tv 2023 Miami Book Fair CSPAN November 19, 2023 10:59am-2:59pm EST
11:01 am
good morning, everyone, and welcome to the miami book fair open to the world today. my name is oscar winners, and i am the president for miami-dade college's homestead campus. and today i have the privilege of being your room host. we are grateful to miami dade college family and all of our sponsors, specifically the green family foundation. zibby media, the j.w. marriott, marcie nicklaus children's hospital, and of course, all of the other sponsors, friends of the fair and volunteers who make this book very possible. as we celebrate the 40th anniversary. please consider supporting the miami book fair with a contribution to the next decade. fund. for information you may visit the friends of the fair table or the website at the end of the session. we will have a short q&a session, followed by the author's autographing right outside down the hall. at this time we kindly ask that you silence your cell phones and it is my pleasure to introduce luke russert on his book. look for me there.
11:02 am
grieving my father, finding myself, which will be moderated by danny shapiro. luke's book is an exploration of once place in the world in the face of crushing grief. it chronicles the emotional story of a young man taking charhis life, reexamining his relationship with his parents and finally grieving his larger than life father who died far too young. danny shapiro is the author of 11 books and the host and creator of the hit podcast family secrets. her most recent book, signal fires a novel is a national bestseller and was named a best book of 2022. by time, the washington post, amazon and others. it is my pleasure to introduce both mr. russert and the shapiro. thank you.
11:03 am
so first, as you are probably our aware, just at least visually, priscilla gilman is not here. she took a fall and she'll be fine. but she couldn't get on a plane to miami. so, luke, it's it's you and me, and it's such an honor. i feel the same way. and your book made me cry. you're all here to see danny, susie. your book made me cry in multiple places in the margins as i wrote things like tears and crying and little sad faces, but only in certain places. it's actually a very it's a very hopeful and very inspiring book in so many ways. and and so much about what we how what shapes us and then how we shape ourselves. and i'd like to begin by asking you to talk a little bit about the moment where your lee, your book begins in 2008.
11:04 am
you're with your mother in italy and the phone rings. so i always like to say then on june 12th, 2008, i was a happy go lucky 22 year old recent college grad, only out of college about three weeks. thought i would take a gap year, hunker down and study and go to grad school. i wanted to get a master's degree in international relations, possibly, but i didn't really know exactly what i was going to do at the time. it was i just finished college. let me have a chance to breathe. let me go do some travel and whatnot. and i was in florence, italy, with my mother, and my father actually had been out with us in rome two days prior and had to go home to take meet the press. and so it was the the friday, june 13, i had a father's day weekend and we got the call that, you know, your dad fainted. and i knew immediately he was gone because he didn't faint. he was a guy who worked so incredibly hard, wasn't a napper or anything like that. it was all the engine was constantly moving.
11:05 am
so as soon as i heard that, i knew something was seriously wrong and yes, i write in the book, it's a huge just upheaval right in real time. but then also in the months afterwards. but for me at that age was fear. you are happy go lucky. recent college grad, you know, want to get into reading or national relations. five days later you're giving a eulogy with barack obama and john mccain in the front row and you grow up really quick in that moment. and i think that was something that it took me really years to process it because i was so involved in the idea of i got to keep my father's legacy alive. i have to be strong for mom. i have to be strong for the rest of the family. that i wasn't aware of. the magnitude of what had happened or my own role afterwards. i was just sort of like, this is, you know, this is something i got to do, just like i have to go pick up my dry cleaning. it was sort of how i approached it. it wasn't until later on that i took a deep breath and go, wow, that was quite something, especially for someone who was 22 and lost their best friend.
11:06 am
i think that the the rituals surrounding death are designed in part to keep us moving. yeah, it's i was raised in the jewish faith and it's it's true in judaism and you were raised in the catholic faith and it's true in catholicism that there is this mode you go into and then when that mode involves a famous father who, who, who dies suddenly and the world is, you know, shocked and stunned and you talk a little bit about being in in florence with your mother in that that night before you fly home. and it's kind of the last time that there's going to be any quiet or any intimacy or you know, your phone's not blowing up. you turn your phones off,
11:07 am
there's no i mean, it's actually pretty early for social media. there isn't really a lot of that going on. yeah. and you have this time together, it's fascinating because we were we were aware of that in the moment. and i think part of that was just because the magnitude of the calls that were coming in and then people saying, oh, this is all over tv, etc. and i think my mom and i sort of said, okay, we're about to walk into a completely different, chaotic, crazy, sad world. and we but a lot of people had said to us, oh, that must have been so hard being so far away. and i actually look back at that as it was the greatest blessing because it gave us that night, it gave us that time where as mother and son we were conscious of this is a new relationship and we have to be really strong together and we have to manage what's coming together and let's take a moment to pray on that. let's take a moment to breathe on that, to meditate on that, and ultimately, i'm so thankful
11:08 am
we had that, because if we had been in the crash of washington, have you been around all these, you know, all our friends and family? yes. there's a supportive element to it, but you do get lost in the chaos. as you mentioned, the movement. so to have that stillness and sitting it, i'm very blessed that we had that. and my mom still mentions that a lot. yes. you are so lucky we had that that bond in that time. the first place your book made me cry was is when you return to washington and you walk in to your house and all of your classmates from st albans, the high school that you went to, are there and they you're an only child and they're like brothers to you. i mean, i could get choked up now talking about it. and they just envelop you and and that begins this whirlwind process of, you know, the the wake and the at one point you
11:09 am
say to your mother, there must be something going on. look at these huge lines of people and those huge lines of people were there to pay respects to your to your dad, you know. yeah, i think what you're touching on those two things is, one, it became so real when i saw the expressions of my friends in the family kitchen, and i think up into that point was surreal. and then it becomes very real because you see their emotions and you see how sad they are. but then the wake, the public wake, we drive and you see this long line, thousands of people and, you know, we thought it would be a big story in washington and we knew people from buffalo would come. but there were people from all around america that had flown. and, you know, i think that speaks to how revered my father was, but also the sort of personal connection he was able to put through television in different mediums and his books as well. and for me, i just got so much
11:10 am
positive energy and support from that. and this lady says, well, you know, you want to go out and greet people. you don't have to. you can go out there for ten or 15 minutes. and i, i was on my feet for ten or 12 hours. i think that was the beginning of i was playing the role of comforter in in the least of the getting i was also getting energy from that. so i like to make people feel more comfortable and feel sad. but also i was feeding off of that in the beginning. but yeah, that was something that again, you in the moment, you're not processing, seeing the magnitude of it and you're not processing, for example, wow, this guy in his his son, you know, drove from minnesota. that's a long way, right, to go to a week for someone they had never met. so what does that mean and how is that going to affect you going forward? it's you're you're carrying something there. tell me about writing the eulogy and delivering it and about what happened after. yeah. so my mom is a great writer and
11:11 am
i was sort of looking at her. i go, well, who's going to do the eulogy? and she goes, you. and it was something i obviously wanted to do. i felt the weight of of the moment, but it was somewhere where you don't really know where to start. right. and i went to this apartment that i was living in. that, interestingly enough, was the last conversation i ever had. my father, he was at that apartment setting up my my cable tv. and i went there and there is there's no furniture. there is wi fi and a stool at the at the kitchen counter. and i opened up my college laptop and just to center myself is, you know, dad's eulogy. and then the mark. boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. right. and that was one of these one of these pieces of writing, which was almost an out of body experience in the sense that it was some sort of divine intervention or spiritual being just came about me. and it just started to flow.
11:12 am
and it started to flow and it started to make sense and things came together and my mom was so nervous about that and i didn't show it to her at a time. and she was like, oh my gosh, oh my gosh, oh my gosh. you know? so i was like, it's going to be good. trust me. it's going to be good. i'm going to rise to the occasion and that speech launched me as a more public figure. public facing figure in it is a sort of odd thing, but i've i've come to really look back on that speech with fondness because you when i was doing these interviews for the book, nicolle was and msnbc, she found tape of the eulogy at the kennedy center. and i hadn't watched it for many years. and they now have it in hd. so used to be a blurry. right now it's all in hd. you can really see your expression. and i looked on it in the moments. the only time i ever came close to really choking up on air. and i look at that kid and he's trying so hard and i look back
11:13 am
at that. i go, okay, that kid, my 22 year old self was trying so hard, trying to live up to the moment and did. but it took a lot of years to figure out what that actually meant and what the effect of that would be. and then secondly, what i came to realize also in that moment with that speech is that it brought comfort to a lot of people and let them know things are going to be okay. and that's what i was most proud of, aside from, you know, tv executives being like, you're good on camera. you can speak publicly, we need more young people, etc., etc. so the idea that it brought people comfortable, the most important thing and lastly, i'll say on that, my happiest moment in this book tour is i was in new jersey in an english teacher, a seventh grade english teacher came in line and she goes, i teach my students like how to write a eulogy by years. and i go, oh, and she showed me the worksheet and like, this is how you do it. and she goes, you can't just if
11:14 am
you were doing this and no, i see now i'm just writing it. but that was really neat. well, and delivering it to i mean, i kept on reminding myself of how young you were. yeah. and, you know, just out of college and. and you're like, in the front rows of the the chapel, there were, you know, dignity, trees, former presidents. you know, barack obama, you know, people from all over the world and you write that you needed to at a certain point, look past them and not be delivering the eulogy to this kind of world of eminence. but like, look for the look for the friendly faces. yeah, i looked in the back and i saw my friends. yeah. and i knew that was going to carry me. interestingly enough, when you have an audience of that magnitude, i think politicians are sort of naturally this way because they're very competitive people. they're very like engaged,
11:15 am
competitive people. and so you look out of the audience, you feel the judgment in a way not not like negative judgment, but the idea very well, what are you going to do with this speech? because i give speeches for a living, right. that was a sort of energy i was feeling from them. and i was like, okay, that's not a good energy to have right now. let me look back to the people i'm closest to and talk to them. and that worked out well. so then within a day you were being pursued by by networks because i mean, for many reasons, you you nailed the eulogy and you have this presence and you start receiving these offers and that wasn't the route that you were planning on going. and there's and you didn't you didn't accept offers right away. you i think it created a bit of a inner crisis for you of like what what what do i do now.
11:16 am
yeah. and and then you're you do accept a job as youth. youth correspondent, special youth correspondent probably the first invented for this very occasion. well yeah it was also an election where young people were coming out in droves. it had been seen a long time. so i think there is this idea of, all right, let's take the the notoriety of the last name. let's take someone who's launched themselves, you know, front center and done well on television and see what comes of it. i was i wasn't naive. i knew nepotism charges would be would come and i knew things would be very intense at times, especially in that regard. but i think for me, i kind of looked around, go, okay, this is a one year contract, one year opportunity. if it's you know, if it doesn't work out, i still i'm only going to be 23 or 24. i have plenty of time. and i felt that i was providing a service, whether it was keeping my father's legacy alive, but also trying to bring
11:17 am
attention to important issues that affected the youth vote. and i ultimately was just sort of i don't want to be by myself in in misery. give me something to work on that's difficult to to sort of give me an idea of, all right, this is something you can channel your energy with and focus your energies on. and there is both good and bad to that. and then after that initial year, you move over to the capital and to capitol hill and you begin to work behind the scenes producing. yes. so what ended up happening was the election occurs and then the inauguration happens and suddenly the special youth correspondent there's not a lot of work left. and the one thing that i've always been a big believer in, you know, my grandfather was a garbage man in south buffalo. my dad worked in. he retired all his sick days.
