welcome. welcome. thank you for coming out on a cold, rainy november morning in austin, texas. and do please welcome to the 28th annual texas book festival. since this is the first. thank you. since this is the first panel of the morning, i would remind you

all to please silence your phones while you're in all of the events. but since we're live on c-span two, this morning, please make a special note to as we made it to the big time c-span two. my name is chris tomlinson. i am a columnist for the houston chronicle in the san antonio express-news. i'm also an author. i wrote a book that some of you may have heard of called forget the alamo. but i'm also proud of being on the board of advisors for the texas book festival. so we can't do this without you, without readers, without people who, frankly, buy books. which is where we're going to go as soon as this event is over. so i have i have obviously read the deadly rise of anti-science, and i am proud to be here with dr. peter j. hotez. now, the texas book festival is

committed to providing a safe environment at our events for all attendees. we do have a code of conduct and we do not tolerate harassment in any form and reserve the right to remove from any texas book festival event those who engage in harassing behavior, including but not limited to unwanted advances, stalking, verbal threats, inappropriate statements or gestures. sustained disruption of speakers and disrespectful comments that go beyond the boundaries of civil agreement and civic discourse. now, as a as a board, as an advisory board member, i am committed to this. as someone who wrote a book called forget the alamo, i'm meaner than you think. so please, please, you know, it's okay to engage in discourse. it's okay to have differing ideas. just please be respectful because we are here to listen to

and talk about the book by dr. hotez, who is a scientist, pediatrician and advocate in the fields of global health, vaccinology and tropical disease control. he's also the founding dean of the national school of tropical medicine at baylor college of medicine and director of the texas children's hospital center for vaccine development. hotez is nonstop work to develop one of the covid 19 vaccines and is public advocacy for vaccinations during the pandemic. inform his book. and let's be clear his vaccine has helped 100 million people. thank you. thank you. and it he get he doesn't get a penny. okay. he is not profiting from that. he does not work for pharma companies. in fact, he he creates

competition for them by offering this freely available vaccine. now and unfortunate lately, he's attracted a lot of negative attention. he is faced a great deal of criticism and harassment and and it all kind of comes down to what his critics would say, is that, you know, if i may channel them for a moment. why do you hate freedom. or better yet, you know, why don't you help me understand what is the health freedom movement and how that's a little different than being against freedom? that's right, chris. obviously, i love freedom. in fact, yesterday i wrote about my my dad, eddie hotez, who as he was 19 years old in college, and the u.s. navy said here,

sign up and we're going to send you to medical school because we need more medical officers. and instead, they sent him on a landing ship, transport in saipan, okinawa, and the philippines, where he had japanese arrows and kamikazes coming, coming at him. and and so he was very proud of his military service. yesterday was veterans day, of course, and he was buried in a jewish cemetery nearby in connecticut with full military honors in 2015. and thank you. and and and and so now, you know, when the when i get the online threats or the physical stockings or they say the army, a patriot is coming to hunt me down, i say, you guys don't know. that's you guys don't know what a patriot is. i know what a patriot is because i grew up with one and and not these chuckleheads who, you know, use these propaganda terms like health, freedom, medical freedom. because that's what it is. it's a propaganda term. what happened was, you know, the

anti-vaccine movement really began accelerating about 20 years ago with false assertions that vaccines cause autism. and that's how i got involved. i'm a vaccine scientist, you know, making vax low cost vaccines for global health. and then my wife ann is here also. and you want to just raise your and maybe she doesn't want her there she is over the counter there we have we have four adult kids, including rachel, who has autism and intellectual disabilities. and i wrote a book which made me the target for anti-vaccine activists called vax. that was the initial book called vaccines did not cause rachel's autism, and that made me public enemy number one, one or two for that reason. in fact, our our good friend robert f kennedy jr, who's an ardent anti-vaccine activist publicly labeled me the the o.g. villain. and i'm so old and square i had a look up what that meant. and it means the original gangster villain. so thank you for introducing the original gangster villain today. and and and, and i think, you

know, that was effective and taking some of the wind out of the sails of anti-vaccine groups but the so they needed a new thing right the the phony baloney around autism wasn't working for them so what did they come up with this idea that parents should have choice in vaccinating their kids? we shouldn't have mandatory vaccinations for schools. so what if we have measles and pertussis outbreaks and and land kids in the hospital? this is health freedom, medical freedom. unfortunately, it looked around for a home and guess where? found a home right here in the in the state of texas. it got it got pac money, political action committee money from empower texans and other and other pac groups from the republican tea party in texas. and that way and that's when it started to it's these are the same people who are pushing vouchers by the way. same same group. yeah. yeah. and and, you know, it's and so and it's all this sort of phony rhetoric, health freedom,

medical freedom. but it works. it works for both sides. it works for the for the anti-vaccine groups. now they have new political clout and recognition and money. they got pac money for the far right. you know, now they have a whole group of adherents that they ever wouldn't had before. so it's mutually reinforcing again. and by the way, this is hard as heck to talk about, right? because, you know, as a physician scientist, my training was always said, you know, you don't talk about politics, right? you don't talk about republicans and democrats and liberals or conservatives or red states or blue states. we have to be politically neutral. and i get that. and i'm very moderate in my my political views. i don't have strong political views, but now in the new book, i point out that that health freedom propaganda really went on steroids during the covid pandemic. and that's what led to so many texans, 40,000 texans needs to say it's taken this this

movement, it's taken a toll on people's lives. that. that's right. that's right. and that's why it's no longer a theoretical discussion. and that's why you have to talk about it. even though nobody we don't in our profession, we don't like to talk about politics. i don't like talking about politics. but chris, here the numbers, 40,000 is in the book and it's in a published paper in the public library science. i wrote 40,000 texts and this needlessly died because they refused a covid vaccine during our delta wave in the last half of 2021, after vaccines were freely and widely available in the bay, went home economy 40,000 texans. that's more texans than who lost their lives, sacrificed their lives in world war two. right. and that's the fact. the paper is called the great texas covid tragedy, when vaccines were more than 90% protective and so how did this happen? and it happened through a series of events that began in the summer of 2021. this post trump, by the way, is one of the things i say in the book. it's not about trump. it's it's a post-trump phenomena

that although it may have started, there to some extent, but it started at the cpac conference in dallas of cpac conference of conservatives in july of 2021. they said, first they're going to vaccinate you, then they're going to take away your guns and your bibles. and as ridiculous as that sounds to us, people accepted that in our state of texas and and the in fact, there was an article written about it called the clap to death because they brought on every anti-vaccine activist you could imagine filling it with all this nonsensical rhetoric. and then it got picked up by the house members of the house freedom caucus. our good friend marjorie taylor greene began calling people like me medical brownshirts, you know, comparing vaccination to the holocaust or or jim jordan of ohio, senator rand paul of of kentucky, who goes after me on a regular basis. senator ron johnson of wisconsin

holds his vaccine injury roundtables and then and again, this is hard to talk about, amplified every -- night on fox news by tucker carlson, laura ingraham, sean hannity. and this is documented by two groups media matters, a watchdog group, and a research group at serc. that's the federal university of science and technology in switzerland, where einstein studied, documented that those three anchors every night filled, you know, six huge chunk of their content with anti-vaccine rhetoric, falsely discrediting the effect of this and safety of vaccines. so if you were watching fox news every night during that delta wave, you went down this rabbit hole thinking the vaccines didn't work or they weren't safe. you started tying your political identity to not getting vaccinated and people paid for it with their lives. and so, you know, i gave grand rounds at university of texas. tyler not long ago. and these attacks are very, you know, conservative part of texas. and basically everyone you talk to has lost a loved one because

they refused to come back. yeah. and that's where you really start to see. but i mean, this what does this say about our species, right? that i mean i mean we're darwin's tells us where we're supposed to struggle for survival, right? that we have this instinct to survive. and here is this demonstrable evidence that this vaccine can save our lives. and people are rejecting it and choosing to die instead. yeah, the power of this is the power of disinformation and and the point is, these individuals were victims. these are some of the, you know, kind of nicest people. you never want to meet. you know, if my wife hates this analogy, but i but i'm going to use it anyway. she just full disclosure, she hates this. she just thinks it's too hokey. but, you know, i gave medical grand rounds that, you know, we're at stanford medical school, and before that, i giving grand rounds. university of texas, tyler and when i spoke at stanford medical school, i said, you know, if my car had broken down and from a flat tire, you gave me the choice because i can't fix anything. i'm a disaster.

so but my car had broken down either in palo alto, california, where stanford is, or tyler, texas. i'd pick tyler, texas, every time because people would be fighting over who's going to help you change your tire, right? it's true. i mean, it's the kindest, nicest people you'd ever want to meet. they were victims of this predatory campaign from people who knew better more often than not, people who are vaccinated themselves convince them not to take a vaccine. and so if you know my point is, you know, i'm a i'm an m.d., ph.d. vaccine scientist. i started making a human hookworm vaccine as an m.d., ph.d. student in the 1980s in new york. that hookworm vaccine that was in phase two clinical trials is looking really good for 40 years later. but and then we made covid vaccine oh point. that was part of the plan. i never would have dreamed 40 years ago that i'd have to defend vaccines. but i feel is a vaccine scientist. if pediatric vaccine scientist, if you really in this, there's not two parts to the business. it's not only making vaccines for the world, but also, you know, combating all the i could

do it. but it's also it's but it's it's it's tough stuff. so as a journalist, you know, my an a columnist, i always follow the money. i try to figure out who benefits from these kinds of things. and it's not really clear to me that i can find someone who has a financial benefit. but there does seem to be a political benefit. um, you know, what is your observation? i think that's right. i mean, in the beginning there was clearly financial benefit. the anti-vaccine individuals and groups. in fact, there's an interesting organization called the center for countering digital hate. it's amazing. we have to have an organization called the center for countering digital hate. it identified about a dozen individuals that were monetizing the internet, responsible for about two thirds of the anti-vaccine disinformation selling phony autism, cures a lot of nutritional supplements linked to the health and wellness industry. that's a big one. if you go to amazon.com and you

type in books on vaccinations, it's almost all anti-vaccine. covid anti-vax being a conspiracy book. so now no question that became an industry. but then starting, you know, a little before the pandemic, it became linked to politics, to authoritarian and far right politics. and then the money was really pac money and and, you know, you can ask, okay, who's supporting empower texans? and and all the other pacs? and there are a couple of journalists now that have been looking, trying to follow the money trail at some personal risk because, you know, that's very inconvenient for people. but so i think we don't know the full story of the money trail yet, but pac money is a big part of it. now, certainly empower texans doesn't officially exist anymore. it's changed its name liberty something. it's now defend texas liberty. liberty right. and defend texas liberty. defend texas liberty and it's

financed by two more soaring the rhetoric, the more oh yeah, now it's you know what it is, right? you know, patriots is and is the last refuge of scoundrels. the but it's it's these oil billionaires made their money in fracking. tim dunn and the brother and ferris wilks and his brother are behind those groups and so and you know what i say, chris? i say, look, everyone's entitled to their political views, even extreme political views. i don't have a problem with that. i really don't. when i say as though don't adopt this one. the anti-vaccine stuff, one, it doesn't make any sense to it's going to kill you. and so and so that's a fine needle to thread. how do you uncouple the anti-science stuff from all the other political but i mean, i'm i'm not here to judge people on their part. i'm here to say to separate, look, i don't want you to die. don't don't adopt this anti-vax. but dr. hotez, it's more than

just expressing their point of view. they're also trying to actively silence people. they try to actively silence you. you call it, and you know, you go beyond misinformation or disinformation. you call it anti-science aggression, right? yeah. i mean, i make the point, you know, we we tend to you use euphemisms, we call it misinformation or infodemic. like it's just some random junk out there on the internet, but it's not. it's organized, it's predatory, it's deliberate, it's well-financed, and it's politically motivated and it's killing americans in an unprecedented numbers and and now what you're starting to see is this very interesting revisionist history going on. you know, now that i pointed out, these activities killed have killed 40,000 texans or precipitate, you know, facilitated the deaths of 40,000 texans, by the way, 200,000 americans, mostly in states like texas, oklahoma, louisiana, mississippi, etc., to a now that

i've pointed out, 200,000 texas tet taught 40,000 texans, 200,000 americans needlessly lost their lives. what you're seeing this revisionist history going on and that's what's playing out right now. you're starting to see this this these statements now. it was the vaccines that killed who killed the american. garrett it was covid vaccines that killed the americans. ridiculous stuff. and and so therefore, i'm implicated in that or they'll want to say, no, i was the scientist who made the covid virus in the first place. equally ridiculous. and this is playing out right now in the house of representatives. they're holding hearings, these covid subcommittee hearings in the house. the gop led house on their official twitter site. they actually say we're going to sell popcorn. they're not even pretending this is anything other than political theater or or fox news soundbites. and so it's this revisionist history now that's putting a lot of us at risk and, you know,

basically portraying us as public enemies or enemies of the state. now, you make an observation in the book that most of your hate mail comes on sunday mornings and and so does mine, actually, you know, most of the most vicious emails i get on sunday mornings. do you have any thoughts about why that could i guess people have more time? you know that to do this that they before or after. yeah i it's it's it's usually before church it's and fortunately it's what i wake up to when i scroll my email in the morning and think, oh god, i haven't had coffee yet and i'm already but you know, they're it's also is it partially demagoguery. it's creating an us versus them which is an old authoritarian, uh, game, you know, playbook. i mean, the idea that, you know, we saw it with adolf hitler, we

saw it with joseph stalin, where, you know, there becomes a authorized science and that is our science. and then there's something that's there, science. and your book goes into that. yeah, yeah. i mean, there's this, there's this attempt to want to demonize scientists, vilify scientists, and it has historical precedent. and to understand this, i actually had to talk to political scientists, people like ruth ben-ghiat at nyu, who is a historian of oh, she writes a book called strongmen about authority, as it were, read the writings of hannah arendt in the origins of totalitarianism and apple bombs, writings. and then you realize this is this is not new. this has been going on for at least 100 years. so when stalin had, you know, targeted the mendeleev and geneticist vavilov and threw them into the gulag to promote the lamarche and theories of lysenko that ultimately destroyed the west, russian wheat crop and killed 2 to 3

million soviet peasants, it didn't matter as about controlling the intellectuals or dismissing the intellectuals or creating an alternate to that goes part and parcel with creating an authoritarian state. and that's what this is about in all the phony health freedom, medical freedom rhetoric, it's all about controlling authoritarianism very much. and and to understand it, you have to go back 100 years to see what stalin did. and and it's not only in the us because we started to see this in brazil with with jair bolsonaro, who was was authoritarian like figure also promoting that anti vaccine rhetoric and dismissing covid or viktor orban and hungary. this is like the signature now of authoritarianism, you know as much as the biomedical sciences could tell, sort of learning political science on the fly. well, you know, i mean, and, you know, i don't want to be anti-american. i'm a veteran. so thank me for my service.

but thank you. thank you for your service. but. but there has always been a strain of anti-intellectual ism. you know, i'm going back to the scopes trial. you know, it's there. there is a strain here of of anti-intellectual is and i think these are authoritarians are tapping into that stride although as i like to say, the quote you know mlk, the moral arc of the universe does tend to bend in the right direction over time. it bends toward justice and and what i say is, you know, remember, we are a nation that's built on our great research universities and institutions. guess what? if you go behind the capitol, there's one right there, right at the university of texas, austin. i mean, this is what made our nation great, right? among other things, that this was gave us the manhattan project, the nasa and gave us silicon valley.

and and so what i like to say is, you know, when they say the army of patriots is going to hunt me down, i say, wait a minute, we're the patriots, the scientists. this is a nation built on science and technology. and i saw that firsthand when i served as u.s. science envoy for the state department. they were sending me and the white house sending me all over the middle east during the isis occupy mission to promote american values and science. and, you know, it was impressive how everybody in a leadership position in these countries had spent time in major u.s. universities and wanted their kids to study at u.s. university. that's the power of this country is is our and that's our strength. and so when you see people tear it down, that's where i think you have to draw a line in the sand. but it's really with the scientific community has found it very difficult to stand up to these attacks. they you know, scientists tend to shy away from it.

what is your experience been have you got into support from from the national institute that you would expect for someone trying to save 200,000 lives? well, you know, so often it's not just the words of the enemies. it's the silence of the friends. you know, that's the that's the tough part. and and i get it. you know, most scientists and i think it's totally fine. what do they want to do? they want to keep their head down, focus on their experiments and their grants and their papers. and and it's a hard job, right? so it is more than full time. and i understand that. but it is been frustrating at times where we too often our college presidents are silent about what's happening right now. the scientific societies. and so why why is that? well, one, i think they see how i get beat up and they say, oh, who wants that? but i think i think the other is is one second. you know, a lot of the donors for these institutions come from come from that side and they

don't want to offend them. and so there is that and then there's that third, that commitment to political neutrality at all costs, even though, you know, it's in this case, neutrality is desmond tutu or elie wiesel points on favoring the tormentor, favoring the aggressor, and never the victim. and and so i think we've got to break away from that that that, you know, every now and then we have to be not fearful of addressing politics if we're going to save an institution. now, we and it's not just biomedical science, right? i mean, you have you have lawmakers. you still want creationism taught as fact, even though you can't study biology without understanding and accepting evolution, you can't understand oil and gas reserves without accepting geology and the fact that the universe is a billion years old. i mean, there are there's there's some real tension right,

between doing all the things that we need to do and somehow remaining silent in the face of all this propaganda and and aggression. yeah. and i think we have to remember or you know, this this is also true for our state of texas. we are a nation of science and innovation. i mean, let's face it, i didn't move here because of the climate, right? i mean, i am i moved here because 12 years ago, because of this amazing texas medical center and now with with texas children's hospital, baylor college of medicine, m.d. anderson, cancer center, and all the great hospitals and institutions. you know, i you know, i was trained it at yale and cornell and rockefeller institute and mass. general hospital. i remember the national academy of medicine. i could have gone anywhere. right. and i came to texas because i wanted to do big things and this is the place you still come to do big things. and we did. we wound up, you know, making

two vaccines, reaching 100 million people that would have not have happened if i'd stayed in the northeast and that's people don't know that enough. we've got we've got to do a better job talking about the positives. i mean, this was one of the things i noticed when i was on the cable news channels all the time. you know, when they want to talk about texas is always about the wackadoo it and well, there is whack a doodle here and you you're you one of the best writers about the could doodle and then in this in the state of texas but it's also is this is also a great state for science and innovation and that's what we have to keep on pushing right now. so part of your book is, um, and i, it's, it's history. it's science. it's it's an amazing piece of work and part of it is a call to action. um, it is a call to stand up. would you like. yeah, i think we have to start

drawing some lines in the sand about the attacks. not only on the science, but the scientists. if, you know, if we feel we're being intimidated, if we're getting threatening letters from members of congress on the far right who want to portray us as that public enemies, that's where we say, no, this is where we need to look at what institutions that we have in place. you know, how can we strength in our national academies of science, national academy of medicine, our scientific societies? how can we get our college presidents? and by the way, at baylor college of medicine in texas children's hospital, they've been great. i mean, they've been they've been stalwart champion and supporters, but not so at other places in other places, college presidents of their own. and they and they basically leave you on your own and and especially if you start have to get lawyers to defend you. i mean, those bills mount. they're pretty quickly. so, you know, the climate

scientists have faced this for around ten years. and what the climate scientist did was they created a climate science legal defense fund. do we need to do that now for the biomedical scientists? in the book, i talk about creating something like a southern poverty law center to defend the biomedical scientists, because we don't want to see that start to erode. and you're already starting to see this happen now with with congress. it's putting constraints on the nationalist shoots of health. for instance, there's this one piece that they're trying to put in place where now for anyone who has an international collaboration and they want the international collaborators to send the scientists their notebooks, a stack of notebooks. and then what are you supposed to do with that? translated from i don't know, from vietnamese or indian or spanish into english and then what? send it to your vp for research. and who signs off on that illegal council? it basically would halt all international collaborations at

a time when we're seeing an unused whole number of viruses emerging. remember, we've had sayers in 2000 to so severe acute respiratory syndrome, middle eastern respiratory syndrome in 2012, covid 19 is the third major coronavirus pandemic, the century the fourth one's brewing. we're going to have a fourth one before 2030. we're going to have a major zoonotic flu in the next few years. we're going to have we're seeing this big rise in mosquito transmitted virus infections. the fact that we had zika in 2016 in south texas is not an accident. in fact, i just had a new england journal paper predicting that we could see yellow fever come back to texas because of this confluence of climate change. urbanization altered bat migrations here, altered human migrations, all those 21st century forces are converging to promote the emergence of these virus infections and what's the response of the congress? don't worry about the virus. don't worry about the viruses

contain the virus, allergies and and that's that's a recipe for failure. so i think, you know, we don't have a lot of time, but this is more urgent than ever. so thanksgiving is coming up. and we're all going to be sitting around a table and someone possibly named uncle bob. um, is going to, um, is going to let loose and share their shall we say, controversial views on science. what do we need to do? do you have a strategy for that? i mean, because of being silent is the wrong answer. then how do we how do we speak up? well, you know, i think it's really important that you remind uncle bob that these vaccines were 90% protective against severe illness and death and i mean, i think in the beginning,

you at least put some numbers out there, not that that's going to convince uncle bob for reasons that i'll tell you about a release. you get some facts on the table so that you're not uncle bob doesn't think you're only arguing arguing for ideological reasons. so covid vaccines m rna vaccines saved 3 million american lives during during the pandemic that that's a fact. overwhelmingly, those who perished during the covid pandemic were those who are unvaccinated, including 200,000 americans after vaccines became widely available. that that's what saves lives. and that's why science is important. that's unlikely to convince bob if he's been watching fox news and joe rogan podcast in 2021, they're going to he's going to go down that rabbit hole. but at least you get that out there and then try to work with them and say, look, bob, you're entitled to your views, but don't don't do things that are putting people in harm's way,

like the anti-science component that's actually pretty long. i'm not sure i know the answer to your question. i answer because because it's hard in the past. you know, you can have discussions not only with uncle bob, the parents of kids who didn't want to vaccinate their know kids and and, you know, you could explain to them that why measles is a killer disease, pertussis is whooping cough, the killer disease, or if they weren't vaccinating and enough parents weren't vaccinating, there were kids going into the hospital with measles and pertussis and there'd be that kind of auto correction mechanism or self-correcting mechanism. we don't we're missing that. now. there's no there are no brakes on this. even after 200,000 americans have perished, they're still doubling down and coming up with crazier stuff more than ever before, i think, because they're allegiance, their identity is tied to this now. and and how you break that is, i think, really complex. and i'm not sure i know the answer. so we're going to open up for questions.

and i've got one question. and in that time, please line up at the microphone if you'd like to make comments. i have a question. i was going to say, please do not make comments. this is not a debating society. this is not a this is not the you know, the forum in athens. it's questions. and then we're going to listen to dr. hotez answer them. you didn't ask me, by the way, why i didn't debate rfk jr. well, you know why they should. and if you want to, i could. well, okay, well, that's actually kind of related to my last question, which is i struggle with whether or not to write about crazy people because i worry that i'm going to amplify them if i do. and but i also know that if i'm silent and i don't call them out. did that gives them a chance to gain ground. so when do you engage and how do you engage and and debating?

