tracing them into the mainstream media, partly lack of sources. you are restrained by the material you can actually get your hands on and we work on archival list material and books produced by other historians. but we don't get at the internal culture of journalism and why it is they might be susceptible to these messages except what i said in answer to the earliest question that they are in culture rated into the myth of the free market. >> we have one here and one in back. >> what rule do you think the universities should have in

accomplishing the goals from all three of you in terms of preparing people for business or telling about the system they live in? what do you think would be the role of universities helping with what you want people to know? >> good question. >> in our book, the university is constrained by the efforts of businessmen to ensure business and economics departments tell the free market stories. part one is universities have to get beyond that and have a more diverse economics strategy,