11:18 am
my dad was the hardest worker ever met. my mom as well. the last thing i want to do be sitting around collecting a paycheck and not doing enough. so i go to the middle. look, you're short staffed on capitol hill. let me go there and just be an off air reporter producer, just sort of information gathering. last name, open up some doors. i love congress. i love what i know. washington just let me go up there and be of service. and it was that where i would literally go to house subcommittee meetings, go into the late evening and report on them and i loved it because it was the minutia of government that doesn't get a lot of coverage, but it's very influential. you know, a lot of times the networks will be the horse race, who's up, who's down, you know, is this bill going to pass? but will, don't you don't know what's in the bill. and by learning how to do that for those for those early months on the hill, it really shifted me from, i think, someone who was kind of carrying the legacy
11:19 am
torch to i want to be as serious. reporter and really work on this craft. i have. it's in my blood from my parents, but i really want to make my own name on there in congress was a great place to do it. and during that period of time where did you store your grief about your dad? you stored in? nora? and i think one of the things that i didn't realize was a lot of anxiety is attributed to the day to day job. am i going to make this deadline? am i going to see something stupid on television? i make a fool of myself in front of this member of congress, etc. i never really realized that so much of the weight that i was feeling came from his loss. i just assume that was the beyond the pressure i put on myself to succeed. and i realized that for many years i had just assumed that the grief was actually part of the day to day, when in fact it was something else. it was something that was very much a weight that i didn't want
11:20 am
to explore because if i had to explore, it meant that the reality was true, that he was really gone and it was easier to ignore that. but that that wears on you because there's moments where, you know, i would walk in the capital and feel this massive sense of anxiety and i would go, that's because of this project that i have to do or this deadline that i have now that you're you're missing your dad right now. yeah. yeah. they don't really tell you that about grief, but it yeah, it, it, it masquerades as anxiety and panic and so panics are very good words. yes. so you're you're working this job that you love, but also you're very stressed out and more than stressed out. and then you write in the book that one day john boehner, the former speaker, says to you, you
11:21 am
know, like russert, you know, in my office. so it was a chance encounter walking in the capitol. and i see him and i had covered him pretty aggressively. and this was, believe it or not, when the tea party was they were coming after boehner and they're still coming after speaker now. and i thought he was bad about coverage and believe it or not, politicians do get mad about coverage and they go to journalists and curse at them and shoot him out. so, yeah, okay, he's going to dress me down for something. and he goes, come to my office. and so i go there and i walk in. it's about noon on wednesday. he's smoking a camel cigaret with a big glass and hello and reading golf digest. and i go, speaker boehner and he asked me a question is what are you doing here? and i said, well, you're the speaker of the house. you invited me to your office. i obviously going to go and he goes, no, no, no. what are you doing here on capitol hill? you can do this job in your sleep. you've been up here almost seven years. i know people that come up here ten, 20, 30, 40, 50 years.
11:22 am
they never do anything else. they don't know anything about the country. they don't ever leave the country. they kind of become these washington blobs. i think you'd be well-served to go out and see the world or do something different away from this. and what was remarkable about that is i had this voice in my head that said, you know, who are you beyond this job? who are you beyond this name? who what is your own identity? because you were kind of thrust into this and you do it. but why? but i like to i didn't like to think about that because that's very uncomfortable. then you look inside ego. am i a fraud? is this really who i am? i something different. but he asked that question and it was almost a jesuit priest question what are you doing here? and he was the perfect messenger because he had a similar upbringing to my father, working class catholic family first members of their family to go to college. they paid their way through college. he was a janitor to pay his way through xavier. so the messenger was someone that is hey, it's okay. like you've proven, you've
11:23 am
proved to yourself that you can do this. people know that you're good. it's okay to take some time for yourself. it's not going to disrupt the flow of hard work. you're not going to be looked upon poorly for it. and after that conversation, i went outside and i said, okay, let me start to to think about this. and perhaps leave this gilded path. so one of the things that you began to do was you would start searching on google maps. yeah, different places around the world. was that which came first? was was it this sense of, oh, i know what i need to do, i need to travel, i need to travel solo, or was it like, what was the i just it was one of these things where you're on this trajectory and i was at that point mature enough to understand how fortunate i was,
11:24 am
privileged i was, but also when you work in network news, the people around you are so hungry, right? a lot of them had toiled in local news markets. they've absolutely given every single thing they have to the job. and you start to do that as well because you want to honor, you know, the job. you want to honor your colleagues or whatnot. but i would do things that got a lot of accolades and i would do things well and i would be congratulate me. but i felt empty, like i hope you broke this story. you were on air for 10 hours during this big vote. you mean you're you're you're living the dream. and i was like, yeah, i'd rather go back to my office and go down the street to jakarta and google maps. why is that? and i think that was the feeling of being unfulfilled. but it's hard to do that because you don't you don't want to disappoint people. you don't want to disappoint your family, your friends. you want to disappoint yourself. and a lot of times i think you just sort of chalk it up to, oh, these are normal anxieties that people have, right? ever. but there's something i
11:25 am
realized, wow, you just did this this big vote, you know, gun control vote. and you're searching jakarta on google map. why is that? and i think when i after the boehner conversation, i was more comfortable exploring that. so your first solo trip and i and i should say, for those of you who haven't read luke's memoir yet, is that the the bulk of it really is is is the travel and what the travel did for you in terms of life lessons, in terms of coming to understand yourself in a real reckoning, not not a not an a messy one, a messy reckoning that took that took years. the first trip was a solo trip to maine, and you have an encounter with a timber truck that seems to have been as pivotal as your encounter with boehner. so first of all, travel, obviously, i love john steinbeck, travels with charlie.
11:26 am
i'm going to do that. so i have my dog. he's this pug. his name is chamberlain. he's actually named after the union civil war hero, joshua chamberlain, who's from maine, the guy who won gettysburg and leaves the university the gettysburg address today, by the way. so i go all right, i'm going to drive around maine and sort of see what's out there. and i was in the truck that my father had given me when i was in high school. so that was intentional. it's yeah, i'm solo traveling, but i got my dog there and i have the truck that my dad gave me. so there's still a sort of protective cocoon, if you will, around me. and i'm driving in this working forest and they have this big sign that says, you know, this is a working forest. there really trucks loaded up with timber trees if they come down the road, you know, it's irresponsible. you get home and i'm driving along and this is so beautiful. i'm deep in the woods. there's no cell phone reception. there's nothing. just the dog, the truck and me. and this big timber truck comes
11:27 am
kind out and it's just this cloud of dust and i realized i didn't have enough time necessarily to get out of the way. no where the edge of the road was. it could go over. and so i just took took a leap of faith, if you will, and literally and swerved to the right. and the truck breaks and we go and it stops and we stopped maybe about a foot from going over, which would have been really bad. but in that moment it was exhilarating. i felt oddly, very alive and it is a month before the election. and i go, oh my gosh, i don't want to be in the mix of trump versus hillary right now. i want to be in this working forest in maine and almost dying in the truck. and i think that started an internal sort of exploration with me as you got to figure out why this you feel this way and feed this because it's healthy for you. so that begins this very it
11:28 am
struck me as a deliberate journey from country to country, continent to continent. so i listed them some of them patagonia, buenos aires, paraguay, bolivia, easter island, new zealand, cambodia, vietnam, japan, ephesus. um. senegal. zimbabwe. rwanda and the middle east, to name just a few. you're mother joins you on some of these trips. you have thanksgiving together in business and in buenos aires. what would you say was the unifying. thread, if you will, for like, what's what's next? you know, we what's the next what's the next experience?
11:29 am
and also, you were keeping a journal. mm you were not keeping a journal in order to write a book that was not wasn't that was not in your mind. but this kind of inner exploration was, was driving you. and it seems like it was animated by your grief about about your father. and also this search for your own true identity and and also, i want to make sure that i say this about your book. you so grapple with your your father's history and who he was at the age of 32 and 34. and his accomplishments and the fact that he was the son of a sanitation worker and that he put himself through college and he put himself through law school, and that you had things easier and had a lot of access. and you're very you really interrogate that on the page and with yourself.
11:30 am
and it's it's a gift and it's a burden. yeah. i think what you're touching on is this deep sense of inadequacy, which is something that had always been around me when right after my father passed, because i go, i'll never be as talented as he was. and, you know, one of the things that was very difficult that i didn't process early on was so many people would see, you know, they would say in a well-meaning manner of you're going to be just like your dad. you know, you got to be i'd be like your dad be as good as your dad. and at some point you realize, like, you know, these are the first town hall of famer. he's really good. you're not going to grow up to be michael jordan, right? and you get to that point for me, though, with the actual travel is i wanted to go see who i was in answer to the question of who i was in dependent of my last name, the bubble, the privileged bubble i grew up in,
11:31 am
in washington, the world apart. and so that was the original impetus for the journey, because travel teaches you to become comfortable in uncertainty. so when you go to some small village in southeast asia where no one's ever watched msnbc, no one knows your last name is you go back to the sort of stripped down basics of i need food and shelter, right? and everything else is an experience. and i'm going to see how people live and really what humanity is about. so that was really i love that. i was so curious to see how the rest of the world lived. i was so curious to sort of see what got through from this american existence that i had lived my entire life. my father was very patriarch -- in a good in the good sense of the word. and i had always sort of just that was my world and my mother, who was a peace corps volunteer in her young in her twenties in colombia, had always said, you know, there is a world beyond this americana that you live it, that your dad boasts so much for joyfully. and i had always been like, okay, mom, you know, thanks. and she was the one who
11:32 am
encouraged me to travel. and once i started to sort of see, wow, we are, you know, the superpower, but it's still very small in terms of what actually gets through and what matters. i became very curious, so i wanted to learn more about the world, but then also myself. what i didn't realize until i started to review the journals was there was two parallel paths going at the same time. one is this journey of self-discovery. the other one's a grief journey and it's only in going through the journals and having these moments where i'm in new zealand and it's this beautiful day and i'm just start bawling because i missed my father. you know, i'm in iceland and i start by because i miss my father or i think about, oh, dad will be so mad at me right now that i'm in zimbabwe during a coup. like this is just the biggest. you know, we come from a family of irish civil servants. don't rock the boat. when you go outside, you know, what's your comfort zone is bad. things happen right?