i would agree with you because i went this with alamo is is is not always well you know there are a few things you know because always people always you know, want to know. i mean i had actually been interacting with robert f kennedy jr for years at the request of the nationalist toots of health. they asked me to when he was when after trump was about to be inaugurated, he came out and said he was going to hold the head of vaccine commission. so the national institutes of health asked me to talk to bobby with a third party intermediate to because i have a daughter with autism. and i can explain why vaccines don't cause autism and i did a series of discussions but he was so dug in and he was all over the map, you know, you couldn't pin him down what his concern was. it was everything from the mmr vaccine doing this to thigh aerosol preservative to spacing vaccines to close together to alum in vaccines. so you're always playing this kind of game of whac-a-mole you're not going down. another one would would pop up so that when the challenge came one i knew it was going to be productive. but i also didn't do it because

that's that's not how we do science. i was worried about giving the wrong impression to young people that science is something that is debatable. debatable in a public format, especially by people who are knowledgeable. and i said, look, science works and it works through. what we do is we we do our experiments, we write our results up, we submit them for peer review. they go sometimes it gets rejected outright. other times, more often than not, requires major revisions and rewrites and get a year for a scientific paper to be published. we do the same for our grant applications. we do the same when we present the scientific conferences in front critical audience. they give us feedback. sometimes it's feedback we don't necessarily like, but it's important feedback. the point is there's a very carefully orchestrated process of checks and balances and feedback, and the idea that we're going to throw that out the window just to debate some guy with an agenda, a political

agenda, i think does a disservice to science and sends the wrong message to young people that that that's how we do science, that was the real reason for that. okay. question number one. yeah. first of all, doctor, thank you very much for being a lightning rod for for this very important and much appreciated debate. thank you. thank you very much. and now to your question, please. as journalists, please reply. i'm not sure it needs to be, but silence is not working. we really do need and it is up to the journalist rather than the scientists, i think, to do that. so please, from one who listens, my question is this is in recent decades i've noticed a tendency by public authorities to come out strong with recommendations and to very much minimize any kind of uncertainty into what those recommendations are.

and i'm would like, doctor, your thoughts about whether the fact that we tend not to be entirely trans minute trans, trans, transparent, transparent, transparent in our in our responses is in public. if that might be contributing to the the kinds of rational discourse we see. i think, you know, the way our our agencies communicate science is has been flawed. although i you know, people are sometimes want to do this false equivalency that the problem was not the the aggression coming from the anti-science group, but was that the scientists screwed up the communication. and the scientists have not been perfect and let me explain how they've been. but that's, you know, the 10 to 20% of the problem, not the 80% of the problem that that the other guys want to say. so i think, you know, one of the

if you talk to some of the old school communications people, they tell you that to talk science, you have to talk to the american people like they're in the fourth grade or the sixth grade. and i found that did not work for me. i found that when you tried to dumb it down, it sort of ring hollow. and i was much more effective when i went to some detail, i realized that the american people had a very high tolerance for complexity, provided you didn't lapse into jargon much if your lives depended on it, or the lives of your loved one dependent, you wanted to know the reasons for it and that's something that i tried to do, you know, in the fourth minutes that wolf blitzer would give me or that kind of stuff. so as and i think to often there was that old school way of communication that that that tried to dumb it down and gave kind of the summary status and as though everything were sort of known and fixed and and it backfired i think badly. and i think part it in their

defense, i think what they wanted to do was reach all of the american people, those who wanted all the information and those who were skeptical and by sort of amortizing all that to a single statement, it came out like baby talk. that wound up satisfying no, no side. but, you know, i can go into some some specific examples of that. but i think there was that issue and there there's still that issue. next question, please. yes, good morning. i hesitate to say it, but my name is bob and my apologies. it's my father's name. so that's why i always it and i'm a nursing home administrator and during covid, i found myself more times than i care to remember in contentious toe to toe conversations with visitors who understand they wanted to come in and see a loved one. but they simply would not comply to the screening, the masking the vaccination status as a non clinician doctor, is there something, some phrase, some word that i can say to get people's attention to

understand, make them understand the seriousness of the situation? yeah, i think one is, you know, what i try to do is recognize the fact that these are victims to the fact of of of predation, of specific and treated from that from that standpoint and and don't look for a conversion just trying to get them to engage in one or two less risky behaviors like like focus on specific things like getting your vaccine or getting your booster. i think that that may be the effective and and recognize that you're not in a single thanksgiving dinner conversation going to overcome watching for years of tucker carlson, laura ingram and and sean hannity and listening to all the craziness at the the cpac conference. so look look for small victories to begin. yes, ma'am.

hi. so you've talked a bit about how the landscape you've talked a bit about how the landscape of science has changed over your career. i'm only in my first year of medical school, so i was wondering what advice you would give yourself as a first year med student if you could go back? well, i think one of the things that we don't do in medical schools or in our phd programs are postdoctoral programs, is we don't teach science communication or health communication. and, you know, i had to learn it by trial and error more, as i like to say, more error, trial by fire, by fear. but there are ways to do this. and i think, you know, we we need our medical school deans or graduate school deans to step up and recognize that there's a vacuum right now. and guess what's filling the vacuum is all the craziness. and and that's that's that's problem one, i think problem too is too often our academic centers don't it, when they're

docs and their scientists are speaking out, you know because they're they're basically paid to keep the institution out of the headlines. and the last thing want to hear is that their docs and scientists are speaking out on social justice and and and just social justice issues. they anti-science issues. and i think we have to change that culture. you know, for instance, i get evaluated just like everybody else is a professor and i don't see patients anymore. but what are they asking them? my grants and papers. there's not a place on my form forcing well authored books much less opinion pieces i've written or cable news channels, and certainly nothing for social media. so the message that comes down is we don't recognize communication being doing public engagement as an important activity. that's not what we want from you. focus on your, you know, your your clinical activities, your rv use or your or your grants and your papers. and we have to change. not everywhere, but we have to

change that culture. our office of communications is pretty good about that, but not everywhere. so i think there's a culture change that's going to need to happen. it's going to be tough to do it on your own because, you know, you can, you know, say what you want, whether it's on social media or writing opinion piece. but the message from the health center is, hey, you're an academic you're free to speak out, whatever you want. da, da da. but don't screw this up and don't get the institution in trouble. and and, of course, if you're doing it enough, you will screw it up and you will get the institution in trouble. and and there needs to be some comfort level that you have for doing it. okay. i think we're i think we're going to be able to squeeze in these last two questions. so, you know, keep the question short and we'll we'll squeeze them all in. thank you for the blessings your work. i actually had two really quick questions. one is i work with immuno suppressant patients and i'm still afraid that i'll get asymptomatic covid and take it to the clinic.

do i still need to wear a mask and then the second thing is, in health care, we all know doctors and nurses who refuse the vaccine. and when you when i talk with these people, they would say it wasn't that they didn't trust science, that they didn't trust the government. and could you speak to that, please? and actually, let's get that last question and we'll try to wrap them all together. thank you. thank you. the yes, let's get that last question in. i just wondered how much of this i've been a public health nurse for almost 40 years. how much of this anti-science stuff where does racism mean not the people that died from not getting their vaccine. but tucker, does anybody challenge them on their racism, classism? they're the privileged. i mean, tucker carlson doesn't have to go out into the world and be around viruses.

it it's so i'm going to answer your question very and say we do it in newspapers. subscribe to newspapers and watch less television. except for c-span two. so, dr. hotez yeah, i think it's i think it's it's very tough. you know, when you see health care professionals start going down the rabbit hole and questioning the value of vaccines and masks and everything else and that can be quite demoralizing. and and they're very powerful in a negative way in terms of influencing patients and and trying to, you know, but you know, doctors can go down the rabbit hole watching this kind of stuff just like everybody else and not a lot of them, but but they are they they do a lot of damage and and and no one's asking anyone to trust government. but but if you trust the science, you should understand the importance of wearing

vaccines. and if you're around immunocompromised patients and i think that's a valid concern. just a lot of covid transmission and masking around those patients is a great thing. so we're getting the hook. just a reminder, this is great book. you have time to buy it and read it before thanksgiving dinner and you can get it signed by dr. hotez in the signing tent. the money goes to literacy programs. it goes to books in schools. you're doing the right thing. thank you for joining us today. thank you very much. i'm doing. well.

we'll have more live coverage of the 2023 texas book festival. a short break. torie clarke is a former political operative who worked for both presidents. george h.w. bush and george w. she decided to start a podcast to highlight her love of books. it's called chatter on books.

and she recently joined book tv to talk about. torie clarke, how do you go from a career in politics to a spokesperson at the department of defense to a book podcaster? what's the track? the track is when i was very young, i loved books. books were my sanctuary. they were my safe place. they were my escape. and then umpteen years of multiple jobs. my god, you guys. you and i have known each other for so long, and worked in every agency in town and raising a family. there was no time for books. so now the jobs are a little less high pressure and there's a little bit more time and i hung out in a great bar called chatter. and so then we came up with this idea, chatter on books. that's how it happens. and is it a podcast? it is program. it is a podcast. occasionally we do things. c-span is very nicely been there. we do things in a location, say, in a bookstore. we taped in the calvert woodley liquor store once. that was great. right before thanksgiving, customers got very cranky because we were taking up space

as they were trying to get their minutes. so we tape in some places. but the bad news was the pandemic. so we couldn't do as much in-person. the good news was we do it via zoom. now we tape on monday evenings and you can get, you know wonderful authors and they'll do anything to come on c-span. but this kind of up and coming podcast not as well known, but when you can get in via zoom, they're willing to do it from anywhere. we did a podcast, a fabulous podcast with ken follett, and he zoomed in from london, which was terrific. what kind of guest you go for? they have to be interesting. the book's almost always are interesting. we cover topics from a to z, but they have to be interesting. they have to be fun. and we are always very honest when when we're pitching them or their people, why they should come on chatter on books. i always say we are a cross between wait, wait, don't tell and pti with books. and sometimes drinks thrown in and will debate bestsellers. we'll talk to them. we also like to get their back

stories. we ask them about their book and then the conversation can go 18 different ways. as you know, some people can roll with that and some people can't. so they have to be fun. interesting people who are willing to roll with things. and these days you can find video at anybody any time and you can pretty quickly go might be a book, but that person is probably not going to have much fun or chatter besides ken follett, who are some of the other authors you've had? wow. we like to say it runs the gamut from names. everybody would recognize. ken follett, erik larson, susan orlean, new yorker fame, fantastic. --. and then people that you will be hearing from soon that we've had. so chill. gonzales great book called organized reading. angie kim, who's from the dmv. fabulous book called miracle creek. donny walton, the final revival. open nev. this up and coming authors dish. ofelia who are starting to get the recognition in the awards they deserve. and we like to say we've discovered them quite well. torie clarke, you worked for john mccain.

you worked for george h.w. bush. you worked for george w bush. thank you, amy. peter, you. i don't see any polemical books or political in that very few. and part of this is going back to my word, escape. this this show is an escape for people. and i and it really started out because i was very fortunate to be on tony kornheiser radio show for many years, which then became a podcast. and it was his bar called chatter, where we started all of this and we realized pretty quickly, people love that. there's a there's a family feel to it and we like to have fun and it was an escape from politics, as you know, politics can be really tough these days. it's been fraught with emotion. this is a bit of an escape. so every once in a while i'm sure you had it on susan page had a fantastic biography of mrs. bush. barbara bush. and it was not about politics. it was about their marriage. the the trauma of losing their young daughter and how that impacted decisions he made. we had karen tumulty on to talk

about her biography of nancy reagan. that's about as close as we get. we'll leave that up to you. what's the podcast address for our listeners? because this is a program and of course, well, you know, as we like to say, you can get us anywhere. you listen to your podcast. but if you go to chatter on books dot com chatter on books is all one word. you can see upcoming episodes, you can see previous episodes. we've had. john was just telling me before the show, we're over 150 now. i didn't even know that. but you can get all the information you need right there. do you make money off this? aren't you adorable? no. we're close to breaking even. we have patrick on, which is an interesting thing. give people for a very minimal fee. you give people extra content. you know, the the outtakes, the the goofy mistakes we make. we do a thing with many of our authors. at the end of the regular taping we call it 60 seconds more, in which we ask them rapidfire

questions. your favorite childhood book, what classic do you love? what classic do you hate? so the patron patrons give us a little bit of money, which is nice. there's a wonderful organization called bookshop.org, which is just tremendous job supporting independent bookstores. and we are big supporters of theirs. so as an affiliate, if someone buys one of these fabulous books from bookshop.org, we get a few cents. torie clarke, how often do you do a program where you go on location and film it? video not enough. before the pandemic, we had started to do it. c-span was so kind to come to a couple of the local bookstores. we taped in the calvert woodley liquor store once, which was fabulous, although we annoyed the customers right before thanksgiving. and we did one at georgetown university, which was terrific with the fellow, oh name escapes me. he wrote the book that broke the story about elizabeth holmes bad blood. and that was great because we did it with students. so we want to do more of that going forward have some live ones, but generally the zoom zoom is a wonderful platform.

do you spend any time on book talk, talk recently? yes. and should spend more. and you know, we're not the fancy people in books but i know the fancy people on books go, oh, my gosh. you know, it's it's a lot of young people or it's a lot of romance or a lot of whatever a lot of people are reading of that. i think that's a good thing. and if young people are reading romance books or they're reading dystopian, god bless them, they're reading. so we should spend more time engaged in that. when did you start this? excellent question. about three years ago. yeah. i think we're coming up on three and a half years now and we do it a it works out to about three shows per month, sometimes more. but it works out to about that. we try to take a few weeks off in august. so you're doing year round? oh yeah. we we are doing year round and you, you know from what you do with all your fabulous authors, there's so much talent out there, there's so much great content. any topic under the sun. sometimes we do impromptu

things. i was sharing the story with you recently after the george floyd murders occurred on a thursday night. we changed the show. we had planned for monday night and had on a guy named chris wilson, fabulous guy who was a convicted murderer who spent a lot of time in prison. and he had some really interesting thoughts to bring to the table. so we'll do things that are topical. for instance which makes it really nice. we can turn on a dime. who is your first guest? oh, mark leibovich. interestingly, mark leibovich, then of the new york times now with the atlantic, one of the all time greatest guys in town. i'm sure you've had him on and he had decided after the first trump administration what he wanted to do something completely different. and he writes a about the nfl, but it turned out so much of it was about trump, but he was fabulous. did you read his book our town? yes, but only after i had read the book on the nfl. the one thing about our town and mark leibovich, there was no index whatsoever. and for washington readers, you

have to explain it for your non washingtonians. why, that's big deal. well, because the first thing we do is go back and see if our names are in there or if our organizations are in the u.s. yeah, and i go to that page. my favorite thing about reading the washington read it, the washington read one of bob woodward's books. i don't remember which one. it was the first one i think he did on the bush 43 administration. i flipped it and i thought, you know, he listed my name as victoria, a clerk. now, usually misspell clerk. he got that right. that letter a, i don't have a middle name, but only is it not. a so i like to say i'm one of the few people about whom paul werber has made a factual mistake. how do you how do you spell clerk with an e at the end with an e often gets misspelled and you know, go by tory t0ri often gets misspelled. do you bring your republican sensibilities into your interviews? you have a long background as a republican. you're i like to say, conservative. i like to say conservative.

i i'm sure i do. it's not front of brain. i think i probably try to put that aside, it's more the experiences i've had. so for instance, i worked in the u.s. trade representative office under carla hills. so when some say ken follett starts taking medieval examples of geopolitical things going on today, i can i can click that or we have a panel we have live a panel that helps work with the authors, interview the authors and very often one of them is jamie mcintyre. dear, who covered the pentagon for cnn. for many, we can bring some things to the equation based on those experiences, but it's more the experi ence than any political persuasion. have you ever had a guest say no because of your background? not that i know of. if they say no, it's because i'm so busy. these kinds of things. barbara kingsolver you know, the author, barbara kingsolver, totally intrigued by her, love

her books will love to have her on the show. this is the best blow off i've ever gotten. and you go to her website, whatever it is, and usually there's a list of contacts. sometimes you can find the person directly. those are contacts. and it said, because of the demand and this and that excepts, please send a letter to this address. some address in virginia. and i sent off a very nice letter, useful thing a week later, get the nicest letter back from her assistant saying she's so sorry. she can't do it, but she's so busy and i keep it because it's the nicest thing ever. the ones that drive me crazy, the ones who don't answer. i'm happy if you want to say no, but just let me know. but they usually say yes. torie clarke, there have been some book bands out there in the world today, and i don't want to call them widespread. they seem to be very local ized. do you have a take on that? have you ever done anything on that? yeah, we it comes up too often, unfortunately. and ron charles is the

washington post book critic, fabulous guy. we've had him on a few times because he brings a great perspective to things. and this was a year or so ago. he's on the show and i went and found had dug up something he had written ten years ago and was he was gently making fun of national book banning week or something like that. people are bemoaning books that are being banned ten years ago and he saying he ron charles and this is not a big deal so in 2022 i said ron look at this and he goes, i know, i can't believe i said it because i find myself writing about it every week. i find it distressing. i think more information is usually the answer to problems, not less. i think exposing people to as many different opinions and viewpoints really helps everyone. so i find it very distressing. i think some things get complicated very quickly, so if you're talking about are we going to update the language in tom sawyer? so it's it's more correct. i don't know. are we erasing part of history?

i don't have good answers. it comes up a lot. people tend to say on the one hand this, but then on the other hand, that puts. so i find it very difficult. we just had david blight from yale university on this program, and i asked him that question about huck finn, and he said, no, it should not be updated. he's at yale long time professor, and he's doing this new series on black lives, huh? yeah he's producing this new book series on black lives. and he said, no, it should not be updated. david yeah. david aldrich is one of our our contributors. he's with me almost every single week. fabulous guy. he is a rock star in the world of sports. worked for the washington post, tnt, covered basketball now with the athletic. fantastic. he is black. we just talked about this the other day when we were interviewing early on. woo, who wrote the book master slave husband, wife, a fantastic book. and this came up again. and i don't say it's a blanket

answer, but david, the other night was saying, if you start erasing all of that, then people aren't going to know. our kids, our grandchildren are going to know what people did, how they behaved, how they spoke. so in general, he is of changing those things as well. did you see the story about the digital books? that was wild in which you buy a digital book and then unbeknownst to you, you pick it up six months later, it is retroactively been changed like rule dol, the children's author nuts. do you try to books that nobody else has found or that just you personally read and you want to talk to the. yeah, sometimes the more obscure the better. and again, thanks to the internet, lots of bad things you can usually find something about the person and you can find a video. god bless them. they went to some tiny independent bookstore in new mexico and you can see them and go, okay, they're really passionate about this work, so they'd be good on our show. i can't take credit for

discovering them, but so chill. gonzalez, who wrote organized dreaming, fabulous person, fabulous book and she kim again, she's from the dmv and she wrote this book called the dmv being sorry district, maryland, virginia, which is what people in dc call it, to try to we try to be hip. there's nothing less cool than washington, d.c. but if we see the dmv, it sounds a little cooler. i can't say we discovered her. lou bayard, who is a washington, d.c. based author, he writes great historical fiction. jackie and me, fantastic, pale blue. i recently made into a movie. he introduced me to her, but i can't say we discovered them complete lee but they're not ones you and i would have heard if i hadn't had this podcast. what about self-published? it depends on the book. try to think if we've had somebody, it's not coming to mind right away. but sure, in this day and age, why not? it's the content that matters. have you had self-published

struggle? i'm trying to think, yeah, maybe one or two. yeah, yeah. i can see some. and it would obviously be easier for an established author. i can see some of them wanting to go that route because as the publishing industry consolidates like every other major older industry, the restriction has become so big. sometimes the authors. i will commend an author on having a really unique cover. the cover art on the book, and they go, oh, i'd fight the publisher for months over that. i can see an established author saying, i can do this. well, you're the author of two books. what was the process like for you? oh, hilarious. the first one, one of the worst books ever produced by somebody from washington, dc, lipstick on a pig. and i was very, very busy at the time as my excuse was given an editor who, with good reason, had many, many, many more important things to do with and help me with that book. so there was not a lot of editing, which showed up in the final product because the topic

was it was based somewhat on various jobs. i've had it me a lot of speeches, so that was good. and then years later for my father, i did a wonderful little book called surviving how to survive washington without losing your soul and never went anywhere never got any traction again. i got very busy on other things, but i'm actually much prouder of that. it's better written. had a wonderful person, helped me edit it had one derful illustrations illustrations by a guy named galifianakis, who is from northern virginia. and so i love that one. i give it out if people forget about it with good reason and sometimes i'll give it out as a party favor. well, you spent a lot of time in official. do you still feel connected to the city or have you kind of stepped back connected because some of my friends are still into it. connected because, as you know, it gets into your dna, gets into your marrow and you you can't get it out. i'm pretty distressed at that. we've talked for decades that, oh, washington is so tough. and you kind of go, come on, you

know, they used to beat people over the head with their canes on the floor of the house, but it's pretty right. the the acrimony pretty bad. the partizanship is pretty bad. so i'm not happy with it. but i'm still here and it's turned into a fabulous city. when you and i were growing up here, we grew up here and we worked here because this was where we worked and it's a beautiful city, but it didn't have a lot of other things to offer. it didn't matter because we worked so hard. but now we've got 320 somethings. my husband, i do, two of whom live here in the area. it's a great city. it's got great bars, great restaurants, great culture, so many things to do. so even though i'm not as deep in the official business, there are still wonderful reasons to live here. are you doing anything besides the podcast? yes, i a couple of nonprofit it boards, one of which is the rumsfeld foundation. i'm very proud of. i mean, what does it do? it it does that. it has two main purposes. it does fellowships for central

asian fellows. so these are mid-level public and private sector people from central asian countries who come over here for six, eight weeks have tremendous experiences. and then the other half of it is us fellows who are graduate post-graduate students studying national security. and we give them money to help fund their educations. fabulous. and then i do a little bit of consulting tends to be very project specific crisis management focus, which i like. there's a beginning and there's an end. i can stop and i have gone back to school just saying i was a tarot student when i was a child. you don't get better at that. you don't come back 40 years later and go, oh, i'm a good student. it's very hard. but i am getting a master's in social work at catholic university, which is a ton of fun because i would i'm hopeful. my next chapter going to be combining two things. i care deeply about. one is the military. and there is a tremendous problem of military with high rates of ptsd, and the other is

horses. and there's a wonderful alternative of therapy. increasingly being used in which the military veterans with ptsd and first responders work with the horses in this equine assisted. and it's got anecdotally so far, but tremendous results. so hopefully i can get more formally engaged on that. but you actually have to have some education and some training thus my tragic educational career right now, john mccain, george h.w. bush, second campaign, ustr, d.o.d. chatter on books. what's been your favorite job? every one of them is seriously, i've only had one bad, bad job in my time. here was six months at the department of justice, which, you know, just never shows up anywhere. look, his head goes, what a terrible job. but other than that, i've loved every one of them. i've so fortunate, so blessed to work with and for terrific people, so that every single one of them fantastic. and sometimes john mccain and the bushes and john mccain and don rumsfeld, a lot a lot of

love there and they were always said, what do you like that one better than me? i love them all. and now i i'm sure there are books out there. not too many you know, each one represents something. and i love meeting these every week. i love reading things that i might not otherwise have picked up off a shelf. it's fantastic. you ever up to new york to the publishing houses? yes. and the it's like anything, it's an older industry. it's it has its rules, you know, these kinds of things. but there are individual people in each one of those publishing houses that get up every day saying, i want to do the best for this author, even if he or she is not well known. i want to make sure this is the greatest interview for these established people like ken follett. so i've identified some people and each one i really like them. i hear from them every day and we're in constant communication. yeah. so you've gotten on the map enough that the publishers are contacting you as well? i feel badly because sometimes something will across and you

know, somebody who wants to do the political persuasions, i don't know, keywords and new zealand nice go probably not for us i feel badly turn down but i try to respond to all of them. how many listeners do you have? oh, millions. it varies wildly and because of podcast some people listen to it when the podcast drops, which tuesdays and then other people. oh no, that's what i do friday afternoons. so it kind of you get a rolling count but can be as few as a few thousand can be as many as 15 20,000 per show, 60 seconds favorite childhood book, black beauty. why horses, horses, horses, life lessons. charity, humility, kindness what's a classic that everybody should read a don quixote again? the horses thing. no, no, but that was don. you don't. you don't. yeah. there's a great joke about getting a donkey and naming him

don quixote. anyways, don quixote. now, the question. and this is a chatter and books question. what's the worst that no one should read? that was the next question. moby --. why? look at him. drop. it was one of your favorite books. well, i've never read it don't waste your time. here's the deal. i went back to read it a few years ago because i thought i got to this phase. this is before the show, but i thought i should reread some of the classics. let's take that one. i don't know what is over a thousand pages, 800 of which 800 which are about time. not there's maybe a page on the of the whale and this and that and you think this should be a movie but it's hundred pages untying knots it's drab maybe that's the details life that we all have to go the knots of that's your smart i thought that was person yeah yeah again i've never read the book don't tell you don't i just reread the iliad and the odyssey. god bless you. how long did it take you? it was an audio book and it took

me a 12 hour car ride. okay. so are you audio person, a print person, kindle? what do you do? print hard copy? yeah, that's my favorite. i spent a lot of time in my car going to and from the horses, so especially with books, we have authors. the show, if i can do both, i want to do both. have you had bing west on for military right. i got we were going to have him on. i got his book and i'm reading it, going and maybe it was because i was so close to the subject matter, but i'm reading going, okay, okay, okay, okay. the audio version was fantastic, was fantastic and it made me think of things that i hadn't thought of otherwise. and especially different books. i think the audio version can be so much more meaningful. so try to do both when i have time. what are you currently reading? not for chatter on books. oh, how much it works out to over 50 books. you know, usually over 50 bucks a year. no, i just. i have to rave about master slave, husband, wife because we just finished it and we just had

elian. we want it based on the true story of an enslaved couple that escaped 1848 from macon, georgia, to get to philadelphia. and in the crisscross, they crisscross and they hidden in plain sight. they hid in plain sight how they did it. it's so exciting, so wonderful. and it did cause me to go down some rabbit holes to read other things. so i'm still reading. torie clarke chatter on books is the name the podcast? the address is chatter on books dot com. thanks for being with us on book two. thank you so much for having me. great to see. and now more live coverage of the texas book festival in austin. right now. are.