11:33 am
and it's not until i think, you know, few years into like, oh man, what an effect this is still having on me. ten years after he's gone and you're having this on around the world, by the way. around the world. and this this dialog with him. yeah, all the time. and and seeing signs from him, rainbows was his favorite song was something over the rainbow? yeah. and you know, there are these and that's part of a grief journey is that there are these regular moments of connection. yeah. a feeling of he's with me i want to get to because we're going to open it up to questions in a minute or two. but i want to get to how you arrived at writing the book, because there is a point that you write about in the book where your mother, who was very, very supportive of you're doing all of this travel at a certain point was like, it's enough. yeah, time to time to get back to work, time to time to figure out the next step and you
11:34 am
weren't ready to do that. actually, you still had more. you had more trips and you you had something at a certain poit happened that made you turn to those journals and think. so i think there's two things there. one, there is that maternal instinct, which is that, you know, your son is he did a good thing in the beginning, but now there's a little bit of a struggle. i think she could see internally that i wasn't being the best version of myself, but i was sort of steadfast to this ability that i had to keep searching like the clarity would come in the next country. enlightenment would come somewhere. just keep searching, keep doing, keep moving. right? if you slow down, your world is over. and then the second part of that is, i think, you know, this freedom that i had sort because i felt like i had been on this charted course my entire life was so great in the beginning, but it ends up becoming a little bit of a noose. and what i mean by that is, that
11:35 am
you can hang yourself with too much of this freedom. you can be not engaged in in the proper way. and what i mean by that is, what are you actually doing? are you just doing are you going to this next country just for the sake of counting another country? are you participating just as a form of escapism? and i think my mom noticed that and said, look, you've had this incredible privilege to go on a trip like this. you really got to do something with it. whether it's become a better version of yourself or maybe you shared publicly and it was an intense conversation to have because i felt a little bit under assault, but it was also one that sort of inspired me to go, okay, what is in here and how can it be of service? and i started to read the journals, which was incredibly hard at points because you sort of you start to see the trajectory of where i was going in so much uncertainty in
11:36 am
ultimately, though, what i came away with was, okay, i want to do something. so if there is a kid out there like me, they'll feel a little bit less loss and i had a conversation with a friend of mine who's a writer, and they said, well, what would you hope to get out of a book? and i go, honestly, if this thing ends up in the bargain book bin in exxon station, i care. so long as one kid read it and walked away feeling a little less loss and feeling a little bit more clear about a grief journey and a journey about self-discovery. what i wasn't expecting and this book has been incredible, is a multi-week new york times best seller. i'm so fortunate the audience for that. this book, i thought, would be more my generation would be affected. it has been the boomer generation. it's been the most affected i've gotten letters from people in their sixties and seventies. it is even nineties that have said this book helped me process the loss of my parent or my spouse or whatnot, and i was not
11:37 am
expecting that. and that's been incredibly powerful. so i'm very i did it. but that's something that i take very seriously. i mean, i read every note that comes through and i think it speaks to how grief is still very taboo in our society. it's something that no one has a formula how to do to deal with it. and so when you can read about somebody else's shared experience, you begin to look internally a little bit. so that's been really gratifying. so my last question to you, we open it up to for a couple of questions is you write in the book about the writing of the book and you write the writing is humbling when you write there's no cloak, which i certainly relate to and understand and believe. i guess what i want to ask is by writing this book, you made
11:38 am
meaning. you know, it's the making of meaning out of a very sad thing that happened. the early premature loss of your dad in all those letters from everyone from, you know, gen z to. do you find that that connection in that shared experience is something that is healing i guess in some way of your grief in incredibly healing and it's something where, you know, i'll have moments where i will read these letters and they're very heavy and i have to take a moment and i have to take a pause and i go, man, this is this is going to have an effect on me. i'm going to think about this for the rest of the day. but the flipside about that is i go, this really serves a purpose. and if you're the person that was able to get somebody to feel better about their own grief journey or their own experience and you've done a good deed in
11:39 am
any, you know, emotions that arise from that. you can handle it. you'll be okay. i think most interesting to me in terms of the healing component, it is you when you try to process grief. a lot of times they say, you know, you might never move on, but you move forward. i think there's a lot of truth to that. but now when i speak publicly and people will ask, is there some sort of magic secret or something like that, that it's just going to make me feel better and i go, well, no, because it takes a long time and it's different for everybody. but what i have come to realize is that if you had that opportunity to speak with your lost loved one, and i've did this with my own father and a meditative way is they would not want you to be sad when their name comes up. they wouldn't want you to be angry when their name comes up. they would want you to be happy. i think most of our lost loved ones would never want their loss
11:40 am
to affect us in such a way that we were not able to progress forward in our own lives. i wish i knew that when i was 23. it takes a long time to get there, but people say, well, you know, what are you doing? what about this? like, well, i'm a work in progress. but when it comes to losing my father very much in a place of peace and that was a journey to get there. but that's what i carry ways that they'd want you to be happy. it's a beautiful place to stop and i want to see if anybody has questions. we might have time for a couple. so when you were a reporter, what kind of inner dialog did you with your dad? in other words, you're in a situation. it's a good question. in in this situation. my dad would do this and i really want to do this. or my dad used to do these things. at this time, i'm not going to do that at all or i'm going to do something else. it's a great question. i think, you know, i had a photo of a photo of him on my desk.
11:41 am
it was a photo of him and tom brokaw, and it's a photo of them in this like very engaged discussion. it was taken candidly. and i would always sort of think about what they were saying. right. and it gets to that dialog. i think what the influence my father had in that respect was he was very prepared all the time. so he would never go into an interview unprepared. and if a politician came into the interview unprepared, he took offense to that because he thought that you were waltzing in and not working. and i think that ethos went all the way back to my grandfather being sanitation worker or my great grandfather working for the buffalo water company. always pulling in overtime, never taking your sick days. so for me that was a mentality that came through with dad and reporting, which is ahead of this press conference. did i do enough preparation and ahead of this interview that i do enough preparation? am i living up to the level of work that this craft takes in
11:42 am
respecting it? so that's really where i felt his guidance the most. thankfully, my mom is also a writer and she works very hard, but she's a little bit more she obviously has a little bit more fun with it. so she would remind me that, you know, there's a lot of really interesting components to the job. and don't forget to live in the moment a little bit and enjoy idea of of really being prepared is the one that i carried with me all the time. and to also know who you're reporting for, i think one of the most dangerous things, especially in washington, is you can be consumed by the bubble and you forget that the reason you're there is so that the guy who just worked a double shift or the teacher this worked a double shift is coming home and watching the news is informed about their democracy. it's not about, you know, how many likes you got on twitter or something. it's about did that story cut through and educate the the population? yes, ma'am. can you hear me? yeah. there you go.
11:43 am
oh, i'm thinking that all of us in this room and in this world experience grief. yeah. it's like you go through life, you don't think about it, but you love. you're going to lose. and the universality of this experience, you know, do we love them more while they're alive? i mean, what do we do when we lose a loved one? it's so hard, right? and think about the question you just posed. it is something that you can be any race, any religion, any creed, any orientation, any socioeconomic background. and there's no answer. there's no concrete answer. and one of the stories that i about a friend of mine is is a guy named wright thompson. he's an incredible writer, mainly does sportswriting and profiles. and he did a profile about michael jordan.
11:44 am
and what can you write about michael jordan that isn't already known? michael jordan's the greatest basketball player of all time on the greatest athletes of all time, one of the most influential people of the last 100 years in so many different capacities. and wright thompson wrote, here is michael jordan, the fiercest competitor we know the guy who has everything in the world, and michael jordan falls asleep watching western movies because he watched westerns with his dad and he misses his dad. so think about that. right? so here's someone who, by every we see, is the greatest success, right? transfer national figure icon. at the end of the day, he's a little kid missing his dad and wants to watch western movies. so that's the effect that our loved ones have on us. and it's it's a journey to get there. and i think, you know, you you've come to a place of work
11:45 am
and i find peace on that journey. and for michael jordan and watching western movies before he goes to bed luc, thank you so much. we're all touched by what you say. thank you so much for doing my job. this track of time. so with that, i want to thank mr. russell and mr. pirro for the wonderful conversation. and you if you have further questions, feel free to join them at the autographing session on the outside. thank you, sir. thank you so much. thank you, danny. really well done.
11:47 am
so the plot, the plot is a wonderful little story about this cub. his name is is lucas. and he and his younger sisters are all playing in the woods. and this young little little sister, she gets a cut and a very poisonous plant and knows that the only way to save a life now is get this, a certain flower that's way up on top of a mountain. he doesn't have any time to go back to get his father because he's got an act right now. so he's got to get past his fears kind of capacity, obstacles now in front of me. he's got to rely on all the things his father was teaching him about a boy just being a boy and growing into a man. so he goes through all these different things that just sort of fighting his way through there and getting his courage up and finding his own strength and
11:48 am
able to get up there to get the flower and get back down to save his little sister before she before she dies. so it's a wonderful story, really, about just, you know, taking control of your life in such occasions that you probably never thought you'd have to face and the whole the whole idea of this book is really you know, i know they've got this whole thing emasculating men. and we've been doing it for decades. but no, no more than we have over the last five years, which has gotten crazy. and this book is really about celebrating masculinity. there's nothing wrong with a boy being a boy and a girl being a girl and is that why you wrote the book? because of supposed de masculine eating of men, sir. i mean, you see movies all the time. i mean, it's crazy what's going on. i mean, i haven't barbie. i know it's a big hit worldwide, $1,000,000,000 and more, but everybody inside said, oh, yeah, they pretty much tell women they don't need men. they make men look like they're a bunch of wimps and can't do anything. and women are far superior and all this. and you see that in action movies now, too, where the woman
11:49 am
is one has got to come and save the day in diana jones comes to mind. i mean, they put him sort of in the in the back room and they have this woman be the big the big guy action hero of that thing. so this has been playing out over and over again. you know, growing up as a kid, i remember all these sitcoms around, even sitcoms around. now the guy is always kind of the one that the button ebola jokes, he's kind of a dumpy dad, the mom's kind of hog. the kids are teenagers and they all just pick on dad to make dad look horrible and and this is what kids are growing up with. they're saying that the father is not that important for the family, which is quite sad to me. so to me, you know, you eliminate the patriarchy and i think you eliminate the human race and the bible teaches, you know, honor thy father. but sitcoms don't do that. it's a totally opposite way around. and television and movies have been doing it for a very, very long time now. and i think that we got to get to a place where enough is enough and just start standing up for to let kids be kids and let them grow up to decide what they want to be in their lives when they become adults. now, you've written a couple of adult titles, true strength,
11:50 am
true. how was it different writing a children's book? i think i had a lot more help on this one, which is good. i mean, brave books is amazing what they do. people go to read books and it's amazing what they're able to get out there with the number of books they've been doing and people can go join them or join them right now and they go to books and they can sign up for the freedom island book club or get my book for free. and then they get a new book every month and they really cater to like the four year old and 12 year old crowd. and there's just a number of books that are great for all kids of all ages in that group and both boys and girls. and i just wanted to be they came to me because they hear me speak a lot. and i said, you know, i'm tired of the sheep in this country. i'm tired of people saying there's a silent majority. well, we need the lions to wake up and get out there. and the fact that i mentioned lions all the time, i know fans. i think that's when braveheart came to me and said, let's do something about masculinity. and was called linwood. and i said, sounds good to me. now, kevin sorbo have changed since you are hercules in the
11:51 am
1990s. as far as society and how we treat men and women. yeah, i mean i think it's been changing for decades. i think the sixties was obviously a big pivotal decade with the vietnam war. the, you know, the feminist movement and the civil rights, the hippies and the whole the, the really the explosion of rock and roll music, which was all good and bad. and there's all those messages and all those things. so but it's definitely, i think, just gotten worse with a lot of the political leaders we've had through the last the last 15 to 20 years. and you just see that you see a change in this country. you see you're aware of this. i mean, there's so much anger out there, so much hate. there's so much divisiveness. people just want to attack people all the time. it's it's interesting to me that i don't harbor that kind of anger and hatred to people that have a different point of view politically in me or that are atheists or agnostics. i'm a christian. i don't know, maybe i don't wear that on my sleep enough. i don't know. but i do a lot of family movies and faith movies. i know that's out there so i see the attack on that all the time. i see the way every time you get
11:52 am
a pastor in a movie or a conservative, they're portrayed as the goofballs and the idiots and the evil people, which is quite interesting to me when i find there's plenty of evil on both sides of the political aisle. kevin sorbo you mentioned brave books is your publisher. they also are kirk cameron's publishers a lot of news about his being banned from libraries. are you planning a book tour? i believe or not. i'm going to be reading in a public school and an elementary school in new jersey. so i think that's going to be interesting stuff to see what happens when i think pretty much a lot of the liberal teachers will be glaring at me just talking about letting boys be boys. i don't know why why that's such a big deal. but i know kirk, we were neighbors for many years when i lived in california and the attack he had, i thought was just very strange to me. i said, well, wait a minute, you're okay with drag queens reading in the public, but not kirk cameron, like i said, where is this country going? i mean, it just doesn't make any sense to me. well, speaking of which, should drag queen reading hours be
11:53 am
banned, in your view, from public libraries? and oh, they should be banned. and i think parents have a right to decision if they want to bring their kids to that. you know, from my point of view, i honestly don't understand it and i don't know why it's become a thing. but drag queens, we think reading and there's libraries, but i'm a live and let live kind of guy. i don't people how they should live their lives. i'm just tired of so many people in the press, in the media and movies and television telling me how i'm supposed to live my life. you know, i've i've worked around gay people all my life in hollywood 40 years. you're not going to find one out there that says i was horrible to them because i'm not. i treat everybody the same and everybody equally. and to me, it's like, let's let's make a movie together in the same industry. let's have a good time. so i don't like i said, i don't harbor that sort of anger. i mean, why not? they can read if they want to read in there. it's really up to the parents. they want to bring their kids to that. what about book bans? what do you think about banning books from public libraries? well, i there's i don't want to ban banned books, but i do want to ban books out of the sexual
11:54 am
nature that you're reading. a third graders because that doesn't make any sense to me. let kids grow up. you don't have to teach them now how to have sex as a nine year old. let them grow the way we've grown up for centuries and let us let's let kids find out the old fashioned way, hopefully, maybe through their parents doing the birds and the bees. you know, my dad was a biologist, so for the five kids, my family was kind of easy listen to my dad. but let kids grow up and sort of discover life the way they normally do to the to their kids, to their fellow friends. but, you know, hopefully get strong parents that are leading them on an honorable road that's that's not going to be detrimental to them. but let them decide where they want to be like i said before, when they get older and become adults, the new president of the american library association, emily dobriansky, is a self described marxist --. and here is a here is a quote in the washington times from her. she says that every reader has a right to decide for themselves
11:55 am
what they read, and that includes children. well, i don't think children are deciding to look at a book that has to deal with -- and intercourse. i think those are being pushed on by teachers in the third grade, which is crazy to me. it's interesting, the whole marxist thing. i'm are people even aware truly what communism is all about and what marxist has done and what all they've got to do is look at the history of countries that are going through that. venezuela is the most recent one that has just gone through such a huge change in the last 30 years with the governments that have come in there. i mean, how many people have been escaping that country and how many people want to get get away from that the most prosperous country in the southern hemisphere, 30 years ago now it's one of the most poorest and the people are just flooding out of that country. so to me, i'm hard pressed to show where communism is a good thing because all it does is it's stripped away from hope and pride and self-esteem and motivation that makes people lazy to get to a point that, oh, well, i'm going to give up.
11:56 am
and i think that's the biggest killer america, let alone the world. thing is apathy right now, because people at the government, our government just keeps it going each a little bit more and more. and we're losing freedom of speech left and right. i mean, people are getting banned, getting arrested. no country have freedom of speech. why? i have a different opinion. you you can have a different opinion than me. i'm okay with that. that's what freedom of speech is all about. and that's the reason we have a constitution politicians don't want to pay attention to anymore. kevin sorbo, you talked about and write about the fact that you a victim of cancel culture in your view several years ago. what happened? my manager and agent over a decade ago called me in and said, because you're you know, when you're posting on facebook, you know your christian views and and i look, the thing i post on facebook, i put a lot of sarcasm and and truth. sarcastic truth is what i do. people are still follow on twitter chase storms. i do very funny things. i mean, one of the i made a joke on one. i said, i need i need more conspiracy theories because all mine kept coming true. and that's why facebook took me down. so. my age imagines that we can't
11:57 am
work it anymore. and i find that quite interesting because i, in an industry that always comes for tolerance, you know, if there's attack when they have gays in a movie or they have, you know, a certain opinion political movie, some people get very upset. i don't get upset about that to me. but. but why do they get upset if i have a different point of view? a negative. this post they scream for talents and freedom of speech. but let's face it, the hypocrisy in the world is so blatant, obvious right now. and you know, freedom of speech is a one way street in hollywood, which is terrible that has that your acting career. i know i continued. it is affecting me in terms of getting things in hollywood, getting into, you know, they're not going to call me in anymore or any more cable or certainly for network television just because i have a different point of view. but i got there and i storm several studios. scott please go to circle studios dot com. a lot of things coming down the pipe and i've got four movies that are in post-production. i've got a wonderful movie opening at the end of october. there's the poster for it right there. it's called miracle east texas. it's a wonderful family movie.
11:58 am
pg rated opens october. 29th. go to service studios dot com, get your tickets right now. and so i'm staying very busy since they booted me out and shot over 50 movies so they're just not on the mainstream of hollywood. i'm not going to get $100 million advertising budget behind this, but i do movies that hollywood used to do. i do movies that have love and hope and redemption and faith and laughter and things like that. hollywood wants to push anger and violence and sex. well, i'm doing the opposite. of what. book tv's live coverage of the miami book fair continues now.
12:00 pm
good afternoon, everyone. welcome. such an honor to have you all here today. my name is oscar lunas, and i am the president for miami-dade college's homestead campus. and i have the privilege of being a room host for today. that means timekeeper and interrupter of all good things. i am grateful to miami-dade college family as well as our sponsors, specifically the family foundation. zibby media, the j.w. marriott, marcie nicholas children's hospital, and all of the other sponsors, friends of the fair and all the volunteers that make the book fair possible. as we celebrate our 40th anniversary. please consider supporting the miami book fair with a contribution to our next decade fund. for more information, you may visit the friends of the fair table or our website at the end of the session.
12:01 pm
we will have time for a q&a about 10 minutes, followed by authors autographing outside. at this time, we kindly request you silence your cell phones. and now it is my pleasure to introduce the two authors and the moderator of today's session. jonathan, i is is sorry. king elife is his first major biography of the civil rights icon, the reverend martin luther king in decades and the first to include recently declassified fbi files. in it, mr. ike offers an intimate view of king as a courageous, deep thinker and often emotionally troubled human being who demanded peaceful protests but was rarely at peace himself. laura meckler, whose dream town shaken heights and the quest for racial equity, is an intimate examination of the ideals and realities of racial integration. laura meckler tells the story of a day decades long pursuit in shaker heights, ohio, to become a national model for housing
12:02 pm
integration and uncovers the roadblocks that have threatened progress in housing and education and in the promise of a shared community. and lastly, but not least, jacob ivey, our moderator, is an associate professor of history at florida memorial university. south florida's only hbcu. he's the author of policing race and the formation of 19th century british colonial natal. ivey is also working on a history of anti-apartheid movements in florida in the 1980s, tentatively titled from sun city to the sunshine state, florida and the anti-apartheid movement. please join me in welcoming our authors and our moderator. thank you. for thank you for coming. thank you. thank you. thank you for that introduction.
12:03 pm
and welcome to the miami book fair. so we'll just get started on that front. so to begin with, i've got a couple of questions for each author and then we'll transfer to our q&a for the audience as a whole. but jonathan, i just want to start with you say from the very onset of the book that your work seeks to recover the real man from the great mist of hagiography, yet this is really one of the first major biographies. king since caro's bearing the cross in 1986. so i start by asking you why has it been so long since we've had such an extensive biography of king? and what new information is really revealed in this volume? well, thanks. i can't really say why no one else wrote a king book since 1986, there were many books about king, but not a big fat biography, not a soup to nuts, cradle to grave kind of thing. and i thought it was so important because, first of all, in that time, 1986, which is
12:04 pm
also roughly when king became a national holiday and then went on to become a national monument and a postage stamp, a hallmark card, everything else, we've turned him into this almost mythological figure and we've chosen to embrace the parts of the story that make us the most comfortable. and in the process of doing that, we've lost sight of how radical he was. we've lost sight of the fact that he was human, that he suffered, that he had doubts that by the end of his life, 65% of americans disapprove of his tactics and i wanted to write a book that would restore some of his humanity, but also restore some of his true radical and the real show, the real courage that this man had to have, because by the end, he was not popular. and yet he continued to double down on his true beliefs and i was helped by the fact that there were still hundreds of people alive who knew king and knew him well, including some of his closest friends who i with all of whom i were able i was able to interview pre-covid and
12:05 pm
interview them in person and then keep in touch over the phone during covid, but also thousands of pages of new documents, including fbi documents, including the sclc. he had a private archivist, an official archivist whose papers were at the schomburg library in harlem in the boxes had never been opened. i found in published autobiography of martin luther king senior. i found tapes that coretta made right after her husband died. so that one of the i'm lucky that nobody else had done this since 1986 because there was just unbelievable amounts of new material to work with that made my job well, it made it a lot easier, but it also made it take a lot longer. yeah, and it is just amazing the new stories where if you've just read, you know, the traditional narrative associated. king there are so many new tidbits of information that are absolutely fascinating and one that i think will be revelatory for even people who think they know. king on this front. and so i want to ask you, obviously, jonathan's talking
12:06 pm
about someone who we all know, and it's an individual who is, you know, this is the saint of americana on these instances. but, you know, we're as job as attempting to show king with all of his flaws, you're writing about this place called shaker heights, and you specifically call this place far from perfect. and i just want to understand why. look at an imperfect town. you know, what did you feel needed to be told about this community, this this dream of racial integration. well, thank you. thank you for the question thanks, everybody, for being here. shaker heights is my hometown. that's where i grew up. it's a suburb of cleveland, and it's a place that i grew up with an incredible amount of pride of being from. shaker had a long and rich history of racial integration, first in housing, and then in schools. it was something we all knew about growing up and felt like i remember sort of feeling a sort of glow that came with it. this idea that, well, you know, the rest of america, you may have problems with race, but,
12:07 pm
you know, we've we've got this figured out here. of course, that was never, never fully true. but at the same time, it is a place that has in a sort of a nation full of places that hasn't really tried very hard to be in shared community, has over decades done just that. in fact, the the one nice connection here in this panel is, i mean, the title of the book, which is dream town, stems initially from an article and published in 1963 in cosmopolitan magazine, which wrote about shaker heights because it was at that the wealthiest city in america. and it describes it as an american dream town come true. the idea they were talking about suburban opulence, but at the same time, shaker was also trying to fulfill dr. king's dream and trying to be a place where people were seeing each other one another for the content of their character, if you will. and in many people, specific inspired by dr. king and also more generally inspired and
12:08 pm
during those years. so could shaker heights essentially be be both dreams? could it be a place of a suburb, a suburb where you have the best of everything in the excellent schools and a place people aspire to be in, and also a place that is moving towards racial equity? so you said, yes, imperfect. and i think that that's of what the story is, is that i think sometimes when we think about stories about race or any kind of difficult problems, we tend to read about places, success stories like look at this, this is this look at this program, look at this idea, look at this place. they've done such a great or look at this failure. but in fact, most of life is exists in a messy middle in between. and this is a portrait of what it looks like when you try so a lot of backlash, especially in schools, to the idea of racial equity. and i don't know if you've heard anything about that in florida, maybe once or twice.