at. democracy watcher.

we were also. hello, everyone. welcome to this incredible event and thank you so to the book trust. oh oh 30 oh. this is the actual exact. okay we're ready to just practice. oh, we can keep going. okay. we'll just keep practicing. well, again, hello. welcome to the c-span tent. thank you. texas book festival and c-span. i'm rebecca mack. roy and i have just couple of announcements before we get started. please silence your cell phones. it's a great thing to do. i should probably actually do mine. it's not a bad idea after this, the authors are going to sign books in the book, people signing tent that's located near 11th street on congress avenue behind us. books are for sale throughout the festival weekend courtesy of book people so you can help support our incredible authors in the texas book festival. and the largest independent

bookstore in texas by purchasing our incredible festival authors books. in the book, people sales tent, a portion of every book sale will help the texas book festival's mission, which includes expanding literacy initiatives and access to literature across the state. so thank you again and. welcome. today, i'm going to introduce to amazing is the understatement of the century women. serafina el-badry nance and lauren grush. their the six and star struck are must reads for anyone interested in space. women science and the future of our universe and i would like to just have them open up a little bit by talking about their books and how they came to writing this. because serafina is your book is a memoir. a memoir not only of your time working as an astrophysicist, but of coming up right here in

austin, texas. and it is a little bit of a love letter to austin, i must say. it's really, really beautiful. talk a little bit about why you decided to write memoir. you write a lot. so what took you to this point? yeah. thanks, everyone for being here. excited to be back in austin, i think to question i have loved writing. i think in another life i would be a full time writer and not a scientist. so i think there is something you know about books. you know, i grew up coming to the texas book festival. i carried books around with me everywhere, but i think i was very curious, you know, reflecting on my experience growing up as a woman in science and balance, seeing my sort of curiosity for the universe and passion for the night sky with, this feeling of not belonging and trying to discern what about

that is sort of systemic. how other people have impacted and my journey to, the point where i am today, which is graduating with my ph.d. in may, while also sort of carrying this feeling of do i actually belong now? and i think this was not just a reflection, but also a, you know a hope that for anyone reading it who doesn't feel like they belong in science or whatever field they're in, to know that not alone. and i we need more voices that sort of can diddley explore what it means to carve a path for yourself in a field where you're not historically. yeah. and speaking of historical representation, lauren, your book, great segway traces. i mean, these six women who were the first to be in the nasa's space program in the united

states. i mean, you might have just told the story of sally ride, but you chose to tell the story of all six. talk a little bit about your process, why you wanted take this on. yeah, absolutely. i felt like and when i learned of this group, i was probably like most everyone maybe here or, the general public. i knew of sally ride as the first american woman in space, but i really didn't know much about the other five women. and i was shocked to learn that there five other women who could have easily been the first american woman in space. and so when i dug deeper into how sally was selected and what that process was like, it opened up all of these what ifs, you know, historical. what if anna had been first? what if kathy you know, and how that would have shaped history? so it was really a way to educate myself while, elevating their platform and also in terms of why i wanted to write a book about these women as a

journalist, a woman in space journalism, i oftentimes find myself to be the only woman in the room quite a bit. and that sense of, not belonging permeates throughout my entire career. i am very lucky to have met a lot of great women like serafina in this field. but when i first got started in space journalism, there were many moments where i felt i would be in room and i wanted to run out of that room screaming because i just didn't didn't feel like i related to anybody there. and so when it time to write a book, i knew that i to center women's voices in a story. there are lots of space books that center men and they're all great. nothing wrong with them, but it was very important to me to find one that centered women's voices. and i felt like this was a great story that hadn't been told like this before. and i and i loved that as an opportunity and so fascinating because it's not just a look at the history of these women, what they were enduring in the space

program. it's also a history of journalism. it's a history of how we looked at women in science and how journalists told their stories. so maybe talk a little bit about what you learned about the history of journalism from writing this mean. i'm actually saying all the time that when i was writing this book, i'm constantly apologizing for my journalist ancestors because the questions that they ask the women were just so indicative of where we were at the time as a society. so even at the very beginning, when they were first selected as a group, one of the first questions that they got during one of the press conferences was, if shannon loses three kids for we're factor in her selection and it's and then they had just selected 25 other white men and none of you know i'm sure many of them had children and none of them were asked if their children a factor in their selection process. so from the outset, they were already getting extremely gendered questions and it only

continued to get worse as they got closer to sally ride's. i mean, some of the questions that she was asked during her press conference, they just go down in history as their legend in terms of how terrible there were. you know, there was a time reporter who asked her if she wept in the simulator when something went wrong. yeah. you know, just what we. but the great thing was, you know, her her her colleagues are her crewmates. so her commander was like, actually the commander seen in the simulator, you know, just as a. so yeah, chronicling the press and diving through those archives like how they were covered, how the stories around them were shaped was just a giant. it shined great light on, you know, what's society was thinking at the time. it really was mirror of where we were and what we thought of women going to space. and it was clear that we thought of them as novelties, not as serious scientists who deserved

to be there. and serafina, one way i like to describe your book, which i just did, is it's a book that takes a velvet hammer to the patriarchy because the nicest thing really it really is, it's this, you know, being able to tell your story as a full, bringing your human self to science, to your work, to your story and saying, guess what? this all matters is really a revolutionary act. so in terms of what that meant to your book, lauren, it traces how women could show up, what they could reveal, and the moment where judy resnick, her hair is wrapped around the camera and she is just like, do not let people know that this happened, because then that's to be the story. i mean, there is this just the history of is very, very sexist. and what we can say, especially a scientist can you talk a little bit, sarafina, about what it meant for you to do that, to kind of break through that? yeah, i think, you know, when i

approached the book, i had read a lot of stories that sort of either fell into stereotyping and bias sort of exactly to your of women, especially women of color haven't been allowed to show up fully as themselves or either stereotype raped and cast in a particular light, or they, you know, don't really get to express any part of themselves. and either way, they're not serious people. they're not serious scientists. and on the other hand, there are, as you said, so many books and stories that are interested in studying the stereotype of the white man who, you know, is a scientist and is at a blackboard and sort of, you know, like is a genius and i think those are all interesting stories, but where do we bring the humanity of the scientists to the page how do we actually talk about. i think it's a lie when people

say, you know, scientists leave their humanity at the door and, you know, they're all analytical, they're all thinking that's not true. we all show up with our full selves to whatever work we're. and i think it does a disservice to the science, especially in astronomy, which is for me. so much about casting our own lives in the perspective, you know, the sort of grand expanse of the universe that's all about humanity. so how can we hold that and investigate it that sort of clear mindedly while also holding, you know, the pure analytical science questions discoveries in truth as well. yeah, i know kind of it pulls into question this whole idea of genius and inspiration and creativity. it's not something one owns. it's everywhere around you. it's all of those, you know, moments and insights and the way that you parallel the expanse of the universe black holes with,

you know, the the diagnosis, your father, i mean, these things that you're seeing, the macrocosm and then you're living in this and trying to understand your position in the world through that relationship, it's really beautiful. i think that's at its core, it's health science. i mean, you know, when we think about our ancestors who look to the night sky to sort of derive a sense of their own place in the universe, say, you know, obviously understand times through the way that the stars and the move there's something so human about that and i think this book was my attempt at sort of holding both to your point and i haven't seen a lot of stories and i'm so happy to hear more stories that really investigate that question of of the full person. mm hmm. mm hmm. i think, you know, what's so interesting to lauren to that point is seeing how the presence

of women in the space program in the early sixties, it's not just that they doing something very new and interesting. it's they're threatening a lot of social norms. how did you what kind of spoke to you about the way that their presence was threatening certain social norms that you maybe weren't expecting? right. well, so i think you're referring to the group of women in the sixties who are trying to be astronauts before even the six came on board. their famous group known as the mercury 13, not the best name for, but it's kind of how they're known and even even before the this the six came on board, there were these this amazing group of women pilots who they train for space in the same way the mercury seven the first seven male astronauts nasa picked were also selected and 13 of them passed. but they wanted to keep training and prove that they able to go to space and ultimately when

nasa and the end lawmakers found out about it, they pulled the plug. and what i think their shows is just kind of what they were up against at the time and how i mean, even how we viewed women even before the sex came on board in the eighties. you look at how their stories were covered when they lobbying congress, they took note of the fact that jerri took her shoes off, you know, and that that she was being kind of relaxed and in that congressional hearing and then ultimately when they decided not to continue on with women astronauts, valentina tereshkova became, the first woman to fly to space with, the soviet union and the way they covered her was just abysmal. it was about her plump figure and the fact that she didn't wear a lot of and then when she did fly, you know, they were talking about how she she was

hysterical, you know, a very coded word. and that she had this mental breakdown. and so we kind of just the way nasa officials talked about it, they laughed off as a publicity stunt. they making jokes that, you know, when they relaxed the weight requirements that they would send women up, you know, it was just really horrible. and it showed that for them, you know, it was just a novelty. like women were not something to be taken seriously. this this race the soviets to send the first woman was not important enough. and it was also wrapped up in the time, you know, we were locked in the space race with the soviet union. and so basically they they viewed as a distraction against what was essentially national security at the time. it was we needed to win the space race. and so they did. they made all of excuses as to why it wasn't important. you know, it was just i think that was pretty shocking to i mean, it was shocking in that i knew was i knew what i was going to read and what i was going to find out. but still seen it on the page

and seen how blatant was and how people were talking about it. so openly and awfully. that was a moment where i was like, wow, you know, and this was only in the sixties, you know, we're not even a full century out from it yet. so and then and then we go to the eighties where the sex were when they came on board and they were still dealing with things like that. so, you know, just seeing it written out and seeing it on the page like that, you're you're like, wow, this is very blatantly sexist and misogynistic. exactly. exactly. and i mean, sarafina, in your book, when you experience. okay, first of all, you all need to read sarah, you need to read both of these books. i'm just like some of the moments, just like brought me to my knees. and there is a moment when you're at summer camp and you're so excited because you get to meet your first astrophysicist and. you meet him and he says to you, this is not for you.

shivers i'm like, yeah, yeah. i mean, seriously, you that in that moment you could you're at a very pivotal year in your life. you know, you could have said it's not for me, but you had the support of your friend who said screw him like what? what does he know? doesn't know anything. and i think that support and that friendship is so important that comes across in your book it comes across in your book. talk a little bit about what that means yeah so i was the moment that you're talking about. i was in fifth grade, so i was really young and impressionable, and i think i was, you know, looking outwards to see this sort of validation that i belong and that i can do, you know, pursue my dreams and. and it was actually striking to look back on that moment as an adult and question, you know, what veracity does this person

really hold? and to especially say that a young child right. but the what's so sad about moment is that, you know, i experienced that over time. and it's not just the moment itself, but it's also the insidious sort of belief that i carry with me from that moment forward, that questioning, that doubt of do i actually belong, you know, is this something that i can really do? and i think having mentors and figures in my life and a support system through my friends helped sort of bui that like dissonance, you know what they cast me as and what i wanted to be and you know, i couldn't i don't think i would be here without the voices, you know, my friend who was with me, priyanka she, you know, said exactly what you what you mentioned, which

is, you know, screw him. right? but it's hard, especially when they mount over time to be able to fortify against claims that sort of typecast you or stereotype you and make you believe that you're not worthy. so i think, you know, i've been very very, very privileged to have mentors. you know, my high school astronomy teachers, one of them who i think kept me going in those darkest hours where i felt like i couldn't do it. and yeah, i think this book is an example, you know, as i said earlier, of like, how do we make this experience universal in the sense that everybody experience says something like this? how do we help them feel not alone so that they can continue to pursue their i mean, what this book would have for the sex, you know, i mean, what what would what did their support look like and how how important

was it to have the support of everyone on their team? absolutely. well, their was definitely varied. i mean, there are six women from six very different backgrounds and, you know, a lot of them did have very supportive families, but not all of them did. you know, particularly judy had a difficult upbringing, but they still had to push through it. but two, so what sarafina experience, they experience that a lot. and i want to say they went on to be astronauts just to help me. yeah, no, but before they even came to nasa, it was a constant knows. it was constant barriers, you know, i bring up shannon lucid a lot because she was slightly older than the rest of the group, but that generation gap, that small generational gap, i mean, when she was trying to be chemist or trying to find a job her field it was no one's to hire you because you're a woman and. we're not going to pay you the same amount. why would we ever pay you the same amount as your male colleagues? you know, just aghast at that

kind of that suggestion. so the they were constantly being faced with no's. they did have support systems. i mean, she had and her husband and of them had great families that taught them that they could be whatever they wanted when they grew up. but i do want to say that not everybody has that support system, so it doesn't have to just come from your it just, you know, you have to find people around you that can help you. and a lot of that did come. they they moved to nasa. so there were definitely some people who were skeptical within nasa who did not necessarily that women should be astronauts, many of the older astronauts, not many. i don't to say many, but there were a few that voiced their skepticism. but ultimately they were won over when they saw how hard the women worked and how dedicated they were to achieving this goal. and then also their male colleagues they flew with also proved to be very valuable allies for them. so that press conference i talked about when sally ride was

asked if she wept in the simulator, she was constantly getting asked awful questions and. her male colleagues would come in and say, actually, you know, this is, you know, they would kind of insinuate that the question was stupid. and so having allies like that and that protection, that was also great support. and then, of course, the women would also form a united front when they needed to, you know, sometimes comically. so there's a great scene in the beginning where they are first being presented to the press and they all kind of rally in the bathroom because they noticed that everyone was a man so nobody could go into the women bath women's bathroom with them. so that was like a place of solace. and they were all they were all kind of planning their strategy on how to take on the next question. and then also my one of my favorite i think this is also a legendary some of you might know, but when sally ride was doing her bench checks, she was checking out her equipment

before she flew to space she grabbed kathy to kind of be this, you know, sounding board because she knew she was in for a treat. and within her, her supplies that she was supposed to check before she went to space, she saw a pink plastic tube she pulled on it. there is another pink plastic to wrap together like sausages. it was 100 -- for a week long trip in space and the the engineers her if 100 would be enough. and she said can you can cut that in half and it will be fine. there's so many moments like that. it's like, what is it? it's actually a quite a funny book. like i just that the thing that's one of the things i also wanted convey is like, you know, these things are horrible and awful but we take them on with humor and that's kind of one of the ways that women deal with this sort of thing and the women hilarious like they're so funny. astronauts in general are so funny. i hope that is something that is

conveyed when when i went, i just what i wanted to be judy's friend. she just seemed cool. yeah. you know, but. and i just want to give a quick shout out to the books because serafina reads her audiobook and it's phenomenal. and your reader for your book is also fantastic, amazing. and there were so many times when i was like, on the trail listening, crying. i mean, they, you know, laughing, crying, revisiting the challenger crash is i mean, for all of us, i'm sure it's like, you know, is very, very painful. okay, so we're going to open things up for questions in just a minute. but i would be without these two expert scientists and journalists to ask about space travel today. what do you think about private space travel? what do you think about artemis mission? okay, let's have it. i speed round. how long do you have. no, i would. i'm always saying that as a journalist. it's a very exciting time to be a space journalist because there is so much going on and there's so much to cover. you know, during the era of the

six, it really was nasa taking people to space. with the space shuttle, there really weren't any other options. but now we have a myriad of private companies that have come online the past decade that have really surpassed even my wildest expectation in terms of what is possible, who fly, how they can fly. and so it is a really exciting time. also a very busy time to be a space journalist. but one thing that really i like to tie in with these talks is things are it's a very poignant time to be thinking about women in space because nasa is currently striving to go back to the moon with its artemis program and. one of the stated goals of that is to send a woman and a person of color to the moon for the first time and for some, i think that might be a controversial statement because that's never been something that nasa has outwardly stated and one of its human spaceflight programs before. but in my opinion, i think it's an admirable goal, or at least

an admirable thing to state, because i think it will ultimately help to guarantee their success. so if you look at the selection process that i detail in the six, one of their stated goals was bring in more women and people of color into the program and that ultimately guided their decision making on they were going to advertise how who they were going to reach out to. they even brought in nichelle nichols lieutenant or her from star trek to do a psa to brant to encourage people to so that guided their decision making. and so i think with nasa making that a stated goal, it'll ultimately guarantee their success. so i'm very excited to see where that that takes us. and i can't think of anything more exciting than covering a woman on the moon for the first time. i will cry in the best way. yes. yeah, i think there are so many exciting opportunities now in terms of the up, the potential to democratize access to space and real you get people who

haven't had opportunities like women and people of color to really the boundaries of what we've done so far. and i also think it's a really important time for us to be questioning how. we can go about this in an ethical way, in a way that doesn't do more harm than good. so thinking about the climate impact, thinking about, you know, ways that the pursuit of pushing out into the universe doesn't, you know, damage or destroy what we have here on earth, i think there is a very lofty goal in being able to push into the you know, into space something i personally want to do. one day. but i also think that there really important questions that we have to hold close and really i think very very much so investigate honestly and transparently how we can do that in a way that honors what we have.

yeah, exactly. well, see some incredible scientists in the audience as well as journalists and i'm sure that you all have a fabulous question i'd invite you to stand behind the microphone that's in the center of the tent. feel free, not ask a question, but you can if you want to. and as we open up, please just give one round of applause to these incredible women. sarafina oh, badrinath. laura, crush your guts are wonderful. wonderful. must reads. please go ahead. so i've got a question for you. given in charge of the private operations, elon musk and jeff bezos. i mean, they're not personally in charge of those lift offs, but they kind of are astronauts. so they're the concern about the things that elon musk has done with starlink and then with space x, with environmental impacts in boca chica.

and what happened in when they tried to do the liftoff of the rocket that will take us to the moon, what comes to mind for, y'all, in looking at those? because that scares me to death. starlink in particular, when it comes to me as a journalist, it's just my job to not overlook those things, right? so we're constantly be like when, when starship did launch? i was there. and our coverage of that included all of the environmental impacts that happened, the lawsuits that a fan of that, you know, it's my job to make sure that that is being chronicled. and so it is, you know, i have my own personal opinions it but in terms of what i think is my as a reporter it's to make i shine a light on all of those criticisms, all of those things. i think when it comes to space reporting, there is a a tendency to cheerlead because it is so

inspirational and like like sarafina was saying, but at the same, you know, it's an industry, any other industry, any other business in the tech industry. and that comes with these fallouts that you were talking about. and so i, i just say i would say and i think we have a great space reporting of of journalists, but overall can be a tendency to cheer and and you know because does it is so inspirational going to space is so exciting but the same time it does have these real impacts here on earth and so it's our job it's my job not to overlook those things, to bring them to light. yeah, i will answer this question from, you know, my perspective as somebody who has studied astronomy and wants to one day go to space. so a slightly different perspective. i think very similarly. i did an analog astronaut mission a couple of years ago, which meant that i lived in a

simulation though i was on mars for a couple weeks and even it was still here on earth. they really tried to simulate as much as possible what it would be like if we were on another planet and meant we wore spacesuits every time we left the habitat. we had rationed food and water, etc. and i bring this up because when i finished the mission, the first thing i did was strip off the spacesuit and feel sunlight on my skin and look around for plant life. once we away from the habitat and again, even though as a couple of weeks i treasured that moment so because it felt like i had a renewed sort of appreciation for the earth and for what it was to treasure this planet that we live on. and i think, you know, astronauts have spoken to this when they back from the international space station.