12:09 pm
oh, governor jackson, to say i didn't see you back there. no. and there is a lot of pushback to it and but i don't think there is as much of what the it actually is like. what is it when you are actually pursuing a racial equity agenda in the schools. and i think some people will read this and say yep, that's what i thought it was. and i'm against that. and some people might read it and say, we need more of that. and other people might say, i just i didn't realize that's what it was. but what one thing you will come away from this is that this hard work and you know, in some ways the work that well, no none of it was easy. the initially working through housing trying to find a way to have integrated neighborhoods and then integrated school buildings and then finally integrated school classrooms so that can i could absolutely. one of the things i loved about your book is that it really captures this moment and we see it really vividly. in 1963, we see it almost to the
12:10 pm
day after the martin luther king speech when he talks about his dream and the nation is watching this. it's really the first time that americans seen a peaceful protest because all they've been seeing on their tvs for the months and years before is strife, is police hoses and police dogs attacking nonviolent protesters. and here's this moment of harmony. here's this moment of hope. here's what this country could be. and it inspires people like the folks in shaker heights, inspires people. i interviewed people for this book who. one man who was married to a black woman and didn't wear a wedding ring because he didn't know if he could handle the pressure of being. but the day after the march on washington, he put on his wedding ring, took a picture of his wife and put it on his desk. factory started to try out integration. this was a moment of real opportunity. and yet we also saw this incredible backlash because you have the bombing, the 16th street church in birmingham have the fbi the day the march on washington, the fbi issues a
12:11 pm
memo sends it to j. edgar that says, given king's speech, we must now consider him the most dangerous man in america when it comes to race. and they begin to ramp up their surveillance and attempts to disrupt his activities. so your book captures that backlash as well. yeah, i absolutely. and jonathan, you my next question as a specific because so louis lomax you wrote that king quote chiseled out of the black mountain make an eternal liar of white people and but you also not only this great moment of optimism that's associated with, of course, his, you know, early work in the 1960s, but also his incredible flaws and as you've just implied, one of the big watchdogs, you know, who in many ways revealed many of flaws was the fbi. and i would say if you read this book, if there's an antagonist, this book, you know, other than racism, there's antagonist work. it's j. edgar hoover. all right.
12:12 pm
the director of federal bureau of investigation and i was hoping you could talk a little bit more. why hoover and the fbi are so obsessed. king you know why, they sort of list him as this kind of public enemy number one in their eyes at the very least. and you know there's so many instances. your book about how the fbi comes in and just harasses him and makes him this figure. why is that and what does that show about king well, the reason that the fbi and j.a. hoover in particular were not just edgar hoover, but the attorney general, robert f kennedy and lbj, why they are obsessed with king is racism, number one. racism number two and racism number three. but to be more specific, they begin surveilling him because they're concerned that he might be associating with communists and he is associating with former communists. but so was everybody else back then when it became clear that he was not remotely interested in communist activity. by that time, they'd also heard him on the phone with other than
12:13 pm
coretta. and it was clear that he was having relationships with some of these women, and that became their obsession. why? why is that a matter of national security? why is that important to our federal government? should we spend millions of dollars of tax money surveilling a private citizen to find out about his affairs? well, it's obvious because racism, because they want they see king as a threat to the status quo. see that if he's successful and he's the most successful civil rights activist, he has this great ability, as louis lomax saying, to defy racism to make white people reconsider their biases and to rally black people in a way that really no one else can, and that poses a threat. and j. edgar hoover sees his job as being of preserving the white power structure as it's been so good to him for so long, as it's been so good to white americans for so long. and king poses a threat to that, whether he's a communist or not. so they begin to use his personal life the details of his sex life to try to undermine his work. and they make recordings of him
12:14 pm
from his hotel rooms and they send it out to newspaper reporters. they send it to king's home. so his wife will hear these tapes. they send a letter to king anonymous letter that we know what you're really about. and if you don't commit suicide, we're going to make everyone aware of your of your activities. and that's the kind of pressure he's under. and yet he does not back down he easily at any point could have said, you know, i've taken it this far. i'm going to let someone else lead. now, that's really what the fbi wanted. not only that, he refused to stop, but he doubled down on what he believed in. he began to speak out on northern racism, even speaking out on the vietnam. so he's basically saying, i'm not going to be by this even though he certainly knows that his life is in danger. yeah, and also building on individuals who who don't back down, individuals who who refuse to back down his these
12:15 pm
instances. one of the figures that you talk about in this book is winston richie, who is one of the early members who go be part of the integration plan. in fact, he he writes in a shaker newsletter in 1967, the way to achieve is to integrate and for decades he is a figure who does not back down and and continues to call for integration, not just in shaker heights, but in other areas around ohio and other areas around the country. as a and i'm wonder if you could talk to us a little bit more about how individuals that shaker heights could not just become this model but is an opportunity for individuals to ostensibly write, make a symbol for the country as a whole. well, it's interesting. winston richie is a fascinating figure. so to understand him, he's one of the first his family is one of the first black families to move into the first neighborhood where black people into in shaker called ludlow in the mid 1950s, the first families arrived. i think they were a couple of years later.
12:16 pm
and the just to put this into context that, this remarkable thing happened, which initially it was what happened most places white flight usually people refer to integration as the period between an all white community and an all black community as it's changing. and sometimes it's a short period, sometimes it's a long period to the the folks who were living there at the time, black and white decided that they wanted something different. they wanted to actually didn't want to leave. white people didn't want to leave, and the black people didn't want them to leave. they wanted to live in a diverse community. and they began with the radical act of a barbecue got to know each other, formed a community association, and then actually replicated the services of the housing industry and the bank, even the banking industry that was so systemically racist that they were doing everything could to encourage white people to leave, scaring people blockbusting. and not essential not writing loans for white people who to move in.
12:17 pm
so fighting back against all of them. and winston richie was part of that. and then he did something remarkable. and in fact, he wasn't. he and his wife were went to the march on washington and their kids told me that they came back inspired by that event. and what they did was they moved to an all white neighborhood in shaker. and they said that's he wrote that. he said, you know, if we want integration to work, we can't all live in ludlow, we have to spread out. so he and his wife moved to and it wasn't easy to do it. the only they were the only black kids in that elementary school. they were they had to there were these old covenants on the deeds. he had to get permission from the vance where jan company, which was the brothers who founded shaker heights, and they denied permission. so he had to use this fail safe where he went door to door with his neighbors to get them to sign their assent, essentially him to buy this house. yeah they actually used the straw purchaser, a white family bought the property and then immediately sold it to them. so he did all of this work because he believed that that
12:18 pm
was what had to do. and then there's this new twist that comes along. so part of this whole effort is in housing integration. it sounds really great cause you're like, wow, this is amazing. this is so progressive. this is like working to try to have true shared community and diversity. but the way they were doing that was encouraging white people to come into areas that were integrating, discouraging black people from doing the same. so the black people living in these neighborhoods were essentially telling their own friends and don't come here, go somewhere else. and then when richie ends up doing on a scale where an organization is created, the city of shaker heights and the neighboring community, that also had a similar dynamic, they said if these are the only places, the only suburbs that are open to black families were never going to be able to have an integrated community, we're going to essentially be overcome by demand from the black middle class trying to live in the city of cleveland and, well, it's a losing fight, essentially.
12:19 pm
if we don't want resegregation, they didn't. so they were saying we want to limit the number of black people coming in here, both progressive, also a little uncomfortable for everybody involved and certainly for us back on it now. and they, in fact, formed an organization that its goal was to attract black families to other white suburbs that were essentially not particularly interested in this. they describe it as convincing people who particularly want to go to a place that didn't particularly want to have them, but they set up shop there and they advertised the community. they did things like they would give a local official a an award for like a civil rights award and they would publicize it in. the black press that look, we look at this guy, this guy, the head, the mayor of, richmond heights, isn't he a great guy? and the mayor be like, okay, i got this award. but the idea was to send a message to black families that this is welcoming place, whether it really was or wasn't and tried to essentially manifest
12:20 pm
their success there. so so winston richie was involved in, both the idea of integrating first the help, the ludlow neighborhood, then the new neighborhood in a wealthy part of shaker mercer, then trying to persuade black families to move even further out. so all of this was about controlling integration and trying to essentially make more opportunities available for more people, while also also essentially maintaining the white population in these changing neighborhoods to yeah, and the thing that i enjoy about both of your books is, is the way in which these individuals who i've never heard of, you know, are sort of highlighted because for jonathan you're you're writing about probably one that's well known americans in history without a doubt. but what i found so incredibly enjoyable was that you highlighted the people who are around. king the individuals who are so incredibly influential, you know, bayard rustin, andrew young, scott king about, ralph abernathy, who is he's always in
12:21 pm
the background. he's always there. and we never talk about it. but there's one figure who i just became obsessed with when you were actually describing dream speech and you were talking about the national park ranger, gordon gani gun drum. all right. so gun drum for those you don't know is at the king speech. he is in the pictures because he's basically within five feet of king for the entirety of probably the most famous speech in history. and instead of talking about i have a dream speech as would normally just here's speech, here's what happened. you do it through the eyes of gunny and i'm wondering why did you do that? and what do you think it tells us about the way in which we perceive history? that's such a great question. thank you. and nobody's ever really asked me about before, so i'm thrilled when i began to think about the chapter on i have a dream, i thought it's the arguably the the climax of the book. it's king's greatest moment,
12:22 pm
where he's at his height of his influence. but how am i going to write a chapter that captures the magic of his voice? it's impossible if i just reprinted the speech, it would fall completely flat because you have to hear his voice. you to feel the energy of that moment and thought, i'm not a good enough writer to pull off. even just quoting from the speech and describing the scene. and i began think about the possibility of weaving in a couple of other people's stories, two or three. and i settled on this young girl from chicago, a young black named francine yeager, who was 18 years old, and decided at the last minute to put two bottles of pepsi and a change of underwear in her backpack and get on the train and go to washington because she felt like she had to be there. and it changed her life. she went on to become a minister and. the other person i decided to weave in was gun uganda and. i same as you. i looked at those pictures, watched the video. and here's the thing. you go home and watch the youtube video. the i have a dream speech. you'll see this white hand
12:23 pm
reaches in in the middle of king's speech and adjusts the microphone. and i thought, who's got the guts to that? and i thought, i'm going to find that guy. and because i'm a brilliant researcher, i him immediately by googling who's the white guy next to martin luther king at the i have a dream speech. and it turned out his hometown paper written a story about him. and i called gunny and i said, hey, i'm writing this book about about martin luther king. and i was wondering, you know, were you thinking when you reached your hand in there to adjust the microphone? and he goes, oh, you're kidding me. i would do that. i said, go watch it. and he called me back. he said, oh my god. and it turned out to be the most beautiful thing because gunny is white guy from the from the mountains of new york and had never met a black person, was very comfortable using n-word all his life, joined army and realizes, oh, my god, the black guys can't come out drinking with us. and by time he gets to become a partner and is assigned to be the last line defense. if someone comes after martin king, he begins to realize that
12:24 pm
this guy's important. a lot of people are counting on him and he said, when i think about it now, i think the reason i reached in is i wanted to make sure he was being heard he was really short. king was my height, five, seven. and and gunny is like he was tiny. i just wanted to make sure people could the microphone wasn't blocking his face for the cameras and that people could really hear his voice because this was important and then when you watch the video you'll when king finishes speaking this huge wave applause rises. it's almost like you can the wave of applause and gets out of his seat. it's i mean, gets gets up from behind the podium and stands in front of king, as if to say, like, stop, you know, like he wants to this guy and i think it's just an act of love. it's it's what king preached is about when he talks about the beloved community that day, gunny young drove like so many white americans who had never really thought about racism joined the beloved community.