and i think a lot people who have that exposure sense of viewing the earth from afar and coming back home, is this moral responsibility to take care of this planet that we live on. and i believe that it's, you know, our job to sure we have these aspirations and all, i think, incredible goals, a human species. and as people who want to venture into the stars and at the same time can we be honest and accountable to about how we can do that? and think we all have to be we all have to question. we all have to, you know, hold like elon and jeff bezos accountable for ways do that ethically. yes. space doesn't get a pass, you know, just because is so exciting. it has those impacts that you talked about. and so but like i said, i do think there is a tendency to overlook that. and it's our job to to look back

on earth as we're looking to space at the same time as as opposed to an escape from earth. right. yeah. i go ahead, sir. i'm curious about, sally ride. and if you discovered anything about home of phobia at nasa's and if that might have caused her to be reluctant to be more public about her sexual. gee, so nothing that i didn't discover any particular at nasa at the time. but i think what gathered and what the people around her have gathered because unfortunately she has passed. and so we can't ask ourselves, but she she she saw how very similar public figures dealt when they came out. so billie jean king was a very good friend of hers. and when billie jean king came out, i think she lost like all of her endorsements or something in 24 hours. and so while sally never said

that, that wasn't what impacted her, it's likely that she saw that. and that that would be the story if she came out publicly. and so i think she was just trying to be very protective of that. and also, as sally was very cognizant of the public eye being on her. so one of the things she said before flew was that she was very scared she was going to somehow mess up. so she knew that she wasn't just representing herself. she was representing a large group of people, all women. so i think she just was taking that very she was very strategic and, you know, trying to protect her and her family. so i don't know if there is she encountered any specific homophobia at nasa, but i think she was just very understanding that it would be it would take on a life its own if she came out that way, especially at the time that she just flew. yeah. yeah, i, i guess this is a question for lauren, but i was

wondering you could make a compare at the time that you chronicle in the book to the time of today in terms of nasa and it's space journalism and how far we've kind of look prior we've made or whether we need to make more. i love that you're asking this question because i was just talking about this last night. i've been doing these panels and talks and stuff. one of the things that i like to say that the six really helped to pave the way. women who came after them and how they would have it a lot easier because they wouldn't get asked the same questions. and while i do think that's true, i think the space reporters out there do a great job. i was just taking note of the fact a friend of ours, i think a mutual friend of ours, kelly girardi, recently flew to space and big on instagram and social media and she has a daughter who she features prominently and when i was looking at her comments and they were all like, how could you leave your daughter for a four minute trip to space and it just it's anna

fisher was getting those questions as a first mom and people were very critical of the fact that she flew when. she had a daughter. and so i like to think have come a long way. and i think we have but these things are still a reminder that they the we had back in the eighties still echo today. so while i do think journalism has come a long way, i think there are some biases that the general public still holds that we could hopefully get away from as we move forward instead of a double standard. yes, it has to ten go ahead. hi, i'm the student who come. what are y'all's advice to people like students and recent graduates just getting started? and careers in science? thank you. yeah, i, i think i like to say two things. one is i have certainly experienced the refrain of you don't belong here. you're not cut out for this. and that is continued through

entire life. right? it's still happening. i think there's sort of like a muting aspect where now i'm just like not going to listen to you. and i try tell people, you know, especially historically, folks don't let anybody tell you that you're not cut out for something. if there's something you're interested in and passionate about, go for it. and that community that can sort of buttress you against the negativity that will of inevitably follow that that goal and that. and i yeah, i think maybe i saw the two things in one sentence, but i think finding community and finding people mentors, friends, mentees, even, you know i reflecting on my story, hearing about the sex and thinking i wouldn't be here, you know, where it not for these incredible women who have sort of paved the path for women like

me to be able to pursue my dreams and how can i be of service the next generation of young people who are are shooting for the stars, so to speak. so, yeah, that's my answer. what do you think? yeah, i was just going to echo that community has been a huge aspect for me, especially other women or people that i relate to in this field. so i talk a lot about when i first got started in space journalism, being the only woman in the room but over time, more, more women have joined the field and we've found each other and we have this very strong camaraderie. and so we always like to say there are like five people who understand what we're going through and they are one of them. and so we're all very close. we all talk, all the time and whenever we going through struggles that we feel are unique to us, specifically, we have each other to talk to. so would say, yeah, finding those people that you feel you can really relate to that has helped me, especially in

journalism. i mentioned it's a very busy time now. i mean, journalism is a 24 seven job, especially with space orbit, orbital mechanics sleep for no. one. and so whenever you're getting burnt out or anything like that, i turn to these women, these people, and it does make a huge especially when i want to quit or, you know, just kind of run away. they really help me to to feel like i'm not alone and that, you know what, i'm experiencing is is normal and that they've experienced it, too. and, you know, we are talking a lot about sexism and how difficult it is for women. but serafina, your book also offers community for with ptsd, with anxiety, women and other people who have suffered from domestic abuse. so there are many stories in there that provide an point to understanding the human experience and, what it means to persist and pursue in the face of all those challenges. so there's a lot going on there.

go ahead, ma'am. thank for your books and thank you for your persisting. yes. i wondered, is there still a wage gap for women and men? yeah, i'm i would assume, but i don't have the statistics on hand, unfortunately. i do know there is a gap in terms of representation of women in stem, but in terms wage gap, that's also something i'm to uncover as a journalist. so if you have any tips, please let me know. go ahead, sir. this is mainly for serafina, but you talk a lot about your mentors and some that are really, really good mentors and some that are really abysmal and not mentors at all. and i'm sure there's some people in between. is there some trait or a set of traits that really sets those great mentors apart? not from the bad ones, because that's obvious, but from the middling in between? yeah, absolutely i think my best

decision in grad school was finding advisor, who i trust and who believes in me, not just as a scientist, but as a person. i really sought out somebody who could see me and hold full humanity rather than simply my ability to code or to solve physics problems. and i think that for me personally, is what sets apart an excellent mentor from, you know, a fine one. i think when you are able to build bonds that are centered around a whole person, you're able to set yourself up for success, not just in the pursuit of whatever dream you have, but also, you know, personally. how happy are you doing what you're doing? how much you believe in what you're doing, and can that person be of service to you to seek out other or other vectors

of that you might not have looked at otherwise because they your full humanity? i mentioned my high school astro teacher earlier. i also had a wonderful advisor and i think both of those people i'll never forget. i met my college advisor on the day of the arab spring starting and i am half egyptian so that was like a really tumultuous day. me personally and my family in egypt and being able to walk into the room with him and candidly share this is happening in my life and my life. i want to show up as much possible in this meeting, but i'm also this and he didn't judge me. he didn't silence me. he didn't, you know he was able to just sort of hold that and support that and that trust. i think, allowed for better science for us to sort of create a relationship that, you know, i

still treasure to this day. so i think i get personal i seek mentors who who can see a full person and not just how that person can be of service them anything like that. oh. oh. in terms of mentors, for me, i, i hate to say it, i don't want to bring in negative spin, but there been quite a few in my life. i've had a lot of chants like you can't do something. and you'll never be able to do something. and so i've just practiced a lot of, you know, not listening to that and i mean, it's it's simple but there are those moments where you're you take it to heart and you think, wow, i i'll never do that. and you just have to kind of block it out of your memory and move forward. because the truth is, you don't really know what they're talking about.

so, yeah, unfortunately, i feel like i've had a lot of not great mentors in my life who and i would would also this is i'm just thinking of this off the top of my head now, but i think there are a lot of people who strive to be mentors who actually don't have the best intentions because they they didn't feel like they achieved something or they, you know, they just their life didn't turn out the way that they did. and so they actually seek to kind of perpetuate that cycle and so i would say be cognizant of that and don't when you encounter like that, just know that they don't they don't know what they're talking about that you can't do what you set mind out to. and i also just going off of that, i part of it is a representation problem. it goes back to who are the mentors, right. they tend to be, you know, especially in this field, white and you know, i've never a

female scientist i had one female physicist be a teacher in college out of four years of university here. so, you know, i think there is a question there of like what? like how to somebody in that position really reflect your best interests. and i think often times that's why the next generation is so important, because, you know, these people can then be in those positions to holds. you know, historically underrepresented groups in their full capacity, in their full humanity. and i will say that because of the experiences that i have had, whenever someone does come to me for advice, especially young women, i, i always, even if it's out of my way or i don't have time for it, i still i to make space and try to make space. i try to make space for helping them as much as i can and giving them the resources that they

can. and i hope that is my small part and, my way of being able to give back and be something of a mentor to people when when i didn't have that for myself. and if they don't have you, they now have your incredible that you all need to go and buy right now in the tens where future. dr. el-badry nance is going to be signing along with lauren crush. thank you all for coming and have a beautiful afternoon.

the. book tv's live coverage of the texas book festival in austin continues after this break. big the marketing secrets of richard ave viguerie.

mr. viguerie, what do you do for a living? my went to her grave a few years ago, not really understanding what i did. i was fortunate back in the 1960s, early sixties to pioneer political direct mail. people have been raising money a long time and they've been raising it money through the mails for churches, etc. nobody to combine the two politics and the mails and. i did that in the early sixties. for about 20 years, i had no competitors. and i you know, went out there and and helped build the conservative movement. and i can a case that without direct mail would be no conservative movement worthy of the other name. when i did my pioneering work in the sixties, the left wasn't doing it. now they're doing a better job. the conservatives are. have you always been a conservative when you even when you were growing up in texas? yeah, i grew up right in pasadena, texas, right outside of houston. and kids in the neighborhood

playing cops and robbers, you know, we were 11, 12, 13 years old. i don't tell anybody i'm not shooting robbers. i'm shooting commies. i don't know. i have no recollection of any political conversation. and my family, my extended family. but i just came to this world knowing communists are bad people. and i was dedicated to to, you know, fighting them, opposing the i'm second generation conservative, first generation bill buckley, russell kirk, barry goldwater, etc. oh, 100% of second generation conservatives fell of schlafly, jerry falwell, myself before we were conservatives first, we were anti-communist. that was the glue that held the conservative movement in those days back in the sixties and seventies, eighties what was that moment that burning bush moment for you when it came to direct mail mailing lists you were visiting national review office in new york city? well, the. i was fortunate in i had two

weeks summer camp national at a military base outside of chicago. and the first and only saturday we were there for the two weeks. everybody goes into chicago. richard stays in the barracks and reads nationally view and saw a small ad about an inch or two for four for field directors, americans for constitutional and didn't no longer exist. but i had a friend, a buddy who worked for national review, a journalist, a writer there. and so could hear the cannons and the guns going off in new york. in washington, the war was starting and i was desperate to get into the and fight the political left here in america. and so i called my friend david, frankie and said, david, i've got to get one of those four jobs. he says it's not for is one. it was a blind ed to run young americans their freedom. and i said, david, get me that job. i got the job. and for about a year and a half, a move to new york and i came in

contact fairly regularly. bill buckley and frank meyer and brant bozell and intellectual giants out there, james burnham and i tried to be like them and i read everything i thought they were reading. i wasn't making a lot of progress. so at one point i made a conscious decision to focus on directing mail. we didn't have enough people like buckley who could write and debate and all but we had some. we had nobody. they could market them to the country. so literally went to my wife by. then i had a wife and two babies and i said, honey, i think got something here is going to change america, maybe even change the world, but i don't know it. i've got to study it. could i be relieved of all household duties? no diapers, no trash, no yard work? sure. bought into it. and for seven, eight years, i made a deep dive in marketing and, direct marketing, direct mail and those days were the microphones of the country. back in those days, concerted message went up against this blockage. new york times nbc, abc, etc. we couldn't get a message out. we were the tree that fell in the fourth.

but starting with direct mail, we could go around this blockage right into people's homes. and that changed everything i can make a case that ronald reagan would not have gotten the nomination in 1980 without direct mail because when connally and george h.w. were getting the thousand dollar contributions, he was getting hundreds of thousands of ten, 15, $25 contribution funded campaigns made all the difference. mr. viguerie, what makes an effective of direct mail letter? talk about one that you've written. well. direct mail is used to be until recently, the second largest form of advertising in the country. television number one now is number three, because the internet internet's number one, television number direct mail is number three. and i recognize that early on, and i recognize that it's not a when i write a letter that goes to a million people, i don't write it to a million people. i write it to person. i have one person in mind. i'm writing that letter to and i have a conversation well for

most of my political it was my parents, my mother, my dad. i would have them met. they didn't give every time, but they would occasionally. so you don't want to write to somebody that always gives. it's not a challenge or never gives. so you want somebody that gives in and you have a conversation with them and i bill buckley famously said he was a conservative, but of the breed on saturday night, he's hanging out with gilbert, truman capote, etc. i am of the breed. i'm a my faith is. and as long as most catholics have been going to mass, they're not quite sure when you stand up, when you kneel down, whatever i can, still in the front row, i know, i know at any conservative meeting to applaud when i am one with the audience and that makes a huge difference i'm a i'm a true believer many of your letters and those of us who have involved in the media or politics over the years have received these, and they're

often one line paragraph and then three or four pages and repeat what's effect of that. the one of the many reasons why i like direct mail is i don't have to guess, does this for that work because we take a million letters and we split it in half, 500,000, get this appeal, the short paragraphs and hundred thousand get the long paragraphs, and it's been tested billions and billions of letters. we know that a good long eight page letter is going to output a good page letter up to a point. the more page people say, i don't read that. and that's true. people don't read, but they scan. they just kind of flip through. look at this look at that. so the longer the copy, you would never give a salesman, let's say, selling a refrigerator, sell this refrigerator. but you can only speak 200 words or 400 words. you know, you you speak until you've made the sale.

so short letters, short words. if you read the new testament, jesus words and are almost all one and two syllable words, very few, three and four. so he used very short and short paragraphs follow me, etc. so to matthew. so well the you went long letters but but short words short sentences, short paragraphs. and let me just say that my age i'll be 90 in a few months. i literally spend 2 hours a day studying marketing, advertising business. and i've done that for over 60 years. and still today you're to day i will spend 2 to 3. i've already spent probably 45 minutes today studying marketing and i young people are interested in a marketing advertising career. i tell them a study, study, study, read, read, read. competition is not that serious out there. quite frankly, most people in marketing advertising haven't done a lot of study. and so if you study the classics

out there, the the giants who've come before us, you can get to the top of marketing in five years. you can be at the very 5%, say mr. viguerie, email and social media benefited your business. not really in a major way. when i got involved in 1961, early sixties. you're fundraising through the mail was not a mature business, had been out there for a little bit. it's very mature now. every fortune 500 company has a direct marketing division a department, so we what works in direct marketing postal, we don't with the internet, we'll figure it out. that might be tomorrow might be five years from now. but we haven't figured out how to market on the internet. there's a lot of young people are trying it they they're

they've no work next nothing about marketing they know the internet but they don't know how to marketed and so we're still in the exploratory stage in of learning how to market using the internet back to go big. you talk about the four horsemen of marketing position differenti benefit and brand briefly describe, but those for nothing with that at all board from this stone from that etc. but i put it together in a package which is really, really important and i urge our viewers that it doesn't really matter life whether you're running for office or you want to promotion, you want a job, you want raise, you want a spouse. i tell people when i dated my wife, it was a lot of competition for this pretty hands and pretty young ladies in marriage. so i had to separate myself from all that competition out there, position number one is simply a whole early in the marketplace.

what holding a marketplace you occupy. and that's a private decision differentiation is what you do publicly to let everybody know what you're what your whole the marketplace is. i like to up either msnbc, fox television, the up. they both have a a position holding a marketplace. they both differentiate. you know, it used to be tucker carlson and now it's you know brett baer and, jesse waters and laura ingram, etc. on fox and rachel maddow on msnbc. you don't find those people type of people anywhere else on television. third is benefit by way you've got to your market, to your audience. you've got to get all four right. get all four right. life is downhill. when do you back get one wrong, you're going uphill. you're not likely to succeed. so fox to their audience, succeeds for a benefit. they offer news, information. we don't get anywhere out there, particularly until recently.

they have a little competition now, but previously there was no competition for decades. i same with msnbc. oh fourth is brand and brand is the game. one is a combination of position differential and benefit is what makes you singular, what makes you, in the words of a famous communicator. seth godin, a purple. i live out in the country regularly, past fields of 40 brown cows here, 50 black and white moves over there. can't tell from the other. but if one of them was a purple cow, it stands out. so all of our goal in life is be a purple cow. and i haven't figured how to squeeze a fifth one in there, but there's a fifth one. it's called a tagline. and you want a tagline and a tagline when you up, a tagline should be relatively short and summarize what it is that you do that's different differentiates you from everybody else out there. and if anybody can use your tagline, throw it away. it has nothing to do with how much smarter than you are or faster. how how you jump or you better or anything else.

it's something that really differentiates you from all of the products out there, all of the candidates. you know, if you're running for office, your name doesn't tell you you're liberal or conservative. so you want a tagline that the most effective tagline by the way, in the last 40 years has been make great again. and it liberals will acknowledge that. so that tagline separated trump in 2016 from everybody else out there. you want that and we had a well-known governor of virginia, george allen. he said you do the crying, you do the time kind of tune. you can whistle there. reagan 1980. are you better off now than you were four years ago? and so you went that that tune people can whistle an ad tagline mr. viguerie do you have to use have you found it effective to use strong language against your opponents at ak? you know, negative ads work well on tv even though everybody says they hate them.

the it's not necessarily strong words. i read something for the umpteenth time recently about truman people. you say, give him hell, harry, he says, i don't give him hell. i just tell him the truth. and they think it's hell. so i think it's just important to differentiate itself from your your competition, whether in a primary or the general election or even if it's in an audit. you're a nonprofit, you're you want to separate yourself from your competition out there and you want to explain in a few words what it is you're doing. it used to be people were exposed to a thousand, maybe 2000 messages a day. now it's in five, 10,000. with the internet, we're just so you've got to be able to, in a few words, identify your brand. brand, by the way, is when you own a category i am a brand, i own a category. i was the first ever duke political direct mail who was the second person to fly solo

across the atlantic? who who was the second pope? you don't remember? you remember the first. you want to be the first in a category. what surprised me in reading go big is you were talking about how liberals or the people. the others have supersede in the conservative movement. it comes to direct mail, even though you basically started it in when i did my pioneering work with this it earlier in the early 1960s, i got a lot of criticism, quite frankly, up readily on nbc, abc, new york times, time magazine, and all through seventies. but all of the criticism stopped within a few hours. election night, november 1980, huh? that's what viguerie has been up to. so i told my conservative friends editor for the heritage foundation, paul weyrich, howard phillips and many others that we used to get together at my home

for breakfast every wednesday for ten years. don't worry, it's taken me 20 years to learn how to do this. it's going to take them 30 or more years because i'm smarter than they are. not so within five years, roger craver and others on the left had caught up with the conservatives, and now they have far surpassed us, in my opinion, i wouldn't dream of flying in airplane with a pilot who had skills that the average conservative marketer, they just most people have learned it by their feeling. you know, none of us would go to a doctor who learned medicine by his gut, you know, a seat of his pants. so you know, the liberals are basically. him. about 20,000 single issue organizations conservatives about 1500. they raised hundred percent more money than we do from 100% more donors. well, yeah you talk about them as third force organizers, asians, correct? correct. which are what i'm a big exponent of a third force

organization, not third party, of course, but third force. the liberals have 20,000 single issue organizations out there. think about if obama president, former president obama called a meeting of all liberal environmental groups, it'd be three 350 groups represented there. if the conservatives if conservative did the there would be, you know, five, six, seven groups represented there. so each of these groups out there has their own agenda, their own source of money, their own membership, their own leadership. and they're pulling everybody their way. i think what the environmental should have accomplished, not just the democrats, but the republicans, independents pulled people mostly way on many of their issues and. so the politicians don't really set the agenda so much as these third force organizations and conservatives only with 1500. we really are far behind and one of the things that the reason i

wrote book was to encourage mostly younger people when you to be my age or in your sixties and seventies, even your fifties, your dna is pretty well set. the very definite son of an entrepreneur is a risk taker. so maybe he's going to be bold and go out there and risk. so that's going to come from younger people. 2030s, early forties. and so i wonder about a conservative to read the book and, get engaged, pick themselves to lead. i talk about that and really i think it's very important. nobody was banging on barack obama's door to run for the senate for the president. he picked himself, you know, in 2007, 2008. he's just decided, describing himself as a community organizer a year later as president and states donald trump is a businessman. no prior government experience, 15 months later, he's president of state. so i would urge young people pick don't wait for somebody to come knocking on the door. i did. when i came to washington, i had

always energy and nobody invited many meetings and i said, you know, this always knowledge is to waste. so one day i know frustration. i called a meeting a dozen people. they came, you know, and i called a meeting a week later, they more came. and i learned early on something that nancy pelosi i learned also as she's climbing the democrat leadership ladder you'd. be surprised how many good people will come to your if you serve good food and serve good food and all of a sudden they started inviting me to their meetings, you know, and so but pick yourself, be big, have courage be a risk taker, be bold. mr. viguerie, could liberals pick up, go big and learn things? unfortunately, yes. nothing can do about that. but yes, there's a well, it's good advice for even if you're not interested, politics, quite frankly, as i said earlier, the vigorous four horsemen of marketing, if you want to get a job or get a promotion, start a

business, get a spouse, you know, you want to differentiate yourself from all that competition. there's a lot of competition out there, billions people. so this book will help you differentiate self from everybody else out there. i want to talk about some of the people that you write about go bag, beginning with charles edison. who was it? charles was one of life's great human beings. i was fortunate to know him in the early sixties. he was the youngest son of thomas edison, the inventor, and he had been secretary of the navy, governor of new jersey, and in the last ten, 15 years of his life, he was very active in the conservative cause, the movement. he was quite wealthy and very, very generous with his his contributions. and so and very supportive. i ran young americans for freedom for the early sixties and one day we had a small office on the fourth floor, no elevator in the middle on madison avenue advertising row

in york city. and so i'm working at my desk there about 2:00 in the afternoon. i look, there's charles edison, 75 years old or something like standing in front of me. he'd walk all the way from the waldorf astoria towers, 15 blocks, just to kind of boost morale and kind of encourage us in all just a delightful, wonderful man. and i called him on the phone when i first started. yeah. asking for a contribution. he gave me a contribution on the phone and i called a few other people like him, captain eddie rickenbacker, eastern airlines, world war one hero, and jay pugh of the sun oil company. they all gave me money generously, but i decided i didn't like asking people for myself. don't write letters. yeah, talk about that a little bit. cold calling people on the phone, voice to voice that. that's not me. it wasn't me as in my twenties. and it's not me over 90. i just don't like asking for money. so you will them a letter. i started writing letters and you know, that seemed to work. and so i got a secretary and i

was able to write more letters. and then i got something that hardly any viewers understand. remember, i know about something called a mimeograph machine. big roll drum. you wrote it like it would print, you know, a few hundred out letters an hour or something. that and that seemed to work. and i got something called computers that nobody had heard of in those days. and we started spitting out letters and and after about a year and a half by the way at at berkeley, you know, national review, young americans for freedom, i began to focus entirely on direct mail and a year and a half i thought i knew everything there was to know about mark. but then i had this wife and two babies. as i said. so i quit a good job and hung out my shingle and started the viguerie company was the world's first direct mail political advertising agency and. i knew nothing. i thought i knew everything. i knew nothing. less than 1% of what i know now. the one thing i knew that i didn't have that i needed, and that was names and addresses and

i was able to get 12,500 barry goldwater donors, $50 plus donors. and that changed everything. and so by the end of that first year, when i started my company 1965, i had 100,000 repub republicans, goldwater donors, and now we're well past 10 million donors and activists, conservative movement and recognized early on that was the business i was in. i wasn't in fundraising too much or marketing. i was in the name business. mark zuckerberg figured that out too. mr. viguerie, have you gotten rich in your. i have not. a matter of fact, i'm very comfortable. but to this day, my will testify under oath that i put everything past back into the company. i'm a at every fiber of my being an entrepreneur. as i said earlier, the definition of an entrepreneur, if anything, is a risk taker.

so to this day, i, i put everything i've got available back in the company and i learned reason do that is 1965 assured my company in january and i went to very conservative organization just a few of them out there and i said i've got these goldwater donors do a test mailing of 5000 and they all agreed and had spent a dollar instead of it. now now you spend a dollar and 50%, the money comes back because you invest in the long term value of that donor in. those days when i did spend a dollar two, three, four, $5 would come back. this is this. now we'll mail 50,000 letters. and when those results come in the same at the 5000, we'll mail 500,000. everyone, i'm said, let's just mail another 5000. i said, no, the barbarians there down the street. i can see. and they're going to be here. we got to blow and go we got to. and i said, no further. so i said, at that moment i said, okay, i'm going to save western civilization. i know what to do. so i'll tell you what i do.

i'll finance the meeting. i'll put all the money. and to this day, the vast majority of our clients, we financed their mailings. so everything i possibly get from the company i put back to finance more growth for the conservative movement. by the way, who was right? 5000 or 500,000? well, neither millions and millions and we're we'll be mailing in the next 18 months something around 300 million postal letters. somebody else who's been very active in the conservative movement that you write about and go big morton blackwell, who is morton blackwell? i dedicated the book to him. morton is a dear friend and i am known in the conservative as double-o too, which means i've been active at the national level longer than every living conservative, except for dr. lee edwards, who's double what barry goldwater and bill buckley and, brant bozell senior and falwell robertson recently all did. you know so i'm a i'm an

activist at the national level along that everybody except dr. lee edwards. so lee is a dear i've known since 1961 and he calls me on the phone one day and says, let's have lunch with this young conservative. you need to know him. he doesn't know you. you don't know. so we had nice lunch at the mayflower hotel and so like the lunch money, so, well, invited morton back ten days later for another lunch as he and i. and at the end of the lunch, morton said i spoke magic words to it. and the magic words i spoke to him was that morton, i want you to come work with me and help me build the conservative movement. and he said at that point he would taken a pay cut. i gave him a little pay increase. but anyway, after some years he left and ended up working for ronald reagan in the white house. and then after that he left and started something, the leadership institute. and it's a in there almost no organization i can think of as more important to the conservative than leadership institute. they've trained well over a quarter of a million young

people. many, many governors, senators, congressmen, legislators, too numerous to mention. over the years. he gives right now as we speak. he with my president of my company, i'm chairman, my company, kathleen patton is in jerusalem with or five or six other national conservative marketers and he's teaching a couple hundred people in europe. conservatives how to be conservatives. so he has maybe 500 more classes. he's all over the country that his leadership institute teaches each year. and he's had more impact on the movement than anybody else. i can think of living. the book is go big, the marketing secrets of richard viguerie. and as someone said before, rush limbaugh, there was richard viguerie. we appreciate your time on. my pleasure. peter, good to be with you.

book tv's live coverage. the texas book festival continues now. all right.

so. now. is this on? hello. sorry about that. hello, i'm sewell chan. i'm the editor chief of the texas tribune. thank you so much for joining us for this afternoon at the texas book festival.

i'm so delighted to be moderating panel titled security in a free state and the distortion of the second amendment on my far, though not politically necessarily is jeff sharlet, a professor of writing at dartmouth college and author of this brand new book the undertow scenes from a slow civil war. jeff, is the new york times best selling author of or editor of books, including the family secret fundamentalism at the heart of american power, which was also, of course, adapted into a really, really brilliant netflix documentary and a more immediate left is cameron mcwherter, correspondent for the wall street journal and coauthor of this book american gun the true story of the ar 15. cameron, previously the author of red summer the summer of 1919 and the awakening of america, about the racial violence of that era. so i'm going to start actually with jeff and ask you a little

bit about. i'm going to start by asking a little bit about the style of your book, because it is part travelog, part meditation. you yourself a character in it and you're going around a lot of places in america and and talking to people with some pretty interesting beliefs. how did you go about this project and writing it this way? well, thank thanks to, you know, the subtitle from a slow civil war. partly because think that that kind of ambiguous term suggests suggests the the conflict that we're in and how to cover this conflict that is of amorphous and different than what we've experienced before. subtitle could be how to tell stories about fascism. that would be prescriptive because i don't. the book is an attempt to find it is in some ways a kind of input, a critique, not of myself. and, you know, there's there's a

there's a sort of an undercurrent and undercurrent, the undertow of what have i missed? what have i not understood? why did i focus on major players, why did i focus on the broadcast of these politics, these ideas, rather than the reception, the everyday people. and i don't mean the classic, you know, go to a diner and and gather some quotes. i mean, immersing yourself in the sort of the long stories that are shaping life, whether it's martyrdom narratives or or lynching that are really essential to the centerpiece of the book, which is about a white woman named ashley barbecue on january six or in know, sort of thinking about the connection with the cans book, the stories about the stories we tell ourselves in order to live. joan didion put it the stories we tell ourselves in order to die. the stories we tell about, guns and what they mean and what kind of religious, almost kind of intensity they have.

so i decided that i had sort of i couldn't do straight journalism with respect for those who do. i had to kind of wander. i had to immerse myself and these stories kind of flow over and around me. can everyone hear clearly. if you cannot, please raise your hand. okay. just please remember to keep the microphone. jeff me. let's dive in a little bit. a big of your book is how people derive their political beliefs or sometimes from their beliefs about the reality of the world. a sense of meaning and purpose and belonging. and so i think sometimes when journalists, including ourselves, label certain activity as far right or extremist, it's partly accurate, but it may not necessarily get at the kind of internal belief structure. and so i guess i'm asking, could you tell us a little bit about how ashli babbitt became seen as a martyr by people who either

supported or are sympathetic to the january six rioters? yeah ashli babbitt, you may remember on january six, if you were watching, we saw almost real time this 30 something white woman wearing trump flag like a cape leaps up into a broken window. a mob is pressing forward and you see. two hands of a police officer reach out and shoot her. and she falls back in the crowd parts around her and it becomes almost like a history painting. it looks like a caravan painting and the hands of the officer who shot her were those of a black man? and so immediately i said, okay, this is going to be this is the old american white womanhood struck down by a black man. and that's that's birth of a nation, 1915 template for hollywood. d.w. griffith first movie screened in in the white house. and so i looked into ashley babbitt's life and there was immediately also a lot of it's fair to say, if you looked in

the comments in the washington post, i can't even repeat so much of the language. good ratings. she's dead. they should have killed more. i would have mowed them down. this idea that somehow people are are born fascists or terrorists. and of course, wasn't. there's a moebius strip like nature to so many of the the politics of the folks i encounter in this world. ashli babbitt, two time obama voter on obama was her second favorite president right up to the after trump. and you say? well this is just a fool. i don't think so. and i think you look at ashli babbitt. she's in business. she's got debts. no woman can pay a user has debts. she doesn't know how she got into it. she sees the collapse of housing in southern california. she sees houseless ness all around her homelessness. all around her. she tries to be compassionate. and i. i think there's a sort of a turning point. one day a man a homeless man defecates on lawn and she just it snaps.

and there's trump saying to christine, you know what? your anger is actually good. and she just leans back that undertow and lets that carry her experiences, her anger as love. and i think that's one of the most important things we understand. i'm not i mean, this in no way to let these folks off the hook. ashley babbitt went into the capital to overthrow the government. she was not unarmed. there's a picture of the knife she was carrying evidence. picture of the knife she was carrying on the cover, the book. but she wasn't born a fascist. she wasn't a dupe. she wasn't insane. she was being pulled into the gravitational force of that. and i think that's sort of what i'm trying to wrestle with throughout the book and when we say, like, how do we tell i'm the f word, fascist loosely and we can talk about it if we want to. i don't call every right wing or a fascist at all. i would say fascism wasn't, really in the united states on a large scale until trump. but yes, that was the politics

she subscribed to and it's more than ideology it's an esthetic. jeff i've always personally been more in stories about trump supporters and voters than i am necessarily about trump himself. yeah. now, you've been attending trump rallies 2016, and i'm curious about what has and hasn't changed since what seems you saw in 2020, during covid and what themes you're seeing now and how that mixture of rhetoric and belief have or haven't altered in the almost eight years you've been doing this? yeah. trump know trump comes down that golden escalator in 2015, and as a writer who's been writing about right wing movements around united states, around the world, i said, oh, here he's bringing this strongman esthetic. will it be received? and of course, we know it was. but that 2016 rally, remember, we're going to win so much. you're going to be tired of winning. and i was going to these rallies and attention to the preachers that opened them that were not often reported on by the press. it was assumed that he was

impious. so therefore, no religiosity to it. it's called the prosperity gospel. god, you to be rich. and you can tell because how rich trump is. i remember people about his private plane flying into youngstown, ohio, heavy with. they loved thinking about the golden toilets on the plane that they might one day have that by 2020 it's a different deal. we're approaching a million dead of pandemic. it's darker. trump has started the kind of mainline and his own conspiracy theories and i kind of approximate it to something like a bastardized american gnostic gospel, an ideology, secrets and if you're in the initiate. but i think since then and i think what we see on the campaign now, it's the third stage which is an age of martyrs. that's what babbitt enabled for him. that's how trump has used his indictments and how people because that enables you to be a martyr to you don't have to die. you have to be. well, i was wearing trump shirt at work and people were mean me. and therefore i'm like trump.

i'm like ashli babbitt and blood has been spilled, but the imagination has been spread over that. i think that's what makes the movement very dangerous is frankly, the imagination. one more question before i shift to camp. for those of us, not necessarily in early christian thought, what is gnosticism and why is that frame? why was that framework so important for your book? so the gnostic gospels, you may know. there's a terrific book by elaine pagels, who is a scholar. this is a a sort of ancient, early, early christian heresy, dead sea scrolls and. it's the idea that we know as christianity is really just sort of a cover for the real thing. and the church, the bureaucrats of the day, why they're feeding you lies and they're beneath that. there is a true but only for those who are smart enough to read the code. it's a very q and on idea.

it has its own version of the deep state. i started talking q and on people wondering, were they encountering this. yes, they loved the gnostic gospels. they're not doing, but they think they are. you know, they're doing numerology. i remember at a rally in there's there's a kind of mysticism. mysticism, yeah. trump's tweets. and, you know, we all know the misspellings a capitalizations fools. that's because you can't read if you know how read and you can learn how to read as almost a religious process of study. you see that there is a occurring and you know. q and on die hards but i think that spreads out this idea of if i believe in trump, i know something that other people don't. and it's that kind of intimate knowledge that frankly is quite from how like most people in talk. and you i think a lot of people especially in the democratic party, kind of assume that people are following public

policy of some kind. but there's a certain rational structure or framework thinking about cause and effect and are they just kind of failing to get the ways in which, you know, so many deeper layers and levels of trump's language and rhetoric. i think so. and this goes to sort of the whole nature of political reporting, which is necessarily focused on figures in washington, figures here in austin. and it's easy to dismiss these sort of everyday people with strange ideas as fringe until you start realizing i for a chapter in the book traveled around in wisconsin post row and every enthused list. wisconsin was the only blue state. abortion became automatically illegal, reverting to 1849 law no exceptions and people were thrilled by this and and everyone i spoke to had their own very strange idea of human biology of human reproductive biology and where babies from and you could say each one was a fringe until realize wait a minute, this is you build a

movement of this sort of imaginary language. and so you have pay attention to instead of you go to a trump rally. hershey, pennsylvania. trump feeds a joke to the media, which is in a press pen. he says that's all they're going to talk about tomorrow. and it was and they didn't talk about that like nearly 15, 20 minute strange hallucinogenic horror show decapitations disembowel weird, horrific rape narratives that he told and titillating and intoxicating the crowd. because that wasn't policy, that wasn't politics. that was just theater. and i think if we're students, the history of fascism, we know there's no such thing as just theater. if we're advocates of the arts, i hope we don't believe it's just theater. theater's. thank you, jeff. as we shift to cam, i want to have question for the audience. do you think the and air 15 stands for? just let me hear from a couple

of people. this is a very, very knowledgeable. i think it's good, right a lot of and i'm not surprised by that. a lot of americans believe it stands for assault rifle and cam let's start there. why did you decide to do this book? what misunderstandings were you trying to address? explore? well, thanks. thank you, everyone, for coming. i do need to ask you about what does cafe fame mean. then does that have a meaning. what do you think it means, cam? i what it means. i know you will. but as within you, i'm asking you all we know reveal. yeah. book signing. yeah, it's in a in a in an ancient jar somewhere. and we. well, we wrote this book zetia ellenson, and i wrote this for the simple reason that were. i'm a reporter covering u.s. news based in atlanta. he's in san francisco. and we were covering a lot of mass shootings. and as we kept covering the mass shootings. we kept running into the ar 15

more and more. it's been used in a lot. the major mass shootings, las vegas being, the worst. and we started. so we were assigned at the journal, which is primarily business publication to a business story about the ar 15, which we did and like many reporters, including journalists here at this table, we overreported. we had way too information and it's really a fascinate story. you have a it it's an it's an incredibly american story. it starts with a guy named eugene stoner, who was a real tinkerer, you know, in the 1950s and an earlier america produced lots of guys would didn't go get an engineering degree, didn't go to college but were fixated on fixing things and going into the garage and. eugene stoner was one of these people. he he was fascinated with explosion from an early age. and he had been marine in and he

didn't see combat, but he'd been a marine in the and he was tinkering with guns all the time. and he had that impetus. so he wanted to create a new kind of rifle. he was working in aircraft. so he was he was looking he was working with aluminum and fiberglass and new types of materials. he thought, why can't i use these? make a rifle at same time, the united states military aspects of the military were really concerned about. we a new rifle they had used. you know and if anybody's seen saving private ryan, world war two, the american soldiers, the marines used a very heavy gun called the m1, which did very well we won that war. and but it was very heavy and you couldn't carry as much ammunition as the some generals wanted. so they a new gun that was much lighter could shoot quickly and

could carry lots of ammunition and the air 15 and it was partly out of this cold war, you know, struggle against the soviet union and the perception that the ak 47 slash kalashnikov love was somehow kind of a threat to the u.s. could you speak to that? yeah. so i don't if there's if you're old enough, you remember, the cold war wasn't very cold it was hot. there was a lot of brush fires over the world, lots of, you know, all over africa, middle east, asia. these these insurgencies were coming and people started, you know, the communist insurgents started to carry the ak 47. i won't go into all the history of that. we do that in the book, but it's a derivative of a of a nazi invention toward the end of the war. and it was the ak 47 was and is a really tough gun. you can throw it in the dirt, you could be buried in mud and take it out and shoot it and the american military aspects of the

military were really concerned that they needed an equivalent. so it was designed as a military weapon and but but uniquely made by a small almost start up in southern california. how did the air come into widespread civilian use. that's a very long story which we go into in the book but i would by saying at first nobody wanted it it was it was used in vietnam. i was its first combat test and because of production errors that were made a lot of marines and soldiers died. the guns would jam in combat. it got a really terrible reputation. secondly, traditional hunters like to go out with steel wood, big, heavy gun. and they thought this looked weird. it looked like something from george. it didn't look, you know, the air 15 is made of plastic and aluminum and it has some steel in but it's it looks strange. so it didn't sell well i'll will

jump over a lot of history to go to the assault ban of 1994 in which there's a big debate over this ban as and there's this big buildup, a political build up to the ban. and this gun is turned from a device that is sort of it's it's starting to sell among niche groups and some extremist groups, but it really isn't selling that and that debate which ultimately leads assault weapons ban. and i'm going to use air quotes because it wasn't very effective. i turned that gun into a political symbol which is the symbol that everybody knows today. if you're driving down the street, you see that bumper sticker or the silhouette, that rifle on a car, you know, where person stands politically. if you go to a gun control and people have that, they'll just have some people just carry that sign with the saline through a silhouette of that gun. you know what that means? so it's become it's become a

marketing tool because it was something that the government theoretically was trying to take away. ken book is in part a story of unintended consequences. you have this innovator, eugene stover, who built this weapon that turned out to be incredibly deadly. but obviously for the original purpose of giving the military a more effective and lighter, easier to use counterpart to the soviet weapon, you have. but now it's been turned into so much civilian use he could never have imagined. you have you know, you talk about the federal assault ban, which was not really drafted by people who knew guns very well, and they didn't have the impact that it was supposed to have of actually removing these guns off the street. you also in your book talk a lot about the politics of guns and. i want to just pause go go deep there for a moment. i learned from your book that following people opposed the ar 15 at various points.

barry yeah. gerald ford yeah. ronald reagan and even the first president bush. right. he and the first president bush. i think you could make a strong argument that he, his battles with the nra after a shooting which involved an ak 47 style rifle, and stockton had cost him. he that's one of the reasons he lost to bill clinton. and this was the 1989 school shooting. yeah but how did the issue specifically become so polarized? because you also talk about democrats who are who were pretty pro-gun, including then speaker of the house tom foley, who, you know, in 1994, foley was lost his own seat as, part of the republican wave. he was the first speaker to, lose his own seat since the civil war. and foley was apart. spokane, washington, a very eastern, you know, eastern washington state. so the time there was clearly overlap among kind of republicans who were in favor of

gun control and democrat who actually were pretty pro-gun rights. what happened in the intervening years and how did it become as as kind of hyper partizan ized as it is now? well, i mean, i think i think there's there's that's the last third of our book goes into detail on all this. but you have a an object that has now been declared a something that has been banned. importantly, the gun gunmakers went to the atf and said, well, if we make these modifications, can we continue to the rifle? and the atf. yeah, you. so it was a lot of not entirely but a lot of cosmetic changes were made it to the rifle and therefore they were back in business. but the notion the political notion that settled on the public was this gun was was banned. they're trying to take my gun away and that debate and many others have divided country very

severely as we all know. and there's no compromise, betrayal. and that is something that there are various key points to this. but i would say the election of barack obama, particularly, i mean there's a lot of business stuff that goes on where the gun falls of copyright smaller companies are the gun and making a little of money then the ban comes in gun start to take off. as i pointed out, this is a gun made primarily of plastic, primarily of. fiberglass. it's pretty inexpensive to make. and the markup is beautiful. and the gun industry. a lot of people think the gun industry like big pharma or, you know, some enormous they have tons of money they don't gun gun companies are it's very much a boom and bust business and they have been struggling because lots of people were hunting and less people have been hunting over years. and so this became a real savior

for the gun industry. so around 2004, the ban is to die. we have a republican congress that lets it die even though then president bush said he would signed a reauthorization if it came to his desk. it doesn't come to his. and so the ban dies, meanwhile, the major gun companies, which had sort of rejected rifle all jump in and they all producing tons of them and to their benefit. surprisingly, barack obama is running for president. and if people barack obama's remarks regarding the second amendment, regarding gun ownership were fairly tame and very reserved, he was very cautious because. he had seen how democrats have been brought down. yeah, to your point, foley, others have been hammered. in 94, democrats were really shy, so to speak, literally. and so they were just not it.

and and he was also particularly worried about michigan and ohio, where there's a lot of hunters. and he didn't want to tick them off. but the nra's buy what he was selling and they were out there beating the bushes, saying he's coming for your guns. and gun sales went through the roof and particularly ar 15 sales come one of my favorite of many details in your book is that leading into the 2016 election, the gun makers thought hillary clinton's likely to be the next president and they were planning in their financial and other projections going to be a real bump in in sales and purchases just as there was obama's election in oh eight. and instead of course, trump and in fact, it's actually disastrous for the gun industry. it's so that barack so that bump in sales is called the barack in the gun industry. and then the trump slump was came in 2016. so yeah, so but you know, then on a much darker level, know they they started to learn gun

companies started to learn that political uncertainty and mass shootings would lead to spikes in sales. and this gun, particularly, it's inexpensive, but it's also easy to put together. you don't have, you know, a traditional hunting rifle. you need a worker who knows how to lathe wood. you know, it's it's a it's you're an artisan almost with the ar 15. it's known lego's for adults. it's a real click. you can click add attachments and that's part of the appeal, frankly, for a lot of gun owners, they it's a gun that's easy to put together, easy to take apart and clean. and it's a gun that they really could ramp up production and reduce production really quickly. so they started to time it and they dramatically miscalculated it in 2016 because trump won the guy. they had been backing and they had given lots of money, but he won their shock and then their sales fell through the roof.

so in other paradox in your book is that each time there is a mass shooting, you know politicians from center left are like or you know, are like, we need these new restrictions. and each time after there's a mass shooting, there's also a spike in gun sales of the r 15. do you given the kind of entrenched political positions any in which like policy wise we could get out of this? one of the again, one of the many surprises in the book is that a lot really experienced hunters, marksman and sharpshooter types, they actually don't think that they actually kind of look down on the ar 15 a little bit. right. because not it's like seen as very, very, almost too easy. however, the hands of young, emotionally disturbed men, that ease of use has had obvious devastating consequences. yeah. so i'll i'll let me let me answer that part first. so i will that you know, the design elements that eugene stoner created for for american

soldiers for the american government, for america's allies were really innovative and the guy created a really amazing rifle, which i would say is akin an electric vehicle in terms way less parts really well-designed and does what it's supposed to do. it also was designed for soldiers who weren't really great shots because there had been a lot of research done in the military that, you know, this of john wayne standing up on a log like, you know, taking aim and and that really isn't how people fight battles. it's much closer range and not surprisingly, everyone's terrified because someone's trying to kill them. so they're all just spraying in the direction of the enemy. and if you fire, let you win. that's so all the design principles that he out to achieve, he did this long battle within bureaucracy. but he eventually the chiefs goal. but it also makes it really easy

for the kid in duvall day to go into that school having not fired a gun before that day and you can fire lots of rounds and you know we see this over and over with the mass shooter. you know the vast of people who own air fifteens in country don't want to hurt anyone. they are just people who want to own guns. and maybe for political statement, you know that they the self-defense but perceived i wouldn't use it for self-defense but you know you can make the argument but i'd buy another weapon if i was going to do that but but there are people who who want to own an air 15 and they're not out to hurt anybody. but in 94, the atf estimated before the ban went into effect, there were about 400,000 ar15 style rifles in civilian hands. and in the united states today there are and we don't know the exact number. there are at least 20 million. so those guns are everywhere. they're easy to get. i could go on and on about that. so but to your point of are we just stuck in the loop

frustration and and and frozen this, i don't think so i'm been a journalist long time so no one including my wife is going to accuse of being a pollyanna. but i feel that americans can figure this out. i think have to stop the to the two extreme sides need to stop yelling at each other. i think the idea of an assault weapons ban did it work so to talk about it. it's you know, 20 million. how are you going to do that? that being said, there are laws regarding red flag laws. there are ways in which people their weapons taken away. and if those are applied, that can be effective. a lot of the mass shootings that we're all everyone been terrified about, you know, my children going to school, everybody. to two important points. one is a lot of these a lot of the mass shooters using air fifteens went in and bought their guns completely legally because they had never committed

a felony. you know, if you haven't committed a felony, you can buy a gun in the united states and or no record of say mental illness no documented of mental illness or sometimes it's very it's just not blood to the courts. so the guy he didn't use an air 15 and in his attack he's an air ten which stoner also invented but he did have an air 15 laying next to him and guy in lewiston, maine. he was completely telegraph that he was going to hurt other people, that he was having obsessions about it. but the red also never applied. he was never he wasn't stopped. this is this is a problem over and over again. so a much more surgical approach to the issue. isn't this is here he again created a really elegant firearm and here to stay the question is how we keep it out of the hands of people shouldn't have it. and i think that's where the focus of state and federal government needs to be. and it and there are people trying to do that. and you also identify the high capacity magazine as one area of

potential compromise. i think senator susan collins talked about it after the lewiston shoot. right. i think there's also a problem there, which is you can you can make a high capacity magazine with a you know, with tool kit. i mean it's not to make those things and increasingly you even do 3d printing of ghost guns. yeah. what would amount to a ghost gun. so anyway, sorry, let me ask a couple of questions to each of you it just in conversation with each other. jeff, what role did you see gun and guns and gun culture playing in the kind of spiritual almost religious mystical beliefs of the people you interviewed and for cam, how did you see the intersection, the gun industry and gun culture with? these, you know, again, with with the kind of rise of more aggressively, you know, out there, you know, far right beliefs just i've been reporting on right wing movements around the united states in world for for 20 years and the travels for

this book since january six, 2021, i saw more guns in the united states than i ever had. and i'm not squeamish about guns. i am a owner, but it was so much more part the identity and i think of a church in yuba city, california. this is northern california. you you may have seen this church because a little clip from it went viral when. they presented to general mike flynn, trump's national security adviser, customized a ar 15. that's attention was paid to the pastor receiving a customized ar 15 with joshua one nine, the so-called battle verse. this is from the book joshua taking jericho. and on january six, you may remember there was a jericho march around the capital to the city. he also had that gun. this church no longer had crosses. they had a pulpit made of swords. the crosses, they said, were not