12:25 pm
the amazing story and and i think one of the amazing things your book is there are stories like that. but connected to something we haven't actually talked that much about, and that's education and the nature of education and. i'm wondering if, you know, with the time we have, just talk a little bit about the incredible shrug off that shaker heights has gone through related to education, but most notably i think most recently in the move away from the tracking system that they were using to blowing the tracking system, specifically during covid. and what that tells us about the incredible difficulties that this community has gone through. yes. so there has been even throughout this and you're getting kind of little bits and pieces of this narrative, but the overall trajectory is, you know, this a success in housing integration and then in school integration. first, a voluntary bussing plan and then a redrawing of boundaries. so all schools were integrated and they still are to this day.
12:26 pm
every school reflects the racial makeup of the community which is still roughly percent white, 40% black ish and but yet throughout, even though they succeeded the late eighties and having reached a perfect racial balance in the in all of the schools, there was still segregation the schools. and that's because there was pretty aggressive academic tracking program where there were advanced and rich classes, honors classes. they're called different things, different times, and they were all disproportionately white. the lower level classes, the regular classes were disproportionately black. and that's been true for a long time. in fact, was stunned to find academic paper that was written by a shaker graduate who had gone on to harvard. he wrote this for a harvard class, and he just completely took apart this tracking system as essentially racist at its core. and the counseling system as enabling it and stunned to see
12:27 pm
the data on this on this paper, which was written in 1969. so this these critiques went way back and there were a lot of attempts to try to address that. you there's tutoring centers and study circles. and there were summer and on and on the student group on race relations did great work. the minority achievement committee which positive peer positive modeling for academic success for black students just a number of really well-meaning and well thought through over the years to address this. but yet the problem has persisted partly because there is not just not just racial diversity in shaker heights, also economic diversity and kids, no matter where they live. if you coming from a house that doesn't have the same kind of you walk into the door with advantages at the from day one
12:28 pm
at school. so finally, i think there was just a sense that, you know, enough is enough. and the current administration decided that they had they had been thinking about it already, about rolling back the tracking program and maybe phasing it out in different levels, maybe moving it higher. not not so much for the younger grades. it started officially in the fifth grade and, you know, unofficially at younger, younger ages. but kids were starting to really be separated in the fifth grade. and so in the fall of, 2020, there were a lot of things going on. it was the middle of covid. they were trying to figure out how to operate in person, and they decided it would all be easier if they just sort of ripped off the band-aid and they combined kids of different abilities and different perceived abilities from basically fifth grade up until the early high school, there still are advanced placement classes and international baccalaureate classes which are
12:29 pm
advanced, but everything else got combined and that was a pretty radical step for any district, but certainly for shaker heights, which had had this system in place for decades and had defended it for decades. so, you know, i think the jury is still out. whether it will ultimately succeed saw some signs of success. the district is seeing some signs of success. there's also pushback from people who are not who do not like it and feel like who fear that the higher achieving kids will not be as challenged as when they were in a class of all high achieving kids. so it's a complicated issue that can get into more if people have questions. but but, but is there there's certainly going after it. yeah. then would say, please do ask questions about this. there are tons details here that are absolutely fantastic. so before we get to q&a, i do have just one big giant question for the two of you. and so, jonathan, you remind us that king insisted, quote, we must never lose infinite hope. and laura, you remind us that,
12:30 pm
quote, shaker was still trying, in its imperfect, inadequate way. so my question, both of you, is what do these stories tell us about the need to continue to hope that the need to continue to try in were ostensibly incomplete stories, stories that are either cut off short by assassination or stories that we don't see the ending to just yet. so i wonder if you can answer. i think it always feels to us like we've got it worse. it always feels to each generation that have never been this hopeless. and king really reminds us not only where things really bleak that. even said that he felt like his dream was turning to a nightmare by the end of his life. nevertheless, he never lost hope and if he, having been in the chest, his home bombed his home
12:31 pm
shot at death threats. every week, fbi all over his case. if he didn't lose hope, then i feel like we have no choice but to carry on to continue to to fight and let's remember that as fell out of popularity as the government began to attack him, as the media criticized him for speaking out against poverty, for speaking out against the vietnam war, what was he doing? he was planning his biggest movement his biggest civil act of civil disobedience of his career. it was going to be called the poor people's campaign. and it was basically occupy washington, d.c. he was going to move thousands of people's people into a camp on the mall of washington until the government agreed to fundamental reforms in economic justice, guaranteed pay, guaranteed income, higher minimum wage, the minimum wage. today is lower in real terms than it was at time when king was protesting. it. so if he didn't lose hope, if he
12:32 pm
was making and this is in the face of constant death threats, if he didn't hope, then how could we? you know, so interesting. i think that this is you know, you're telling the story of the nation and this this big macro macro level. and this is my is sort of a micro story of one place that is still hoping and still trying and, i think. and what it really on the ground looks like and that is much the theme of of the story that you know, in some ways you could look at the story of shaker heights and say well, you know, a for effort. but you know, you have you haven't succeeded because we still see these, you know, disparate academic scores of kids in these schools and. you know, a lot of people in shaker like to say, you know, if we can't be done here, it can't be done anywhere. and so maybe you come away and say, well, okay, it's been, you know, 70, 75 years, maybe it
12:33 pm
can't be done anywhere. but that's not really how i felt after i finished writing and working on this book, i actually came away much more hopeful. and that is because this is a community of people that is still and is still working on these black people and white people working together. and it's really hard and sort of describe this. the book is narratively. each chapter has is by a different character who's sort important at that time and sort think of it as a baton that these characters are passing metaphorically from one to the next as through the years, and they're each approaching this these issues in their own way. but they and they, you know, maybe this is a race that is never finished. you know, i don't know. it may never may never happen. and but yet i think as long you do have still have people committed to it and still have people working on it and still people asking hard questions and looking for, then i find that be
12:34 pm
a hopeful story. so speaking of our questions, we're going to open the floor up to the audience. there's a microphone in the middle, so if anyone would like to take part and we have a line already already. so jonathan, i thought your book was spectacular. i just really, really loved it. and one of the things i loved about it was some of the characters who you heard about, but you didn't really know. and chief among that was coretta and i wish she would write her story and because i know she you did a lot with her but think there's more and i'm wondering, you did focus on coretta scott king. what insights could you give us to someone we really i don't think ever knew? you for that question. and thank you for calling out coretta, because i try to do that every chance i get. that was one of my really important priorities with this
12:35 pm
book, was to give her part of the credit she deserves. we need to remember that coretta scott king was more of an activist. martin luther king was when they met, and that was what attracted him to her that he was dating. he always dated many women. he was dating many women. and immediately said, you're the one. and it wasn't because was attractive and beautiful and and brilliant. it was because she had a history as an activist that impressed him because he hadn't done anything in. and she continued to guide him every step of the way. she was teaching him every step of the way and pushing him. when king won the nobel peace prize, it was coretta who said, we have greater responsibility than ever now to out on issues beyond race, voting rights. so coretta is a hugely important force, and i would love to see a new biography of coretta. the thing for me is that i'm told that she kept a suitcase, a blue samsonite suitcase full of her most personal letters. and that suitcase is available
12:36 pm
to yet. i don't know where it is. i suspect one of the children might have it. and to do a proper biography, we need that suitcase. so if anyone's listening out there with access to that suitcase, give me a call. the quote that you have from maya angelou for credit, i just have to share it. it's born a cornflower and destined to become a steel magnolia and, that's that's that's her in a nutshell. she's just fantastic to cookware kitchens. one is what it was dr. king's like internal reaction being hated. everybody, blacks, whites in the government and also do you think that he did see the end from the mountaintop speech king was depressed his friends thought he was clinically depressed and tried encourage him to get help. he was afraid that the fbi would find out he was seeing a psychiatrist, so he didn't go. and one of the really ironic unintended consequence of these fbi wiretaps is that we can hear
12:37 pm
how depressed and how frustrated he was we can hear him saying doesn't understand why the media has turned against him when he speaks out against the vietnam war. why is washington post calling him a fool? why is the new york times calling him ignorant and he doesn't quite yet appreciate the fact that part of the reason that the media has turned on him is because the fbi has been leaking the surveillance tapes to all these reporters. so they have begun to think of him as a hypocrite because he's you know he's not the moral leader that that some of us that they thought he was and and the fbi's campaign to damage his reputation coming to fruition. but it's heartbreaking to read these transcripts from the fbi tapes. the one that kills me the most is after his what i believe is his greatest speech on april 4th, 1967, at riverside church in new york, where he calls out the us government as the greatest purveyor of violence on earth. one of his best friends and closest associates, somebody who's been his guru for years
12:38 pm
for more than a decade, calls him. and we can read the transcript of this phone call. and stan levison says, i didn't like this speech. it didn't sound like you. and it's going to set us back. it's going to hurt us and. king has to say to one of his best friends, don't you know who am at this point, you know that i'm not about what's doing what doing what's politically right. it's about what's morally right. and i believe that i said was morally right. so he suffered a result of this not just because of the racist death threats, but because his own government was actively trying to to destroy him and. as for whether he was whether he knew the end was coming. i think that he was depressed i don't think he knew that there was. but he'd also been receiving enough death threats that think he was realistic in thinking that there was a good chance that he was that he might not live a life, but think you.
12:39 pm
think about a specific question about integration and education. from my recent meetings and i haven't read your books. i apologize. king was stated as saying he actually believed against integration. and in terms of education, blacks, that they should be taught by black teachers. and i was wondering how shaker heights addressed that also. thank you. i'm well, in terms of i'm not aware, king said black people should be taught only with black people like all black children. i wasn't aware that he felt that way, so i mean. definitely the people who in shaker believe that there is value in integration. that was the, you know, the underpinnings of brown board that was, you know. that was the whole thrust of it's been the thrust of our education system was for for at least a few few decades there, although there has been a less commitment to that sentence. and i think there are some people today who would say that
12:40 pm
integration is less important than neighborhood. and that's an argument that's been used a lot by white people to avoid integration, but it's sometimes also used by black people to say, you know, we don't want to go across across to another school. we just want a good school where we are and. then the issue of teachers of color is a very big issue in education today. there's research that shows that for students of color, having just one teacher of their identity can make a huge difference in their academic. the shaker has worked on this, but i think it's one of the areas that they have a way to go in terms of having a teaching force that reflects the student body body. for mr. eich in the last few days, i've heard some discussion about liberals versus progressives. so one question is where would king today fall on that continuum, but also i want you to say something about his
12:41 pm
relationship with. abraham joshua heschel and levison and other -- and what he would make of the persistence anti-semitism. well, i think king was, a radical, a christian radical, and he didn't really see himself on the political spectrum. but if you look at what he was fighting for and the things that he was talking about in the last years of his campaign, things like economic injustice, things like guaranteed income, i think, you know, he would count as a progressive. and as far as his alliance, his friendship with rabbi heschel, king was a great listener, was open to learning from other people. he was raised in obviously in the black baptist church, but was always eager to learn, went to theological seminary. he studied with people, other denominations and the jewish community hugely valuable in the civil rights movement, as was the catholic community. they sent support people from the north of all religious stripes.