for now. now is a time of war time theology and. you know, monday night they had like men's group ones, a youth group. tuesday night was a militia new recruit night. and this church is not alone. as i traveled across the country, i kept these churches in omaha, nebraska, fairly significant. church pastor hank many points to the gunman in the back of the church and he says passed psalm 23. you know what psalm 23 is? they robbed and they staff they comfort me or what's my rod they rod is that gun. and again, he says, now we are in this the gun is made over an expression of your commitment to serve god and to be faithful. it doesn't mean most of these people as cam says, i think it's really important, are not going to do anything. these guns in rifle, colorado at shooter's grill lauren boebert it's like hooters but the waitresses guns, it's closed now, thank god and militia guys like know if we're going to be on the streets a civil war is

coming you know if biden does one more thing and that's well what do you think is done when he eats babies and i'm like, what? he eats babies. but if he does one more thing like one. and i said, what is the thing? and he says, if they come to take our guns and this is a little bit of a solace because that's not going to happen so but it's the it's what the imagination of the self is now is calm answers, please. i invite your questions and please line up behind the microphone cam on the intersection kind of gun culture and kind of political beliefs. yeah i mean, one thing i would point out is this is a this is a tool that can be used by anybody and misused by anybody and extremists of all have started to use the r 15 and used it from very on because it was a perceived and looks like a weapon of war and so you have san bernardino you had islamic terrorists going into a meeting and shooting up a bunch of people. you've had people with all kinds

of disturbed ideas. las vegas guy was we still don't know exactly his motivation was but he was going to war against people. but you also have you do have this like i said earlier, is a conservative. this has become a gun rights symbol that everyone in on either side of the debate is using and certainly on january 6th, they were out were men there with their fifteens nearby, ready to go, you know, asking to be called in. you also had to you had of flags that day, if you remember. but there were two flags. one was the confederate battle flag with symbol of the ar 15 and the term come and take it and one was just a white banner with, the silhouette saying come and take it and come and take it, which has a texas origin as people probably in the room. the cannon. yeah, up to the cannon, but also to ancient greece, to the battle where the spartans, the persian

king, says give me your weapons. and he says, come and it. now, if anyone remembers or just saw the movie 300, everybody dies in that so i don't know why might a better slogan that they died correction what what one man yeah one guy runs away and as i january sixers are using 300 as a sort of this is who we are well yeah it's become and multiply by the greek phrase for come and take it is on you will see bumper sticker with a shield or sometimes with the air 15 and so with the phrase in greek. yeah. the phrase in greek. yeah. let's keep the questions brief and the answers brief so we can get everybody. sorry. please hi. thank you so much for this talk. cameron and jeff, could you speak how white supremacy is of encoded in both the topics that you're dealing with, especially gun control as being actually perhaps a stand in for white id and? i'm thinking of the podcast straight white american where

the two professors actually discuss issue and i'm wondering what your take is related to that. by the way, my name is nicole, a ph.d. student at boston university in the department of religion. thank you, nicole kemp, why would you know? as i was saying, there is definitely a a it has become symbol quite literally, you know, the swords in the pulpit. i mean, that that the gun the air 15 silhouette is your statement to the world to today and this is something an often it's anti-government anti-establishment but something that would absolutely baffle eugene stoner if we could bring him in. he passed away in 97, but he would be by that and just i think, yeah, the gun has become a symbol. whiteness in churches that i'm visiting and so on. but that whiteness is complicated and. i always sell the wrong books at events. there's a great book called white evangelical racism and by anthea butler, a scholar of the

black, who sort of looking at how this formed. and she talks about the promise whiteness and the way that this sort of and i think gun culture is a big contribution to that, that there's just this white kind of idea feel that somehow through gun ownership, people of color some are going to sort of saying i can enter into that too. so that white supremacy which is sort of to me the current that runs through all of this again it's more sort of a mobius strip and it's really in that way, if it was simple klansmen, it wouldn't be as powerful. and it goes beyond that. thank you. next question, please. yes historically, anthea, what was the second amendment designed for and how has it met and morphed into what it is today? kemp these short answer on that, you know, it's very good question. but yeah, i mean that is that is that is the the the the crux of

american history how do how do we interpret this document that was created so long ago, you know, these documents these these the amendments that were added to the constitution. so the answer really is there have been, as we all know, recent decisions regarding the supreme from the supreme court, regarding gun ownership and and what was the purpose of a well-regulated militia. i'm not a lawyer, not going to get into that debate. but i will say you now can buy it's very easy to buy a rapid semi-automatic rifle, military style, semi-automatic in this country easily. and for the book, zane, i did each buy one. i bought mine in georgia because that's where i live. and it took me about it took me 8 minutes to buy that rifle. and i would say 30 minutes of that was me standing around.

wow. amazing now the dc, of course, the supreme court said in 2010, dc versus heller that there is a constitutional right to own a handgun, but they didn't necessarily that there's a right to own an r 15. correct. it was it was left open and that and that is being now battled out in all the states. thank you. great question, please. all right. there's a common talking point and i'm now that journalists shouldn't a platform like trump and far right extremists because that in a way like transmits those beliefs. how do you respond to that and you think there's a line where just ideas you shouldn't yeah if 60 minutes interviews marjorie taylor and if you saw that interview lesley who is a has a done great journalism over the years but sort of strolls around and treats her as, oh, just a rising star of politics that's platforming but this idea that on the other hand if we them they'll go away and the imagination that they're just

out there i would say that the folks who come to book festivals which i love and people say, what can i do? doing it right here by being in a book festival. just yesterday i went the texas secessionist movement. i learned about all about your book burning issues. here. and you're doing and our love of freedom and your love of freedom, of course. sorry. it keeps. but that idea that if we don't look at that, we don't understand. i deal with book bands, book banners, where i'm from in vermont and new hampshire and my kids schools, and i was learning had to go and learn how. how were they doing this and what do they think they're doing? and i don't think that's platforming. and i think the imagination that we can somehow wait for them out there. this is a real power we need to contend with it and wrestle with it, but not just to sort of say interesting. well, thank you very much for your ideas.

next question. great questions. i was wondering, you had any real support from hunters? don't know if people know, but the air 15 is supersonic with a super light shell and is meant to destroy. and raleigh is that terrible hunting weapon. so did you find hunters standing up for or actually using this? well, that's complicated question it's a good question, but a complicated but reference to barry goldwater, that's why he hated it. he thought it was. and he said any any good gun owner is going to bring down a deer with one shot with a big rifle. and that's you know what, amanda does or whatever. but that is the ar 15 because it's small caliber, high velocity. that's again, this goes into the injuries that are caused that it can cause and why it was useful and in war but it it's pointless to hunt with it there are people now you can swap in larger

caliber elements to make the rifle fire larger caliber weapon of a larger caliber bullets. so it can be used for hunting. most certainly traditional did not. i'll just add one quick anecdote, so zocchi interviewed some of the early gun gun producers of the air 15 and they would go to gun shows. they would go to the narration and set up their little table, their military style rifles and would come by, give them the finger and say, get that out of here. i don't want to see. so there was a lot of hostility from the gun industry initially to the air becoming a commercial product. okay. we're at a time almost, so i'm going to let each of the two questioners remaining ask your question in sequence and then we'll have the panelists answer please at me please be brief. you mentioned ghost. does your book touch on the challenges by 3d printed guns and modification ins? and do you think legislation to regulate the sale and

importation 3d printers capable manufacturing such weapons could effective? great question. and the next question, please, and then we'll have the answers. so this is for cam. i was a marine and they m 14 era. oh, and experienced in my platoon multiple jamming and malfunction with 14 within 14. yeah. oh, okay. and the automatic version, there's no way you couldn't it from flying up in the air. so so i was wondering if you uncover read any comments like that in your research. yes, a lot. and i'm going to find me afterwards and we'll talk it. but yes, the answer is yes. and lots of the the byzantine world of gun development within, the us military is fascinating, but truly bizarre and has lot to do with what colonel? more political power, etc. it was a real mess. and the earlier question was regarding ghost guns. the answer, the great question.

we do talk about that in the book and we have written about that for the journal ghost guns are a real problem and three printing there. there are there are legislative moves afoot, but you can make a gun that works and they have been used and can make a ar 15 that work and. they are absolutely untraceable. in just a few minutes, jeff sharlet, author of the undertow and mcwherter, author of gun, will be signing copies of their book at the book signing tent. let's give them both a round of applause. thank you. book tv's live coverage. the texas book festival in austin continues after this break.

and joining us from emory university, atlanta is professor cynic and here is his guest essay in, the new york times. in june. quote, cormac mccarthy had a remarkable literary career. it could never happen. now, professor, do you say that cormac mccarthy's career could not happen now? well, his depended on a situation in publishing that no longer exists. he required a editor at random house, albert erskine, who has a tremendous editor who worked with some of the giant figures of 20th century literature. in addition to mccarthy, he needed mccarthy needed erskine to support through a series of books were commercial failures. his first five books over more

than 20 years sold only a few thousand copies each and went out of print. that's not something that is sustainable. commercial publishers in. the 21st century. and why is it that albert stuck with mr. mccarthy? did he see something? were these books written? no. the books are beautifully written. mccarthy's his early books as his late books are all beautifully written, even though there's a big divide, a big difference between two halves of his career. but his early books all brilliant. i love them. erskine saw genius in them. erskine was the last editor for william faulkner, actually, and mccarthy's books are quite indebted. faulkner and faulkner's style. so when mccarthy's manuscript came across the transom at random house in sent it to random house, sent a what i found in the described as a poorly typed manuscript of his

first novel. he just sent in to random house. he addressed his envelope to random house and eventually the manuscript reached erskine's desk. erskine read the manuscript and. he saw something that he recognized from faulkner or something in the style that that spoke to him in a similar way. and he thought, here's a writer that has special and. so he worked with mccarthy through that first book, through this next several books. and in each of them he thought these were great and he thought they deserved a major audience. and a big reception. and he worked erskine worked to help mccarthy continue to write by using own networks with writers like robert penn, warren, ralph ellison, saul bellow and, many others to get fellowships in foundation. prizes include macarthur genius,

grant. mccarthy was one of the inaugural first winners of the first macarthur genius grant in 1981. erskine had played a major role in getting mccarthy all of this support. so he could survive as a writer for 25, 30 years before he became lucrative. now, professor, cynical and you said that you saw this in the archive. what archive are you referring? yes. so mccarthy's papers are held at texas state university in san marcos. and it's an incredible collection of papers dedicated work across his career, all of his manuscripts, much of his correspondence. and it's just full riches about the incredible research, the incredible work that mccarthy did. he was a painstaking craftsman who worked incredibly hard on of his books and. did you have access to the correspondence that he, his editor, robert erskine,

exchanged? albert alberta's ken sorry about that. yeah. and yes, there is correspondence between him and erskine and then later once he gets a literary agent, there's some correspondence between him and his agent as well as correspondence him and publicists at random house and him and various friends. now you have a book coming out this fall entitled big fiction how conglomeration changed the publishing industry and american literature. are you saying with regard to cormac mccarthy that it's because conglomeration that he is would not survive live today? yes and no. so the thing that is remarkable about mccarthy's career is his transformation. people recognize that two halves of his career are quite different. the first half of his career, his first five novels are very difficult, dense, allusive

books. they're not market friendly. they're not commercial books. the first four appalachian novels and then the fifth is blood meridian. in my opinion, his masterpiece, his greatest work, which is a sort of sort western, but not really in the genre. so it's a very dark, apocalyptic historical novel. and those novels, they they sell at the time and they wouldn't work now under the conglomerate era that we currently live in, at least not among commercial publishers. the second half of his career, starting with his 1992 novel all the pretty, is much different. he wrote novels that still have of that unique chronic voice, but they're also commercial. they're more front of the of the market. all the pretty horses is closer to classic western. it's a cormac version of a louis l'amour novel. it tells a story of a young cowboy who goes down to mexico

and falls in love and kills a man comes home. it's. it's got nostalgia for the old west, and it's all 100,000 copies that won the national book and became a blockbuster film with matt damon and. the argument that i make in the book is that what's amazing about mccarthy, he adapted to this changing system of publishing across his career. in guest essay in the new york times, you compare him somewhat to colson whitehead. so yeah, what i see. mccarthy having created with all the pretty horses in 1992, was a strategy for how to navigate as an author, the conglomerate era of publishing what figured out was that the techniques that had been developed by genre writers, writers who'd been working in mystery or romance or western or

fiction since the late 19th century had figured these forms were had a built in audience who were ready to read them, and that could allow a literary writer, someone who had the esthetic ambition of a colson whitehead or a cormac mccarthy, to adapt techniques from genre fiction into, a literary work. and that way they could merge some of the demands. the bottom line, the press's need to satisfy with own innovative literary techniques. and that's what mccarthy did. all the pretty horses in the western in 1892. and colson is the exemplary figure in the 21st century. i mean, oh many would consider him to be one of the very greatest, one of the most sellable, feted novelists american novelist of the 21st century. and across his career, you can chart how book by book he plays with a different genre,

elevating it with his literary techniques. so he's really an extension of the work that mccarthy figured out in 1992. and of course, random house today, penguin random house with several other imprints embedded there. when did this congolese aberration of publishing houses begin? it began in 19, in the 1960s. that was when random house went public in, but not and bought pantheon and started collecting these other imprints. and in 1965, rca bought random house. it continued through late sixties, accelerating in the seventies and and really gone on and on and on into present and but what allowed mccarthy nevertheless write the novels that he did with erskine in the sixties and seventies and early eighties was that random house protected itself from some of these pressures by having a president robert burns dean who was there the first 25 years of

the conglomerate era but buffered the press from and its later signed new house and really tried to keep his editors protected which was not same at a different houses such as doubleday or simon schuster. places where those commercial pressures pressures were more immediately felt. so professor cynical and you note in your guest in the new york times that after bernstein, the new editor of random house, said, hey, each book has to make money. is that a correct statement? yeah. so that was reported by alberts, by andre schiffrin, who was the editor at pantheon on one of those houses, those imprints that was within random house. he'd been there since 1962. his father actually had founded pantheon. so he'd been there for 28 years. and then the new president, britell, came in and very quickly fired. and schifrin reported that bechtel's new policy was that

every book needs to pay for itself. from now on, they would not be subsidizing some books with other books. so books like mccarthy's like the orchard keeper, like blood meridian, like subtree, which had been subsidized by other books that was no longer going to fly. so in your view is that the market are the model today in some of the larger publishing houses. yeah. and there's been increasing ways in which bureaucracy companies these are these are commercial companies got shareholders who feel they need to satisfy. and the way that they try to make this as rational as they can is by using various techniques like profit and loss forms that editors need to fill out when acquiring a new book to determine how much profit they'll make from any given book they want to acquire. or they use comparative titles known in the business as cops, where they say, oh, this new book is similar to these three previous books that all were. and because it's similar to

those, we can bet that this next one is also going to be successful. all these these companies, profit and loss forms have a sort of conservative force. they tend to make acquisitions look similar to other acquisitions that have come before and it tames those commercial presses makes it a little easier for them to try to figure out how to consistently make a profit on every book that comes through. and so that has that the general ethos and it has been institutionalized in the conglomerate presses, as we mentioned. you have a new book coming out in the fall of 2023, big fiction how conglomeration changed the publishing industry and american literature. but you also have a previous book, american literature and long downturn. two things. tell us about your previous book and who is your publisher. yes. so previous book is about apocalyptic writing. contemporary american

literature. it argues that the after the postwar boom of the 1950s and sixties golden age of capitalism, starting in the 1970s, when we started to see of the economic trends that have continued into the present where wealth inequality is and wages stagnated. one response to this among american was to start thinking apocalyptically. so that book i write about cormac mccarthy's blood meridian, and i argue that that is one response to these larger economic trends. and that was that was the project that was the book that got me into archives and actually started inspiring this next project about the publishing industry. that book was published, oxford university press and my book, big fiction, is published by columbia university press. did penguin random house have a chance to get your book at all? so as an academic, we tend. we tend to work with university

in part because there's a separate a whole separate system of how acquisition and publication works with the presses versus big trade commercial like penguin random. a university press has peer review system that means that all of their books go out to specialists in the area, which that book is working, and those specialists have to sign off. and for my boss, the chair of my department, the deans, provost and the president, they like to see i'm working with a peer press, a university press, because that gives the work a little more of the academic imprimatur that it needs for my own career. so i did not let random house have a chance at these books. well, dan cynic and i presume you have an agent. what is the process for getting a book to, any publisher and when did cormac mccarthy get an agent for the time? yeah. so if want to work with a

commercial press, there's. you have to have an agent at this point, most big commercial presses won't even consider a that comes without an agent. that's not true for every kind of publisher. so we've been discussing these commercial conglomerate presses, but there is a really incredible dynamic, wonderful world world of small independent presses and nonprofit presses. and many of those presses will take direct submissions from authors in the university press world where have been doing my publishing, even though i do have an i don't need an agent to work with the university presses. university press editors regularly meet over zoom or at conferences with academics who they might consider publishing, and it's a lot more direct. so so it kind depends on who you want to publish with, whether or not you need an agent. and when did mr. mccarthy get one. right. so his editor, albert erskine,

retired, which was in 1987. mccarthy realized that he'd been protected by erskine for his entire career. he really wasn't sure what was going to happen after that. one of the wonderful outcomes, publishing my essay with the new york times was that someone reached out to me over email who had corresponded with mccarthy decades ago in the late eighties, and he shared with me a letter that mccarthy had sent to him a personal from cormac mccarthy, written him in 1988. and that letter, mccarthy said that his editor, albert erskine, had just retired and and he was not in a good place to offer anybody advice about how to get published at the time. he said these big publishing companies, they're not the same as they were. he started, and they're more like movie companies now, and he had no guarantee that they would continue him.

so after erskine retired, he was worried. he wasn't sure that he would even be able to continue having a career as a writer. and even as it was he'd never, he said in that letter, and he said in letters that i have seen in the archives as well that at that point in 88, 89, he had not received a single royalty check in his entire career, 28 years, 29 years of writing. he hadn't received a single royalty check. so it was this moment in the eighties where he thought, if i'm going to stick around in this business with my editor who's protected me, leaving, i'm probably going to need a literary agent. so he wrote a letter to probably the most prestigious literary agent, one of the most prestigious theater agents working in america at the time, named lynn nesbit. and she passed that letter down to an ambitious protege hers named amanda urban, often goes by the nickname pinky. and it just so happened that pinky urban had read mccarthy

novel some tree and thought it was a brilliant, ambitious book itself and decided to take him on as a client. so at point did random house sell cormac mccarthy in a sense, to knopf? and if they're owned by the same, what's the what's the purpose of changing imprints. right. so it under binky urban's influence that mccarthy went from random house imprint of random house within the larger random house company to knopf and the two imprints have different reputation. this is not something that your casual reader is going to know much about. but within the industry there's a little difference. every imprint every company has reputation about the kinds of work that they do, how they do it, who's on their list. so farrar and giroux is a little different than knopf is a little different than random or doubleday or simon schuster. they each have the things that they do well and so random house

and not both exist within the same company because they have slightly different reputations. canada tends to be little more literary a little more random house is a little more mainstream and i think urban decided that it might be worth trying to change things up to, try to make all the pretty horses fresh to give it a fresh start, to try with a new editor to try with a new imprint. so she went to. the new president of canada, who had just come in, a guy named sonny mehta, and asked if he would be interested in trying to take on mccarthy. and sonny made it. mehta himself. he was following in the footsteps of a giant ex-nazi robert gottlieb, who recently away himself and mehta was struggling. he was struggling in his first year to not to find his footing to get support from the

employees, to get support from his bosses. and so he was hungry at. the time for successes himself. and he thought that he could find in cormac mccarthy an opportunity for demons to demonstrate his own abilities as a publisher. so it was a really smart move by. pinky urban to go with sonny mehta, someone who was driven for a big success and could take advantage of this writer, had won prestigious awards but had never broken out commercially. the two of those them together urban and made a started brainstorming. yeah, all the people they could get involved to try to make all the pretty horses. the success it would eventually become. so professor cynical as cormac mccarthy became more successful, all the conglomeration model worked for him to his advantage. it. that's exactly and he you know i don't know what was in his heart or isn't in his mind, but the indications from the books themselves suggest that he

accommodated the conglomerate era, the books that he wrote the border trilogy or the two books that came after all the pretty horses form, a trilogy of westerns. no country for old men, the road. these are all books that are much more friendly to the market than his first five novels were. want to ask you, besides the and we talk about big five publishers today, there is another publisher out there norton what's story that's a wonderful question and there's a whole chapter on in my book big fiction, just dedicated to w.w. because it is such an interesting, unique story. norton remains independent, and it's the largest independent trade in the united states left. and the reason it's able to succeed where others have not is for two reasons. one is it is employee owned its

founder, w.w. norton, was his name. he died young and his wife decided she would sell the company to the employees and it has been an employee owned ever since. the other thing then employees become very loyal and norton employees tend to stay the company for a long time. in a business where people tend to move around a lot. so it's a company that that whose employees have a lot of loyalty it. the other thing that makes w.w. norton unique is that it's developed a special relationship to higher through its anthologies and critical editions. anyone who's been an english major been in a literature classroom there's a good chance they've been exposed to norton anthology of one of the many variations on it and that college division is been financially successful decades and that gives company a bit of a cushion to do things with poetry and fiction on its trade

publishing side that allow it to have a little more experimentalism, to let it play around a little bit, to do things that are maybe little more interesting, a little less constrained by the bottom line than you see in debate. the big conglomerate publishers. well, dan cynic teaches english at emory university. he has a book coming out in the fall. big fiction how conglomeration the publishing industry and america and literature. in his guest essay in the new york times, he writes cormac mccarthy's was an improbable trojan victory. writer toils for decades in obscurity before finding renown. it's stuff of legend. the guest essay is entitled cormac had a remarkable literary career. it could never happen. now professor cynic, and thank you for joining on book tv. pleasure.

in the past 25 years, book tv has been the air over 1300 weekends covered nearly hundred book festivals and featured 2000 authors, including this event john grisham, who was deborah carter? was a thing that although journalism cocktail waitress among other jobs 2122 years old in oklahoma who was murdered in december of 1981, raped and murdered a very, very brutal episode. and it took the police and the five years to solve crime. they thought they solved it the day they got the wrong guys and they convicted the wrong guys, sent them prison, send one to death row, run. williams someone to death row. he had never met deborah carter

and he spent. 11 years in prison and was exonerated ten years ago, 1999, almost ten years. exactly. but he spent a total 12 years in prison for the murder of deborah carter. they never met. who was ron williamson? ron williamson was a man never met. i never heard of. he was one of the first big notorious exonerations in the late nineties. um, and i met him when i read his obituary. so i never got to see him. obviously. but he was a fascinating character. when he was younger, many people in his small corner of oklahoma thought ron was the next mickey mantle. and ron certainly thought so. he had had a nice ego and he was

a second round draft pick in 1972 of the oakland a's and went off to seek major league glory and thought he was going to make it. never came close had a bunch of injuries, didn't take care of himself started drinking and drugging and you know pretty pretty lifestyle. crash and burn in the minor leagues when he was 25 or 26 years old and began showing the first signs of some type of mental that was eventually diagnosed as as being bipolar. all the wheels came off for ron williamson. he didn't help himself. it was a lot of self-medicating with booze and drugs. and in. 1986 or 87, he was arrested for the murder of deborah carter.

again, a woman who never him. why did you choose this story to be your only work of nonfiction? well, it was enough novels. 20, 22, 21 novels now, and one work of nonfiction. i ever thought about nonfiction. i never i'd never i'm not trained as a journalist. i never thought about it. i'm a lawyer. i'm a novelist. that's the way i think i create fiction, lies and at the same time always looking for good stories. always. i'm always on the prowl for good stories. i never thought it would be a real one. i read ron's obituary in the new york times early in december of 2004. nobody steered you. it stumbled across open the paper. one day there was his obituary and. there was a picture of ron in court in ada, oklahoma, in april of 1999, the day he was exonerated, same courtroom from which he'd been convicted and off to die. 12 years later, he's in the courtroom this one photo was

taken and he and i were the same, same race, same religions same part of the world. we grew up in a small town in oklahoma. i grew up in a small town, arkansas, and in mississippi and louisiana. a lot of similarity is a lot of similarities. and i thought, how could this guy. go to death row for 11 years and come within days of being executed? i mean, he was he was a dead man. oklahoma was about to strap him in and lethal injection. it was all planned and he'd given up. he was i nobody cared about that except family. it's just too. it was too good. did you know that all 92,000 plus hours of book tv programing is available online? just visit book tv dot org to watch full programs on your favorite authors.

our live coverage of the texas book festival continues. we'll more live coverage of the 2023. american. good afternoon. hello, everyone. hello. thank you so much for returning to this book talk.

c-span broadcast here at the texas book festival in austin. i'm sewell chan. i'm the editor in chief of the texas tribune, nonprofit, nonpartisan organization covering, state government in texas. i am delighted to be joined at one at the other end of the table by. steve vladeck, professor of law at u.t. austin, an expert in courts, and the author of the shadow docket how the supreme court uses stealth rulings to amass power and undermine the republic. and to my immediate left, i'm very proud to introduce one of my journalism heroes, marty baron. marty is author of the new book collision of trump, bezos and the washington post. marty, retired, not ago as editor of the post after a historic tenure, which will be discussing and previously before the post was the top editor at the miami herald and then at the boston globe, where marty supervised of sexual abuse in the catholic church that

obviously drew global attention and also became subject of a very interesting movie in which is played by liv schreiber. i mention that in part because, it turns out that liv schreiber also the audio book, which is one of my favorite details, have you communed with him? yeah, we've talked and we've concluded that we are the same person actually. so i tried out for my audio book and i was rejected. so, marty, let's start with you. you were coming on another historical you supervised coverage of of obviously the last presidential elections. and i'm curious about, you know might or might not be different this time. uh well, i think a lot a lot is the same, but i think that in this instance, trump is being actually quite explicit about what he intends to do were he to gain office yet again. a lot of the things that he's

talking about are actually by definition, and it's not like an opinion by definition, authority, a nature he's talked about. he's he's the only person i've heard talk about suspending the us constitution. he's talked about using the military to under the insurrection act to suppress perfectly legitimate protests. he's talked about bringing charges against the what was then the outgoing chairman of the joint chiefs of staff and most likely having him executed. and he's talked about bringing treason charges against media, particularly nbc, for coverage that he views as unfavorable to him. so that is actually when you look at the definition authoritarian, it fits where we in the press too slow to, kind of appreciate the anti-democratic nature of of trump's campaign and then presidency. did we did we, you know, take him to and not seriously as not

sufficiently seriously as was kind of proposed by some critics in 2016? well, i think it's to generalize, but the press can always there are a lot of different news organizations in that in that grouping. it's like saying all, all politicians, what have you. i think there were some that didn't take him seriously enough. you may recall the huffington post decided to relegate him to the entertainment pages of their website. i think that was big mistake. i think we at the washington post take him seriously right from the beginning when he announced in the summer of 2015. and he talked about mexicans coming across the border and being rapists and all of that. he he went up to about a third support in the republican among the republican electorate, and he became the leading candidate almost overnight. and actually actually overnight. and so we to take him seriously, we had to understand why people were supporting him. certainly lot of the political class didn't take him seriously. many people thought that he was

going to fade, particularly with all the bizarre statements he made and offensive statements that he made, including about john mccain and things like that. but that didn't happen. we took him so seriously that we did an entire book on his life and career called trump reveal and. he severely us for for that book. and actually the process if he didn't like it he was going to, he might sue. but he also said that he wasn't going to read it. so we asked him, well, how will you know if you like it? and he said, well, i have people who read it for me. so but anyway, we did take him quite seriously throughout that whole. yeah. so, marty, let's step back for a moment. when you joined washington post in 2013. it was a significantly smaller newsroom than it is now. it was still under the stewardship of the graham family, an incredible american family that owned the paper for for 80 years. and then made a decision not

after you joined, but not due to you, of course, to sell the paper and obviously sold it to jeff bezos, founder of amazon. and one of the wealthiest people in america. and so, know, i'm curious about you know, what were your expectations when you took the job especially would the post's identity as both a regional and a national news organization? and how did the change in ownership, you know, affect the mission and the purpose? the washington post, as you understood it? well, we've been up to then at that point a news organization that was very much focused on the washington metro region, the line that was used as part of our strategy was to be foreign about washington. so essentially, for people within in the district of columbia, parts of maryland, of virginia, the washington metro, we would cover national politics. but our market would be that when jeff bezos acquired us, he he wanted to change that immediately. so they needed to change. he did not see a model a

sustainable model for local news. but we had a great opportunity to be national and even international for a variety of reasons. we were based in the nation's capital, a good base for that. we had name the washington post, which was a name that could leveraged to a national and international level. we had a history and heritage back to watergate such that there were millions of people around the country who had never read a word the washington post, but had an idea of. the washington post, as an organization that held government to account that had helped contributed mightily bringing down a previous president. and so so he and then he said the internet has given us a gift. of course, at the time we were we couldn't figure out what that gift was given destruction that it was inflicting on our business. but the gift was that we could now deliver our journalism anywhere in the world at essentially incremental cost because it was digital, and that we, as he put it, take the gift. and so that was the fundamental strategic change that we made. marty, you the post early in

bezos, his tenure adopted the slogan democracy dies in darkness. marty legendary as a kind of very, you know, kind of traditional, you know, newsman show don't tell. tell me a little bit about how that slogan came about and and the pros and cons i mean on the one hand it it kind of really put a marker in you know how the post covers power. but it was also seen by some as a partizan statement. yeah, wasn't a partizan statement. we started about it actually two years before it was introduced, just so happened that it was introduced when trump moved into the white house. so the timing was a little weird and. people interpreted that as an attack on him. look, the new york times had long had a slogan called all the news that's fit to print. it's a little out of date these days when on the internet you can print as much as you want. but we never had anything of that of that sort. and he felt that we should something that really captured the distinctive nature of the

washington post and the and the role it can serve in our country. and he said, don't be afraid of the word democracy. and and so he wanted a, as he put it, a slogan that would be he didn't want to he didn't call a slogan. he called it a mission statement. he said he wanted it to be not a product people would subscribe to, but idea that people want to belong to. and that's what he talked about it sort of a club that people might want be a part of. and by the way, he said, and should fit on a t-shirt so and so we struggled with that for two years. we struggled with that. we a thousand different options. we we couldn't decide. i'd find it came down to a meeting, the ritz-carlton in georgetown, and we had a half dozen left and we said, we're going to pick one. we have a half hour do this. and we still didn't agree. and we came up with something else. he took it back. he flew back to and his then wife, who was an author, a novelist, she looked at it and then he sent a note back to us saying, not the news you want to

hear. she has proclaimed this to be franklin's slogan. so why don't we just go with democracy dies in darkness. what was something that bob woodward had been using for many years, and it was derived from a federal federal judge's ruling. and it didn't really go back to watergate. but it was more recent than that. but a lot of people were nervous that. i was too, because most marketers would tell you don't put death and darkness in your slogan. but we did anyway. and proved to be a hugely with some portion of a big portion of the population not so popular with the trump folks. of course. and a lot of people mocked it, but when they mocked it, bezos was he was thrilled. he said people actually, which is not the case. a lot of mottos for a lot of companies and few media owners understand product and audience as well, probably as jeff bezos. steve, let's shift over to. you know, we'll start with the title of your book.

the term shadow docket was coined around 2015 by university of chicago law scholar, actually conservative one named will bodie and at the time he kind of meant a little bit more descriptively rather than normatively. you have kind done a lot and played a big role in popularizing or explaining the term. and your books are really revelatory. could you start a little bit by you know, giving us a brief history of how this docket has always and yet how it's used has expanded significantly in the century? sure. i mean, i wrote book really to help get everyone on the same page about how the supreme court basically one does its job, but two has come to play such an outsized role in so many features, contemporary public discourse. and know the shadow docket is really a big part of that. all it is is this evocative shorthand, basically, for all of the procedural orders that the supreme court hands down procedural orders, many of which

are entirely anodyne, but some of which are not. and so one of the most common types of orders, the supreme court hands down, is an order either agreeing to hear an appeal or refusing to hear appeal by volume. that's actually most what the supreme court does. but there's a lot behind that, that process called circularity is basically an enormous transfer of power from the democratically elected branches, who until 91, told the supreme court every single case it had to hear right to the justices who now basically get to pick and choose not just which cases they here, but which issues they're going to resolve within those cases. so last term, for example, supreme court decided 58 cases. the justices chose 57 of them. and that, i think, has a lot of consequences that we and by we, i mean law people who write about the court the media, i think, don't always account for

in talking about the court's power, what it means that the justices picking and choosing a subset of cases to decide how that wasn't it always was and how that gives the court power to make all of these decisions in the literal and proverbial shadows. it really still picks up, at least with regard to their sheer. ari right. in the 1920s. but then the real phenomenon of the last decade has been a different type of order these pertaining to what are called applications. basically, a party is asking the supreme court to adjust the status quo while the case is working its way to the supreme. we've seen a lot more of those in the last ten years on everything from sb eight texas's six week abortion ban to trump biden, immigration policies to covid mitigation measures to alabama, redistricting. and one of the things that the book really tries to help show is that these unsigned unexplained orders, which are inscrutable enough to lawyers,

let alone to non-lawyers, actually in the aggregate, are part of a pattern in which the court, has exercised them more more power over more and more things with less and less justification, with fewer and fewer opinions, telling why. so, steve, the court was famously described by alexander bickel as the least dangerous branch and in and i think for much of its history, least postwar history, it was in many ways most respected branch, i think for a number of reasons. esteem the supreme court has dramatically lessened and obviously risen in other parts of america among certain segments. you know, how are the justices how seriously are they taking the of reputational and know legitimacy issues that come with, you know, a emboldened, empowered court the last five, five, six years. yeah. well so mean i think the first thing to say is it's important to understand exactly how the court became so empowered and emboldened right. that's actually less a function

of who the justices are than it is of really congress keeping its hands off the court. right. of congress no longer exercise any of the many tools congress used to have to sort of leverage the court. you know, we talk about whether the justices adopt an ethics code. imagine if congress said imagine if senate democrats said, we'll pass your budget. supreme court, you kind of need as soon as you adopt an ethics code, right. like that kind of conversation happen anymore with regard to sort the extent to which the justices care, i mean, the justices are are they not in it? right. so you have one extreme. you have justice samuel alito who says i couldn't believe he actually said this, who said in july, no provision of the constitution gives congress the power to regulate the supreme court period. he would have failed my commonwealth class at that. right. justice alito, who we should say sits in a seat congress created

in 1837. i don't think he thinks he's unconstitutional. so at extreme, you have the sort of the view expressed by justice alito, which is not only we not accountable, but you can't hold us to account. right? we ought not to be accountable to you. other people and actors. and then the other extreme, i mean, you have i think folks like justice kagan, who has quite publicly that she thinks the court needs have an ethics code who has started voluntarily explaining why she's recusing from cases, something that none of the other justices do. and i'll just say you have someone like justice amy coney barrett, who i think is actually a really player in this conversation and who went out of her way three weeks ago in a speech, the university of minnesota, to say that she thinks an ethics code would be a good idea. so, you know, i think there's a bit of a going on behind scenes at the court right now where you have maybe thomas, alito and gorsuch right at one extreme. and you have the three democratic appointees, sotomayor, kagan and jackson the

other. and in the middle you have the chief justice and justice barrett and justice kavanaugh, none of whom i would say are moderates, but they're in the median. and i think they have somewhat more nuanced views about danger of this public confidence in the court that they're they're more worried about it, i think, than the alito's of the world. so you point out in your book that congress can and has expanded or changed the number of seats on the court. congress could create even an additional body of appellate review above below the circuit courts of it west. you talk about the growth and changes in the judiciary, but at a time that so hyper polarized, would we want or the white house to have anything to do with changes the functioning or size or jurisdiction of highest court? well, i mean, i think this is one place where my book actually really starts dovetail quite poetically. marti's right, which is part of the story i'm trying to tell, is

a story about institutional relationship chips and the notion that congress has a vested interest in a healthy institutional relationship. the supreme court, regardless of who's control of congress and regardless of who's in control of the court. we don't have the same stool. i think reluctance to have this conversation. we're talking about executive power, right, for decades. we've been talking about the balance of power between congress and the executive branch, how congress should be reining in executive moves across administrations of different parties. and so i think the the real quest that i tried to sort of nudge us toward in the book, the conversation i hope we'll start having about the supreme court is one that is actually not just about the ideological divides that, dominate almost every headline about the supreme court, but shifts that are not in way ideological, that are not a function of a conservative supermajority any more than they would be a function of a liberal supermajority. i just wondered if i mentioned the court decided 58 cases last

term, the last four years the court has decided cases than any point since the civil war. a rather surprising data. given what the court done in those fewer number of cases that might surprise you. and given the growth of the nation's right. but i think it's a symptom, the underlying disease, which is that when justices can sit back and do only they want to do and don't have to do anything that anyone else tells to do, right, they are much more to behave politically, much inclined to behave ideologically, and i think much inclined to behave as judges. and that's why i think the more we have an institutional frame conversation, the more that actually the supreme court might pushed to act more like a court. again. so like, like to ask some questions of of you. one of the common themes in your books is really about institutions and norms, norms that sometimes are explicitly stated more often than not are implicit. you know, marty, i think one of

those norms is that, you know, at since, you know, the modern era, fdr, the 1920s, the idea that, you know, there's a white house press corps, that there's a spokespeople for the president, that job, more or less is to answer questions. journalists ostensibly representing readers, viewers and listeners. we're in a very different time. you have some political candidates where take the reporters query and not not respond to it, but then immediately posted on twitter to denounce the reporter and news organization. you've credentialing of people from really non-mainstream news sources that are really hyper partizan in nature. some people call those websites, you know, pink slime, you know, given our nation's tradition of really know freedom of the press. is anything that can be done to reduce to to kind of combat these norms violations? well, i think it's can be hard. i mean, i think if there were to be another trump administration, i think we'd see more attacks than we saw in the past.

obviously, trump used a lot of language that was intended to not only discredit the press, but actually dehumanize the press and to portray us as traitors, to the traitors to the country. they did endeavor during the first his his time, the white house, to withdraw press credentials against institutions press institutions that he viewed as unfair favorable court against him on that and but i think they will try again and will try to essentially probably the deck in the press room. news organizations that they view as favor only favorable to them. there will be i mean, trump has talked again quite openly. i mean, the one thing about trump, you recognize is that a lot of what he intends to do, he says openly, and so you should pay close attention. people say, well don't pay attention to him. no, you should pay attention him because he's telling you what he intends do. and so he does intend to go. he's talked about going harder against the press and think he will use every means necessary to undermine the press if he were to get back into the white

house. and, you know, steve, talk a little bit about the supreme court and its and, you know, until the series about clarence thomas, i think a lot of people hadn't given much thought, frankly, the finances of supreme court justices. as you state, there is, an ethics code that applies to all the other federal judges. but somehow the supreme doesn't have one. and, you know, what is the nature of that? and then you had the leaked memo the leaked decision in the dobbs case overturning roe v wade. and and, of course, someone on the conservative side thought that that was a norm violation, that, you know, that really damaged and eroded trust within the institution. and so, you know, how do you think the court know is approaching this question of norms and what what needs to be formalized or not? i think it goes back to the same split that i alluded to before. i mean, i think that there are, you know, a couple of justices, to borrow a phrase from my friend and colleague leo litman, who take this yolo approach, right.

that you know, you only live once they've got they've got the votes, might as well take them out for a spin. and in that regard, right. short term victories are the goal. but i think that there are a number justices across the ideological spectrum who take a longer view. i think understand that, you know, the court the least dangerous branch, right. alexander point was that the court can't enforce its decisions itself. it depends us depends upon the people the political branches and that that's why the court's legitimacy matters. and so i think part of this is new. you know there's there's a lot of noise on the right that people are making noise about the court now just because there's a conservative supermajority. there has been a conservative majority on court since may 14th, 1969, when warren court ended right the last day on which there was a majority of justices appointed by democratic presidents. what's different about this moment, i think, is two things. one, for the better part of those 54 years, the court a real middle and it had a middle

superintended by justices who had strong about norms. justices like potter stewart and louis powell and sandra day o'connor and anthony kennedy. we might not have agreed with them that often. right. but they were i think very much sort of keeping things calm. right. and keeping either sort of extreme side of the court from getting too out of whack. that middle's gone. and so we have the disappearance of the middle on the court at the same time as we have congress and the president, two actors who historically pushed back when it was perceived that the court was getting too far over its skis in the 1930s, for example, who had stopped doing so. i think that's a big of how we got to where are today. the circumstances in which you can have a dobbs and a brew and the second amendment case and a west virginia versus on climate change and, you know, all of the other affirmative action. i mean, just all of these decisions where the court is basically saying we don't even care. right. how these rulings are received by the public. so, you know, sticking with

norms, there is a lot of discussion within journalism, even debate about traditional norms such as objectivity and, fairness. we could obviously talk about this for hours. but i think the way frame it in brief is that, you know, a whole body kind of body of standards that, you know, come out of walter lippmann in the, you know, a century because. right. the press used to be obviously there was a lot of yellow dog journalism, a lot of hyperpartisan, a lot of, you know, mistruth is published going back to the early republic. but in the 20th century, really saw the emergence of this body of norms around journalism and how it should, you know use or expertise and, how it should use data and kind of a standard of you've got really now, you know, a new generation of journalists. i think it's safe to say who you know they're coming from a good place. i think they but they want journalism journalists to perhaps be more assertive. tell me from this from a little bit more assertive, countering mistruths. they want journalists not fall into the trap of false

equivalency and they want journalists to in some cases, their, you know, their their mantra, their motto, their mission as being one of defending democracy. and at time and you know this i wouldn't say it's a clash of norms. i think that's a little bit simplistic. but at times this debate has led to some real you know, rancor within newsrooms and i'm curious about, you know, how that debate evolved in your view and and how you experienced it and tried to respond to it when you were at the post. yeah, well, there was a fair amount of rancor. my newsroom as well. pretty much an uprising against my efforts to traditional norms. i think it's that we particularly at a time so many norms are being violated on the political arena including donald trump and lot of his allies and norms on the supreme court and all of that that. if we want to preserve our democracy that we in the press should think hard about norms and actually preserve our norms rather than throwing them out, ditching them and throwing them out the. but i think we should understand what those really are.

so have been a defender of the idea of objectivity. but i think the i, i want to define that for you because i think a lot of people have mischaracterized what objectivity is and conflated with both sides as am and false equivalence and all of that. and that's not what it is. it's not what it was when it was popularized more than 100 years ago by walter lippmann, particularly in a book called liberty in the news and, the idea he was actually to to the propaganda that had led the united states into world war one and the slaughter and it was an anti-propaganda idea. and what he's talked about is that, look all journalists have opinions. all journalists have their preconceived fashions, all of that. but we need to we need to set that aside and move beyond that and really do rigorous research in the way that the scientists might do that. you start with a hype and a hypothesis, and we often start with a hypothesis, but you have to sort of be open minded, you have to be fair, have to look at

all of the evidence. you have to talk to all of the individuals necessary. you have to look at all the documents. so you should go about work in a in a rigorous, comprehensive, independent. but when you've done that, you've done all your work, you shouldn't hesitate, tell the public what you've actually found it. there's nothing about this notion of objectivity that says, yeah, go do all that work. and then when you've done all that work, pretend you haven't done that work and that everything is 5050. that is not the notion. so my view is that, look, we saw in journalism sometimes we see the world through a keyhole, which is just a lot that we don't know. it's hard enough to come up with the right. we certainly don't have answers before we look at the beginning, we should go looking for answers and try to ask the right questions and be open minded and rigorous and independ. and that's what i favor. i understand where people are coming from they feel that we've been assaulted and that we've been what trump has talked about, waging war on media. he said it on his very first day

in the white house, was talking to cia agents, standing in front of a memorial to slain cia agents. what did he choose to talk about? he said, as you know, i'm at war with the media seeming to try to enlist the cia, that war against the media. and so but i don't see our job as being at war. i see it as being our work. and marty, you know, you're talking about a subject as i hear it, objectivity as as a method, as an approach, as a form of inquiry. what about those who say that the notion of objectivity was kind of at its strongest or often was used at a time when, frankly those giving us the news and who and the audiences reached by the and also the subjects of the news were less diverse than now right when you it's often oversimplify people sometimes think that walter cronkite was this voice consensus, but he actually in many ways came to prominence as a critique, as a critic of the policies in.

but i think that that when we think there was never a golden age, in my view, but there certainly was an age when americans probably fewer mainstream news sources and the level of trust they therefore invested it in those news presenters was probably higher then than than we have now. you know, is that is objectivity in something that kind of has to go as we have a much greater pluralism of who presents the news you know, what stories get covered and who were covering those stories for. i don't think it's something that has to go with pluralism and greater diversity in our ranks. i think greater diversity in our ranks actually serve the purpose of objectivity. we need to see things. we need to see events from different perspectives, from people who've lived different lives, people who will aware of things that, for example, i not be aware of because of my own life experience. that is, that is what you want. and in objectivity, is look at the totality, look at the totality of look at, you know, all that's on. talk to everyone. look at all of the evidence.

don't don't, you know, go about our work with blinders it. and so i think greater pluralism in our and in our actually serves the purpose of serves our mission in a really great way. so when i ask each of you about some fateful decisions, marty you talk about how the press handled or mishandled the steele dossier, which was that compilation of very but as it turns out, not very legitimate rumors about president trump were published by buzzfeed and, you know, you are a critic of that decision. but you also say that that need to pay more scrutiny to where we get information from the the people leaking, us or providing us with information. what are their motivations and be more transparent about our processes. how did you reach that conclusion you talked about on the steele dossier in particular that it was a problem. well look i mean your own newsrooms you know the internal debate about how to try to

verify. well the the claim. sure. but what we were trying to do is try to verify we were not going to publish until we verified. and i think fundamental the idea of high quality journalism is verification. that's what distinguishes quality journalism from all the other stuff that's out there, verification. have we verified? so, yes, we got we got a hold of the so-called steele dossier was really just a collection of reports. we endeavored, the people in our newsroom went about the work of to find out if that was true. we weren't able to we weren't able to verify it. but then after trump took office, buzzfeed news chose to publish the entirety of that so-called dossier. and then that just, you know, opened the floodgates, gave it gave trump an incredible opportunity to attack the press a. great. gave him i mean, most critically, it gave him the opportunity to conflate entirety of the russia investigation, much of which was entirely legitimate with steele dossier, which couldn't be verified.