12:42 pm
but king was very grateful for the support of the jewish community, and he spoke often of the of anti-semitism. i think that he saw a kinship between the israelites who were enslaved and the black people who were enslaved. of course, big difference being the black people to live with their former enslavers. but king was absolutely just determined to fight all kinds of racism and and discrimination and saw us all as children of god. that was kind of fundamental to everything. believed that we were all made in god's. so sadly this will be the last question. but if anybody else has comments or questions, they will be outside in the autographing session. i read your book mr. strikes, i will tenuously with beverly gages monumental biography of hoover men and was interesting to see how much hoover lived in
12:43 pm
your book and dr. king lived in her book. certainly hoover was the enemy in your book, but and i encourage everybody to read both of them because you will have a much better understanding of the time. but my question for you is about dr. king's children, because his legacy seems to have been turned into a battle among children. and i wonder what you can share with us about that. i can't share much about it. i feel like coretta and the children have done a wonderful job of preserving king's legacy and seeing that the nation remembers him and. it's complicated. you know these kids lost their father, didn't know him very well. and feel like it's hard to know what that must be like for them and to continue to see his image used and to see people sometimes abusing his image. i think the family has had a very difficult time and i have
12:44 pm
12:45 pm
book fair. we'll be back with more live coverage for the first. well, joining us now on book tv is dr. norman horne. he is one of the coauthor. there's this book, faith seeking freedom libertarian christian answers to tough questions. and he's also a founder of the libertarian christian institute, which is what the libertarian christian institute's mission is ultimately to try to convince other christians of libertarian ideas. and so we do this by making the christian case for a free society and equipping our people to help defend them and. so we do that by creating all sorts of different types of media, purchased things like our book here in order to try and spread the word. is there a natural antagonism between libertarianism and
12:46 pm
christianity? yeah, well, to some extent we have seen that in the last, you know, 30 to 40 years of american history in particular. what we what we experience days. but i don't think it's because there's fundamental incompatibility. it's bit more like that. the loudest voices in the room aren't always the christians. and so it's important to realize in fact, and wherever you go amongst libertarian people, about 50% of them are christian. and so often the that they have are not that they're afraid of trying to make that connection. they just don't really know how all the time. so what we do is we to apply sound theological principles and sound economic principles in basically trying to teach that there is this concordant between libertarian theory and the way we think about politics and ethics. from christian point of view. and to quote your book, to give allegiance to jesus christ is to strip of its power and authority. yeah. when in the early in the early days of christianity, one of the
12:47 pm
mantras of early christians was jesus is lord and. the corollary to that is caesar is not. and so that's why we talk about stripping rome of its power and authority. it is instead of giving this allegiance to the roman emperor who claimed to be god himself, or at least the son of a god, we give our allegiance only to jesus. one true son of god, are you a libertarian, fearful that americans have given too much authority to our government? well, i wouldn't say i'm exactly fearful it i know that is the case. and fact. i think that's kind of part of the problem that we encounter as well. libertarians itself, that many in many respects, our fellow patriots among us look to d.c. they to their state governments. they look to all of their the people in power as to for direction and for and for solving their problems. but this is not the way of the christian in the end, we realize that in order to solve problems we should not rely on the initiates in the force to do it. we use persuasion. we use our own devices to do
12:48 pm
this. we solve own problems. we don't need to endow a large government with powers that require the use of force to execute them. so that we start from that from that point of view at the very beginning. norman horn as a libertarian how do you reconcile jesus saying render unto caesar what is caesar's? well, we talk about that in the book a little bit. one of the things we have to realize the render to caesar passage is even what is on that that that is presented to jesus when he when he asked for hey will you give me, give me one of these denarius and what is the who's who is sign is on it and inscription. well that actually is caesar himself. and on that coin if you were part of, you know, part of that day, you would know on that coin itself, it would say this, is caesar, son of god. ironically enough, that's kind of like a graven image into temple where that event occurred. and so when we say when jesus says render to caesar what is
12:49 pm
caesar's and to god what is god's, he's kind calling out the pharisees during that during that time for doing something that is fundamentally against what what jesus is all about, which is to give honor and glory to god. so in a sense, what is caesar's basically, what is god's everything? and so in a sense, you know, the, the, the typical interpretation that well rendered to caesar means you just need to pay your taxes is a bit shortsighted when we think about it. there's something more going on there. we try to bring that forward in the book and we do that also in many of our publications elsewhere as well and in faith seeking freedom. spend some time with jesus in the desert. why? well, because fact what you're referring to are the temptations of jesus. and i think that that's really an important and it's a crucially important point in jesus's life that we that we draw a lot of inspiration from. but the big part of that is when is when the devil who's tempting is brings him up to the high and shows him the kingdoms of the
12:50 pm
earth and says, if only you will bow down, worship me, then i will them all to you. now what significant about that is not that that jesus says, oh well, know this don't belong to you anyway. i control this. this is all mine. this is all my stuff. anyway, in in effect, what jesus does is he grants him that that is exactly what he could do, that that satan could fact give him the kingdoms of the earth if he submitted to the satan at that point. so in effect what's really important there to realize is that what jesus is, what jesus is saying is that the powers that be, they to satan. so this is where we draw a lot of inspiration as libertarian from. if we understand that the institution analyzation of force is fundamentally against god and it is from the beginning to the end, and we even see this in the past, in the in the way in which jesus interacts with satan himself on in the desert. that's something that we should take great heed of. and i don't think that a lot of
12:51 pm
christians kind of pay close attention to that text in that way. so it's something that i think we kind of do uniquely. it's i shouldn't even say uniquely. it's not like this is a new theology. it's not like this is something that we invented this is goes back eons and in christian history, it's just we've forgotten about it. so in a sense, is any earthly ruler illegitimate? on some level, yes. we believe that basically somebody tries to institutionalize force and claim upon a claim upon a territory, a monopoly of force, that that is illegitimate, that the only way that we are that we are permitted scripturally to interact with each other is not on the basis of the use of force, but on the basis of persuasion and, peaceful interaction. so those who don't do that that's illegitimate. so the non-aggression pact, the nape that you talk about. yeah. yeah. so exactly. so we kind analogize this and it's kind of other half of the coin of of the golden rule where jesus, you know, do unto others as you would have do unto you.
12:52 pm
the other half of that could be called the non-aggression principle. don't do to others what you don't want done to you what's your theological background. so i come from the stone. campbell restoration. it's tradition, specifically the churches of christ, which is well, it's a it's a smaller denomination, but but one that kind of formed in the states of america. it's a congregation. all it's tradition doesn't have a strong like kind of presbytery or hierarchy. there very local control and basic theological principles, basic beliefs in the bible. and what we what you kind of typify as standard kind american christianity on some level. but we do have some unique, very, very interesting and unique components to us, for instance, that we have historically been antiwar. we don't have it's not quite that way anymore, but historically that's where we were. and even in the 19th century and there's some really interesting parts of our our church history that i even tried to rehabilitate on some level
12:53 pm
through our work at lci. our prophets and markets anathema to christians. they be some people think it is because they, they take things like that when in the in the epistles paul where he says that the love of money, the root of all kinds of evil and they kind of take that in twisted in various ways thinking that well if you're making profit you're taking advantage of somebody else. but the reality is that that's a kind of a misunderstanding of the nature of money and of economics. and so we understand that really, you know, we we we understand that it's important to engage in peaceful interaction and indirect trade is a really, really important component of that. and you can't do that without the use of currency. when is a state necessary if all in your view, in my view, it's basically not necessary. almost anything the government can do, we can do better on our own, whether it's the provision of law services or the provision of or the provision of health
12:54 pm
care and food, there's no fundamental problem with trying to solve these with market mechanisms. now put that in christian principles and christian principles that basically means we don't have to initiate force against it against us in order to safe in order to have legal services, order to do this stuff. we don't need to do it. we do not need to sin in order to get a good result. are there any policies? norman horn in the federal system today that are based on christian, in your view? well, on some level i suppose you could say that. i mean there are certainly there are certainly policies that, you know, that things like free speech protect our ability to protect ourselves, all of these things like these things are part of our kind of american tradition. they're built into our dna. these are things and principles that point to good things. so it's not as if that nothing good whatsoever that any government has ever done or something to that effect, but rather that when it's an
12:55 pm
institution is kind of founded in this problematic manner, that there are going to be confounding problems on top of that, is there a position in a libertarian position, abortion and is it in sync with a christian on abortion? there is debate amongst libertarians about what it means to be pro-choice or pro-life. we come down that on that the non-aggression principle means that one ought to be pro-life, even though we acknowledge that debate and have a whole chapter in the book on this, written by one of primarily one of my coauthors, kari baldwin, who's done tremendous work this regard and is well published in the field in this respect. what about immigration. well, we believe in that there's a fundamental right of people to move. we think that it's important for people to be able to try improve their lot through moving around. and this has a net benefit economically. and so morally, we don't think that we should be able to prevent them from doing so. so is it important to have some type of restriction at the
12:56 pm
border? well maybe in order to keep out like perhaps the obvious criminals per se, but we really shouldn't be trying to prevent people from doing what they want to do and pursuing what their what their best interest is now. norman horne there's a lot of i guess the word would be split between liberal quest, christian conservative christians, christian yep. how do you address that? oh man. well, in some level we try to, you know, we might even say harmonize the fact that you know, that liberal christians have some good things to say and conservative christians some good things to say. we want to be neither of those. we just want to be christians. so we want to look for the bedrock principles that we can all kind of agree on. and we understand as as flowing from scripture. and but the christian nationalist part of it actually is kind of an aberration. it's kind of a bit of a it's got a unusual history to it, what is now called christian nationalism, used to kind of honestly sort of look like what
12:57 pm
would call dynamic reconstruction ism, which is a weird set of terms that a lot of people probably don't know. but that goes back into the seventies and eighties and nineties and a lot of this stuff kind of has its genesis there. we don't really get into that so much in the book, but we do have a cool session coming here at freedomfest later on in the day on should christians in your view, be politically active? should they vote, etc. on some level to be christian is to have apolitical activity because in order to say jesus is lord, you are caesar is not. so i think that on some level there is a base political activity that we have. however, i don't necessarily think that it is the moral obligation of every christian to just get out there and vote and so on. in fact, i don't think that that's necessarily even a good thing at times. but ultimately our allegiance is to christ. and so when we find that whatever way that we can to promote human flourishing, this regard, we should try to pursue so long as it doesn't so long as
12:58 pm
it doesn't require us to initiate force against others. norman, let's close with this quote from book. it's in relation to galatians libertarianism doesn't artificially bind christians morally where christ has left them free. yeah, it's what we like to say a lot in libertarian christian institute is that we are seeking after the concord and values that we see as both consistently christian and consistently with the natural law flowing from that that we can determine that those principles that we find self-evident, that all men are created equal and are pursuing happiness and so on. those things are what we seek after, and we seek to promote. and there is nothing about christianity that says that's wrong. faith seeking freedom is the name of the book christian answers to tough questions. norman horn, doug stewart, kerry baldwin, -- clarke and the foreword by lauren sweet. thank you. thank you so much, peter and.