and they have tried to characterize as one in the same. in fact russia did intervene in the election. the trump were aware of that intervention. they welcomed that intervention. there was communication between trump allies and wikileaks, and they never to law enforcement to say, hey, here's an adversary of the united states that is intervening in our election. they were perfectly happy to have that intervention and they kind of played even if what didn't amount to coordination and collusion or whatever the term is, you want to use an may not have amounted to criminal offense. there was clearly sort of a game of footsie going on there. do you think the press could have been more transparent in about its efforts and inability to verify those claims? yeah, i mean, i think i think a big mistake that we made was that once we did try to actually and couldn't come up with verification, we really should have gone hard. look at, well, what's wrong with this? what's wrong with this document? the set of documents and really questioned the source that and

and how how you know, how did it come to be and and all of that. i think we should have been much more aggressive about it. and be as tough on the people who devised these allegations about trump totally as as we are on on and that's what i mean by independence we need to be totally independent. steve, i think a signal a signature moment in how the supreme court got to where it was was when first the democrats abandoned the filibuster to get appellate judges confirmed. and then, of course, the republicans, you know, then abandoned the filibuster for supreme court justices. did did the democrats make a critical mistake with that move and going back even further, was the treatment of robert bork in the 1980s. you know, which is often seen as the starting point for supreme court wars, or was that a mistake as well and how it was handled? you know, i probably in retrospect, if you asked harry reid, he might say he or she had that one back.

but, you know you have to put yourself back into the context of 2013. i mean, there were, you know, dozens of qualified and, not controversial, you know, nominees for federal circuit courts who just weren't getting through the senate at all in ways that actually in 1999, as late as 1999, no. a conservative than chief justice rehnquist had publicly criticized republicans for not give him up or down votes to president clinton's judicial nominees. so, you know, i think i mean, you sort of work it backwards and say, you know, who started the war? i would say the notion that that sort contentious confirmation hearing started with robert bork is a bit of a myth. they go back much further. and actually there were some darker undertones to some of the early contentious confirmation hearings for some, the first jewish nominees to the court who actually got completely sort of unprecedented levels of questioning and skepticism. frankfurter, brandeis, frankfurter, cardozo. right. and so, you know, i guess

there's a part of the story here is that like actually lot of what we think is new about the supreme court actually isn't that new. it's just more visible to us today. but i also think part of the story, again, is i it's a bit of a sort of category error to think our current predicament, our current problems are a function of who the last ten years of nominees have been. i mean, not just because justice alito predates, that he was put on the court. 26 because i don't think it's the judges and justices who are the problem. i think it's the lack of any sort of reason to look over their shoulder when we look at all of key moments in american history when it was believed that the court gotten out of line and when there was a significant public pushback against court, that pushback is manifest in either statutory or proposed reforms that then push the court off of the cliff. the most famous example is 1937, the switch in time that saved nine. you know, the the sort of the typical one sentence line about fdr was court packing plan,

which would have added six justices to the court is it failed didn't get six more justices. it actually succeeded wildly because court moved right. fdr threats actually impelled the court to shift on a whole host of really important statutory constitutional doctrines so that me is what's missing today, right? what's missing is sort of any threat, any concern that if the court steps out of line, if we learn further things about the personal behavior of the justices, that there'll be any consequence for it in in two rounds of elections since dobbs the election last year and the one that just happened, you know, democrats probably outperformed expectations, particularly in races in which abortion and reproductive rights came up as an issue. you do you do you think court's, you know, is open to ideas that it has overreached and do you think we've reached a point where the american public believes that? so i mean, i think some of the justices are, i think, clearly open to the idea that there's

been some overreach. and i mean, we've already seen in the book talks about some of the ways in which justices barrett and kavanaugh have moderated some of their behavior in the last 18 months, not in the most cases. but again, if you look at the court holistically, there are things you'll see. i think some of the question is, you know, sort of is. the court worried? not that kansas and other states are going to bring back rights that the court has taken away? rather, is the court worried that congress is going to clip its wings, that congress is going to mess with docket or mess with its right, or think about term limits. and i think it's really only when you have the specter, those institutional reforms that you might finally get someone other than, you know, justice barrett. justice the three democratic appointees to also actually. wait a second. right. maybe maybe we should rein this in a little bit. and marty, a question for you the washington post, you know, has recently had real economic difficulties. it's reported to be losing great

deal of money this year. something like approaching $100 million. there's new leadership now about the business side of, the post from when you were there. and obviously your successor, sally buzbee, a very respected journals from the associated press, you know, has a lot to deal with. a lot a lot on her plate. do you think that the fundamental business model for news is still broken in some deep way? many had looked at the post's success turnaround under your tenure as a source of hope that. you know, subscriptions and relying on subscriptions, which the new york times, the wall street journal have done very well, though they are really, i would point out, a universe of two. right? and so, you know, a lot of us are like if even post is struggling to make the subscription work, does that mean the model is somehow, you know, broken, inadequate? oh, well, look the business model for news generally really challenged. i mean, and you can't just talk about the national news organizations, but about the

local ones as well. and that's really a different model than it is the washington post, new york times, wall street journal, places like that, look, i mean, i think part of the problem at the washington post today after we had we had six straight years of profitability, bezos earned back all the money that he invested in and then reinvest that he had invested the $250 million. and then he reinvest that money. but the problem today was insufficiently preparing for a post-trump era. so many of the people who who bought subscriptions to the post wanted to. we're about trump. they were concerned that there wouldn't be an institution to hold him accountable. they were worried about the courts. they were worried congress. they looked at the press, which they had taken for granted for so long and still do probably do still take it for granted. and when they looked at the press, they look essentially a two organization. that was the new york times and the washington, the washington post. and so people read we actually had more traffic at one point than the new york times, and they and then they bought subscriptions and we went from 0

to 3 million digital only subscriptions. so but it was clear that might not stay in the white house. i mean, the republicans lost the house in 2018. we and we needed to prepare. and and the new york times was doing something bezos had talked about all along which was creating a so-called bundle. and they added they tens of millions of dollars into a cooking app. they acquired wirecutter product recommendation service. they they took their very famous new york times crossword puzzle, digitized it and built on that with a bunch of word games and hired wardle and acquired a well. and i heard of wardle. i knew that like it's matter of days before the new york times was going to buy wardle so it's like i was just like counting the days, you know, in any event, i did bring this up with my publisher and like around 2000, a little after the 2018 midterms and look at what the

new york times is doing. they're not this this stuff has nothing to do with news. it has to do with becoming part of people's daily routines, cooking, buying products, playing word games, figuring out what to do with your spare time, that kind of thing. so we needed to do that. we didn't do that. we diversified, but not sufficiently, and so we didn't prepare for that. but i don't think that means that the fundamental model for the washington post is is broken. they overinvested. they had they had expectations that were too grand and. they have to adjust even after these cuts. i mean, when i got to the post, we had 580 people in our newsroom, i had to cut 35 in the first year we were going to cut another 50 or more the second year. then bezos came along and acquired it, and then but even after these cuts, they will have 940 people in their newsroom and that is a large newsroom by any measure. and i'm i feel confident that they will get past this and figure out something. you write about. bezos as a being a pretty responsible owner terms of he did not interfere with editorial

content which i think was very wise decision and also the right decision. other media owners might not be so restrained and i'm curious if you think that you know is there a problem with billionaires owning media outlets just like there's a problem with hedge funds or private equity funds owning newsrooms? yeah, well, i talked about that a little bit in the book toward the end. there is no perfect model, by the way, from our ownership. when we were owned by publicly traded companies, everybody was complaining that all they did was manage the company to get stock price up. we had essentially in our business, we had monopolies, oligopolies, none of us were complaining about monopolies and oligopolies. our own business, strangely enough, just about in other business. so we had 42% profits. but the investments were not being made toward the future, toward a digital future. and that proved to be a real problem. people about billionaires because they have commercial and all of that. but then you have hedge funds and private equity funds which are treating news organizations

like annuities and basically trying to extract every last dollar of cash out of them. and then they don't care what they don't care what happens to them. but even and forgive me for saying this, given texas tribune is a nonprofit, but get a lot of money from people who have they got a lot of from nonprofits, from foundations. other foundations are run by much of the money comes from elites the people who serve on the boards are so-called elites. and many of the foundations only want to give money to organizations that advance their causes. and so i'm not sure there is another out there. i think we should media organizations by the work do not the ownership model that they have. and i'm particularly regard to the washington post, if people go back and look at the work we did, they will see that was entirely independent, including being independent of jeff bezos and his own commercial interests and political coverage of amazon as well. no, i completely with you about independence and that means showing independence from advertisers, from owners, and

from you say donors and even subscribers and members. right. that that like having our own kind of moral, you know, center of independent journalism is really, really crucial no matter the business model. absolutely. steve, what do you see coming up for this october term that has just recently? do you think that, the greater attention, frankly, from your book and other critics suggests that these unsigned, you know, decisions some of them, you know, authored and, sent down to two in the morning, do you think there's going to be some greater restraint on the part of the justices? so, i mean, i think there'll be some greater restraint on the part of the justices i think we've seen a little bit of that already. think part of the issue is that, you know, you can't always help it. there are lower, especially the fifth circuit, which covers that seems to be how do i say enjoy in sending cases to the supreme court, perhaps more should. but but actually i think that's a really helpful place to tie together the theme of the book right. which is you're going to see a lot in news.

both conventional outlets and less conventional outlets this year about the supreme court and the fifth circuit. there are going to be a number of cases where i think the court doesn't go as far as the fifth circuit, mifepristone, the consumer financial protection bureau, the second amendment, social media, i mean, there are going to be a lot of decisions. the court this term that some in the media are going to try to portray as or as signs that court has actually done an about face. and this is it really matters to look at the whole picture right when the court is forced to take cases from, an outlier appeals court, the fact that the court is reversing that outlier appeals court doesn't necessarily tell us that the court is moderate. it tells us the outlier appeals court is crazy. and, you know, this this is again, where i think you have actually not just assume that things are as they appear. right this is where understand and how much control the court has over its docket, its cases, its workload its budget, its autonomy really influence the

story much the way that marty says. right. you know, what the newsrooms actually do and is more than who owns that. ditto with the court right. don't just buy the narrative that the court is somehow moderate if it's reversed in the fifth circuit. all the time. right. the question is, do we really want unelected justices having not just the power to have the final on what federal law means, but having the complete and unfettered power to decide when? they're going to decide that in the first place. steve vladeck, author of the shadow docket, marty baron, author, collision of power, thank thank you. thank you. and and, of course, a reminder that both of these authors will be signing copies of their books, which i found truly revelatory at the book signing ten in just a few minutes. so please come and talk to them in person. thank you so much. thank you. c-span.

go. we'll have more live coverage of the 2023 texas book festival after a short break. well, we recently sat down with university professor david blight. he's one of three editors of a short biography series that focuses on individuals of african descent who shaped american history.

well, joining us now on book tv is longtime yale professor david blight. he's also an author and a pulitzer prize. professor blight, what do you teach at yale? i teach about slavery, the civil war and reconstruction. how long you been teaching that? well, i've been teaching about that all of my career. i've been doing it at yale about 20 years. but we've invited you on to about a new series that you are editing or producing called black lives series. what is? well, it's a series that yale university press just begun in the past few. the three series editors are henry louis gates jr and goldsby. jackie is at yale and the english department. skip is, of course, up at harvard. it's a series modeled on another that press does called jewish,

which has now been around 20 or 30 years. it's been very success series. they are short biographies, usually 200 pages or less. the jewish lives series has been a triumph, so they decided to do a series called black lives is the new series. and we have the first two books coming out in the series just in the next month or so. and many other books in the pipeline, 18 of them already, i believe, signed up or the proposal is are under careful review. and this too will be biographies of broadly defined now about black african-americans, africans, anyone of african. including even the literary characters about whom or about which authors will write

biography or themes. and we'll talk some of those books in just a minute. why the focus on short biographies? well, there's a lot a lot of readership out there, as many would know, for biography. i certainly that in the last four years of my life with my biography of frederick douglass biography, not only still sells, but it is also the pathway into history. many people. people love reading individual lives as especially books that not only explain the lives of person famous in many cases, but not necessarily famous and other kids, but also the ways in which an individual life would reveal a society reveal times a person lives in, or even reviews reveals a culture. so this is the ancient craft of biography. it is in some ways the original

form of history, but its design to reach a broad, serious readership who who love reading short books. these will be in the neighborhood of 200 pages per book, all of them by distinguished series scholars, some some our writers were signing our younger authors, writers, but we have some very distinguished who have signed into the series well, and over a period years, this series could produce oh i'd say within the next six years as many as 20 titles, 25 possibly even titles that will form a collection of black biography across across all borders, all time. and there have been other biography before. there was a famous one. oh back in the 1960s, seventies

and eighties, done by beacon press. it was edited by handling these were these are about american history and they too were relatively short biographies. i can still remember teaching with of those biographies from that series, especially one of john winthrop done by edmund morgan. so you're most recent book is entitled frederick douglass prophet of freedom. 600 plus pages. correct. it's almost 800, actually. almost 800. i shortchanged you. sorry. that's quite all right. that's quite all right. so will this series be looking at people as notable and well-known as a frederick douglass? yes we haven't signed book on douglass yet, although i wouldn't rule that out. we probably down the road. but yes, you're going to find a book soon. but about james, many black

writers are going to be in this series. it's going to be a book. desmond tutu, the third book in the series, which will out next summer, this coming is on john lewis, the great civil rights leader and congressman. there will be books. anna, julia cooper, all martial and others. so there be books here on the famous. i think we're about simon on duke ellington. matter of fact so these books are cross the of politics and culture and and achievement of all sorts. it's also series that reaches all the way back to antiquity and right up to the current day. so there's out of the bounds of this kind of series including and i'm particularly proud of

this one because we signed the actually good friend great shakespeare scholar shapiro at columbia university to do a biography of the character othello. how you how do you do that? well, he's calling it a fellow america. in other words, it will be the story of the various ways beginning the 18th, but especially the 19th century, the ways that was staged in america, depicted in america, the way othello as a character changed time in the 19th century into the 20th century. there was a period in, the 19th century, when othello could not be portrayed as black as the murder of venice was white, and then white, and even more especially for performances in the south, where there's going be a book we've signed on.

true to your harris import and literary scholar is going to do a book on bigger thomas richard wright's famous in native son and. there's also going to be by shelley fisher fisk and great american studies scholar she's doing a book, a biography. if you like of the character jim from huckleberry finn. now, that means she's going to be tracing the reactions to the character jim depictions of the character, jim ethnographer about the character. jim over time. and i think some readers of especially readers of literature will those kinds of books fascinating. i can't wait. read the books on othello and jim and, those sorts of works. but there will also be political, diplomatic, we hope, and literary figures and

including legal figures. and we have an we haven't even touched the surface yet of biographies of great lawyers and judges and so forth. well, before we leave, some of these literary figures, would you consider the biography of jim from huckleberry finn, in a sense, to be a historical. no, i would i would would say no to that. and i think shelley fisher fishkin would, although i can't speak for her. she's writing book. no, she's going to be charting the way jim has been interpreted over time, criticized over time, depicted in art, over. i mean, it is one of the most famous black characters in any american work of fiction. yeah. jim and huckleberry finn. and she proposed this to us. and we all said, oh, my god, yes, do it. because as your audience would know, that novel huckleberry

finn has been very controversial over time, especially for its uses of of the n-word and the n-word used in related to jim, that character. so, no, this will be almost like an ethnography of a literary character over time, a kind of biography. it it stretches the, you know, definition of the genre a bit for sure. it's not an actual living person, of course. it's a character, by the way. we have a couple of books coming down the road already. i probably i can't announce them. they're not they're not yet in on certain biblical characters. so, professor blight, an aside, do you think that huckleberry finn should still be taught in english classes or should it be edited? no, it should not be edited.

and absolutely it should be taught. huckleberry finn is. i mean, i'm a history and although i, i play a cultural history. no, i don't think it should be edited anyone to read it. you know, for young readers a teacher should help them understand the context, helps them help explain the uses of the n word in that book. help them understand who mark whom. mark was and the country text of that book and. it's a it's a it's a perfect way to help young people begin to get comfortable with ideas like irony and ideas of racism. so no i would never advocate that that book be censored for its use of language and certainly not for the story is it's one of the greatest classics, american literature. in fact no less than ralph ellison, the great

african-american of the 20th century, who wrote invisible man said everything changed after huck finn that that huckleberry finn was was a pivot of american literature. and and in terms of recreating an american. and ellison said, you know, the writer is black, white or otherwise is had been response ending in a way to the power and achievement of huckleberry finn ever. now, given your writing career, my guess is that the book out by diana berry is one of your favorites or one of your choices? it's about anna marie douglas, the wife of frederick douglass. right now, here's very intriguing and challenging part of this genre. now, anna marie douglas, of course, is a very real person. she, frederick douglas, his wife of 44 years, but anna remained

all of her life. so do not have much of anything that anna. we have her her voice to some extent as spoken about or written about by her children, her four surviving adult children and to some extent about her. but it takes it takes a skilled researcher. i mean, i did some of this for my biography. you have to get at her life, her story through other people and through side doors to her experience. you get her through the context in which she lived. but was a truly crucial person in the life of not only frederick douglass, but certainly his family and his his fortune and their 21 grandchildren. and so dinah berry proposed to do this a short biography, anna

marie now. and what an what diana is likely do, although i don't know. i'm i'm not writing that book. diana is. but she may also deal with anna's changing place in our imagined over time or place, even within life of frederick douglass, over. so that book will have a deal of imagination about. it at the same time, it's going to have a lot empirical research of three of the four douglass children left narrative accounts about their mother so that there there is material there is evidence about who anna was, what her temperament like, what her what her life like, how important was as the core of that and a core, for example, of her church community in rochester, new york, or what it

was like to move so times that whole family to move with douglass to washington, d.c., for example. so, yeah, i really do really look forward to that one. and anna is not well known even who really know douglass well or love to read about frederick douglass just do not know anna douglass very well at all. so, david blight, how you describe the role that you and professors gates and goolsbee play in the black series? well, we're our role is the traditional role of series editors. we our job is to find authors who who have an idea or even to plan an idea. for example, in the case of jim shapiro, the shakespeare scholar, i simply got in touch with him and. i said, hey, if the thought of writing book just on othello, and he said, oh god, i'd love

to. and then he latched on to this idea of a short book about the play othello, and it's kind of american and its american over time. so but skip gates has done same thing. and jackie goes done the same thing, especially with literary characters and figures. i mean, so our job is to solicit manuscripts, find the authors and then help the press conceive. the series, and also it's our job in part me is to give this series chronological range. you know, we're in our discussions, we're always trying to balance the 19th century with the 20th century and now with a few about people and, characters from antiquity or shakespeare, for example. so that's our job. and eventually we read proposals

and we recommend and down to the press and and we're now working with a brand new editor at yale press, jesse, who has been hired in part to edit the series, which is quite exciting. and there are a lot of authors out there now beginning to hear this series, learn about this series. and they have ideas. they you know, oh, i've always wanted to write about so-and-so or i've always wanted write about so-and-so. and that's kind of the fun it. how is it being funded? well, it's being by yale university press and, actually. beyond that, i can't say because i'm not sure know. i know that yale. is giving it from one of their funds a subvention, but yale press is raising money to fund this series. and then, of course, i'm sure they hope it'll be continued and

funded through sales. the jewish lives series has done very well in terms of book sales. there are some now classic short biographies in that series, and the hope is that will that will grow out of this. i mean, we're publishing books also about very known figures which will people, people who want to read about black history, but people who want to read about american literature or just american history more broadly will be stunned. i think by one of our first two books that comes out in just weeks by katherine mooney, historian trained here at yale who teaches at florida state. but she's done a book on isaac murphy, who was the first great african-american jockey in the 19th century. he won two of the first three kentucky derbies.

he was born a slave, lived fascinating life, became a celebrity athlete, worked as a jockey in the 19th century, was a former slave. he was the most sought after jockey in the horse business from, the middle of like the reconstruction in years to up to toward the late 19th century. and he lives ultimately a tragic life which i you know, i don't spoil the story but he's he's a great story. and most americans, unless aficionados of horse racing have never heard of isaac. richard has a who's who's a very historian of abolitionism and the particular black abolitionism has produced a of samuel ringgold who was a former slave for who starts his career canada as an editor and then another biographer who up

ultimately a very important abolitionist in an anti-slavery circles in 1840s and fifties, but ends up exiling himself from america by the time of the civil war. but left a remarkable record of the story of a former fugitive slave out of maryland who builds career as a journalist editor of newspapers autobiography and brilliant common on the meaning of race and slavery in the united states. he's one of those abolitionists the most have never heard of. what's the importance of shining a light on more obscure biographies? well, that all lives matter. it lives and there are some remarkable people in history who didn't leave as much evidence papers, materials, you know, they didn't become and write 12 novels. they didn't become famous

politicians. and in the public for years and years. but they lived interesting lives in some kind of path of life. usually in this tradition, some kind of path of protest tradition of literary tradition of, you know, organizational traditions for example, that the series is hopefully going to have a couple, if not few books on major civil rights leaders from the early 20th century, from that age of dubois all the way up through modern civil rights movement and some of them are unsung heroes, i think lovers of history, love to read the relatively obscure or who can become fascinating in a short biography when you realize what they really did or what they tried to achieve or what

they tried to change. sometimes those are artists, you know, musicians, a poet or a novelist who who might have had a know a short ten year career like paul laurence. i don't think we signed a claude mckay book already a harlem renaissance writer. great significance. i don't we've signed a paul laurence dunbar book yet, but we need to. he's really the first great modern black poet, although he lived a very short life. how you match topics with authors? well, partly that comes from the author telling us what they want do. they're often just coming forward and saying would love to write about so-and-so and we say, all right, do a proposal on that and then sometimes we say, can you tweet that and maybe take it little bit in that direction? or where are you finding the evidence on this in the material and so on? but sometimes we sit around and

we have our zoom and we just kind of dream up topics and then skip or or or i come up with, well, you know, who might that or you know, who might write that. and also now press is the series is now and more widely known, the press gets proposals submitted directly to them to, the editors at the press. so in other words, ideas for the series can come through the regular transom. so speak. but many ways the authors already are matching themselves to the personalities or figures that they want to write about. and they have make the case. they have to know where the sources are, where the evidence is, and then they have have a, you know, a proposal, the strategy and an outline of how they want to write this book. two of david blights books include the frederick douglass biography of freedom came out in

2018 and race in reunion, the civil in american memory, which out in 2000. to professor blight, are you working on a new book? oh, yes, i'm working on a new full life of james johnson, the great african american poet, novelist diplomat and executive director for. oh, about 14 years of the naacp. in 1920s, james weldon johnson's personal papers are all here at yale. he's a major figure here, not only in the literary flower, and we call the harlem renaissance. but he was he was a true polymath. he worked in many different fields, so to speak, and he became a kind of cultural broker for black america, with everything from publishing to

foundations. he also, as many will now know, is the of the lyrics. his brother, author of the music for the black national anthem lift every voice and sing. there hasn't been a major biography of any kind of james weldon johnson since 1971. i'm not that in the black lives series for yale, because it's not going to be a 200 page study. it's to be a longer fuller biography. but that's my next book. and of course, of princeton wrote the of lift every voice. yes, she did. that's that's kind of yeah it is is a kind a biography of a song over. it's a it's a it's a it's a wonderful book. and it'll be a very nice guide for me when i get to that of of writing about johnson's life, johnson lived epic life that most americans know next to nothing about and died

tragically in a horrific auto accident. well, david blight, yale university history professor and, advisory board member of the yale university press black lives series. thanks for being with us on book tv. thank you very. glad to be here and to let people know about the new series of the oprah thank you. our live coverage of the texas book festival continues now. ladies and gentlemen, we'll be getting in about one minute. if you'd be willing to take your seats and just a preemptive call, if you would also be willing to silence your cell phones, please.

i. ladies and gentleman, greetings from austin, texas. it's a pleasure to see you. all here today as we're beginning to wind down the second day of the texas festival, the greatest book festival in the country. thank you for being here. i love that and glad to see that weather hasn't dampened anything in