12:59 pm
1:00 pm
1:01 pm
for miami-dade college's homestead campus and also have the privilege to serve today as your room host. we are grateful to the miami-dade county miami-dade college family and our sponsors, including the green family foundation, s.b. media, the j.w. marriott marquee, nicholas children's hospital, and all of the sponsors of the fair, including the friends of the fair and all of the volunteers make this possible as we celebrate the 40th anniversary, please consider to the miami book fair with a contribution to our next decade fund. for more information, you may visit friends of the fair table or. the website. at the end of the session. we will have a time for a q&a, about 10 minutes, followed by the authors autographing session right outside. at this time, we kindly request that you silence your cell phones and i would love to introduce ms. schaffler, who is the executive director of americans for immigrant justice, a nonprofit law firm that for over 27 years, has championed the rights of
1:02 pm
immigrants in south florida offering free legal services to unaccompanied minors. survivors of violence and human trafficking, asylum seekers, dreamers and immigrant families in our community. before joining age, shea served as an attorney consultant at fordham university of law and directed the asylum defense project, an initiative of texas rio grantees, legal aid, where she represented immigrant families detained at the south texas family residential center in dili, texas. she also directed the harlingen, texas, office of the young center immigrant children's rights and as a staff attorney with the catholic charities services in new york city, she obtained her juris doctorate at the university of california, davis. king hall school of law and master of teaching at dominican university and a bachelor of arts from southern methodist university. please join me in welcoming
1:03 pm
flaherty. hector tovar is a pulitzer prize winning journalist and novelist. he is the of the critically acclaimed new york times bestseller deep down dark the untold of 33 men buried in a chilean mine and the miracle that set them free. the barbarian nurseries, a novel translator and nation defining a new american in the spanish speaking states, and the tattooed soldier. a novel. tovar is also a contributing writer for the new york times opinion pages and an associate professor at the university of california, irvine he's written for the new yorker the los angeles times and other publications. but it is these accolades that make me so to present him to today. eg justice is, a nonprofit immigration law firm dedicated
1:04 pm
eliminating the legal barriers to advancement that immigrants face. one work permit green card and naturalization at a time. hector's book speaks directly to the complexities of violence, identity class and race that contextualize the personal stories of our immigrant clients. as immigration lawyers, we try to untangle these two complexities to share a client's humanity with the judges who determine their future. the president and elected officials who categorize stem and the media who narrate their burdens and dreams with a nuanced of border crossings. it's in the nuance that you understand why a guatemalan toddler in tow told a border patrol agent in a cold border patrol station that she speaks no other language than spanish. when in truth, the only language
1:05 pm
in which she is fluent is mom. her native indigenous tongue, hector's is an invitation to understand ourselves, our neighbors, our friends. strange and so many people in our lives that we love. it's an invitation for me as a mother to reflect on how i can talk about identity with my daughters. now two and three who are children of a mexican american father born in wisconsin who learned spanish in his adult. and so with this, it is such a joy to welcome the stage. hector tovar. thank you, shannon, for that wonderful introduction. thank you all for being here today. it's an honor to be at the miami book fair here in this of latin and other.
1:06 pm
there are as as you all know, there are two great poles of latina in, the united states. there's miami and los with apologies to new york. and you know, it's interesting because growing up in los angeles, as the son of guatemalan immigrants, you know, i watched l.a. become a latino city in my lifetime. and i watched how the city became a little bit more comfortable with spanish. but in l.a., when you meet who looks latino in quotes, you don't really know whether or not, you should begin the conversation or spanish or english and which is more polite. but in miami, people will address you directly in spanish, which speaks to the confidence of the latino community here in this. what is a capital of of latin america practically. right. and i think that i've also seen my lifetime the way people think
1:07 pm
differently about about latino people in this country. i've seen the way that we've gone from a period in my lifetime of incredible optimism when my parents arrived from what my life in the 1960s. my father told me that this was the land of opportunity. that i would taller than he was. and that my kids would be taller than. i was, which didn't quite prove to be exactly true. and yet then in the 1990s, in 2000s, we saw the growth of a very powerful anti-immigrant movement. and of a different way of looking at latino people of people seeing us as a threat. american democracy as treating us as a of backwardness and barbarism. and i grew up i became a writer, a grown up writer in that in that new country that country
1:08 pm
that mixed feelings about the latino people in it. and, of course seeing the the campaign in 2016 of donald trump, as with his reelection campaign this year, a centerpiece of his election campaign, this idea of the threat of latino immigration and a lot of young people of of the generation of my at university of california. they have grown up with this hurts that they feel because they've their whole lives they've lived with this stereotype of the border crosser of the undock, demented immigrant hovering over them. and it's and it's become this this thing hovering over them. and so i wanted to write something about about race and how people treat latino as a race, even though it isn't. and though race is kind of a a strange thing anyway.
1:09 pm
and thought about my student writing my most of them are in their twenties. many of them are the children of mexican and central immigrants, also of puerto rican migrants and cuban immigrants. and i asked them to write stories for me that describe how they feel about latino identity. and this passage i'm going to read to you now, opening passage of my book is about their voices and about the messages that they send me about growing up latino in the modern united states. you write words for me to read a string of memories that place me inside the eyes of the child. you were a daughter of honduras, of mexico, and of puerto rico and the central valley of california with its flat, dry plains, with crops and cows and towns filled with bison cows and their chickens. you sit in my office, begin to weep as you tell me the story of
1:10 pm
your undocumented boyfriend and the demons that haunt him. and it is clear to me that you should break up with him even i cannot say this. you tell me about your best friend, a white girl, and about the african american family who live next door. in your stories, i see a suburb of rectangular lawns and a rancho in the rural united states, where the neighbors heard your mother and father yelling at each other. and where you took solace in the natural beauty of your surroundings. in the crisp desert wind and the muddy yellow outline of mountain. you write. i am having a nervous breakdown. but your prose belies this controlled and precise. it tells a story of violation and survival. you endured when you were a kindergartner. i read the pages, write for me, and i learned that as a child you were the good daughter who helped raise her siblings.
1:11 pm
you were the son who worked alongside your father in his landscaping. you were the daughter who rubbed your father's weary feet every night. and you recount the months you were living in your car with your parents and brother, taking baths at night at the spigot outside a laundromat. you describe the water over your -- cheeks in a way i'll never forget when your parents were depressed and nearly broken, you kept the home together. you witnessed your mother disappear to confront your father's lover. and you watched the home invaders arrived in your living room. criminals speaking poor spanish. you took and you drove siblings to doctors appointments. and now i see you sitting before me. your sense of humor and awareness and a dignity and a purpose about you. in a minute, you will become frazzled. but 15 minutes later, you will
1:12 pm
recover. your eyes dart. and then suddenly i see the centered. you. and i want to weep because i can see you walking into the future unbroken. so that's the opening to my book, our migrant souls. and it captures this feeling of longing that i feel among so much of the generation that is now coming of age in our country. a generation that's very comfortable with its life in iraq and also very aware of the of being born into a group of people who are seen as a threat or seen, as we say in spanish. caminos right. menos cielo, who are not treated with the full dignity that they deserve. and so in thinking about the question of latino and race, i began to research the question of race. and it's really interesting because, you know, we know that latino is not supposed to be a racist, supposed to be an ethnicity.
1:13 pm
right. race has this idea of biology connected to it. ethnicity is a common share traits. you know, we grow up speaking spanish or we grow up eating black beans in miami or brown beans or pinto beans in los angeles. but in fact, people treat a latino, as if were a race. so, for example, you'll notice or hear on the radio description, police description of a suspect, and they'll say he's either a black suspect, a white suspect or hispanic suspect. right or asian. if you look at those pie charts they do of the census of the demographics of the united states. they'll have a big 50%, 60% slice for white. and then they'll have like a 25% slice for hispanic. and a smaller slice for black and asian. so hispanic is treated as if it were a race as those other terms as white and black and asian.
1:14 pm
now one of the things i learned when i was writing book is that race is actually just the story. it's a made up thing. i did not know until i was well into my fifties that there's no basis for the idea race. if you look it up in a dictionary, we'll say that it will say that modern science has determined that there is no biological basis to the idea of race, that in fact the of people in the same racial group is usually more different than the dna. someone from another racial group. and so this to me a revelation. and i began to think about the story of race and how it became it became imprinted in my brain. how is it that we have this idea of race that we learn? and i thought about my childhood. i as i said, i'm the child guatemalan immigrants. and i grew up in east hollywood, california, in a very racially mixed neighborhood alongside armenians and cubans and filipinos and african-americans.
1:15 pm
and i did that. i was a kid. i was very sheltered. my kids excuse me, my my parents told me that that i was special being what the on my father was kind of a what are exceptionalist. he said that we were automatically spoke the best the best spanish. which is kind of a ridiculous thing to, say. but then i thought about later, looking back at that childhood. how did i lose my innocence? how did i learn that race? a thing that mattered? and i did some research and i discover that i lived next door as a kid next to james earl ray, the assassin of martin luther king. i read a wonderful book about the king assassination, killing the dream by gerald posner. and i looked at the address that james earl ray lived in just a few months before he drove in his white mustang across the country to memphis to kill martin luther king. and it was right next to my house. and so i looked at james earl,
1:16 pm
raised life, and it was a lot like my father's life. he was this poor, white from illinois, always in marginalized communities. i looked at the census of his birth and i determined i found out that james earl ray actually was born along black people in illinois town. and so he grew up among black people. he hated what was close to him. and that's one of the things that race does to us ideas of race. it's this it's this way of explaining our reality. james earl ray grew up extremely poor. he grew up deprived of opportunity. and to him, black people, people close to him were that were who he blamed for it. but on the other hand, i also had this story. my my, my east hollywood story was one that was very close to the black experience. my mother, when she was pregnant with me, arrived pregnant from what the mother. they lived in this tenement. and one day there was a knock on the door and there was this
1:17 pm
african-american man at the door. and he was unbeknownst to her, he was studying spanish at a place this institution, l.a. community college. he was studying spanish and he wanted to practice the spanish. and so he told this lady senora beo accosted call him beg, you know, he was he told her when his broken spanish, if you need a ride to the hospital, i can give you a ride to the hospital. and in fact, when my mother went into labor, my father was working at a cafeteria. hollywood and vine. famous corner of hollywood and vine. he wasn't around. so mother knocked on booker wade's door and he gave a ride to the hospital in his convertible. and a february night, the top down, because the top wouldn't close. and booker, this african-american guy became my godfather afterwards. my mother told me that she was that booker had arrived because she had been praying to sam martin, the press who. many of you will know is an african peruvian afro, peruvian saint, later called the saint of
1:18 pm
of harmony between the races. and so my mother was convinced that booker wade had been sent by some martine's brothers to help her get to the hospital. but i tell her that the real miracle is african-american in history because african-american history is so at the core of the american experience. it's actually one of the defining elements of the american experience. and booker, i did not know until i was in my forties and writing a column, the los angeles times, i wrote a column. booker wade asked for the public's help in finding him because i had actually never met. and it turned out that was a civil rights activist in the 1960s. he had left memphis because he had joined a protest to integrate the segregated memphis public library. and he had been chased out of town by the cops and by the klan. and he ended up in los angeles,
1:19 pm
where he became the person who gave my mother a ride the hospital. so from an early age, my life intersected with that of american history, with white supremacy, with history. and i think that all of us, as in this country, we grow up in a very complicated community. you know, the stories of who we are are complicated. we might be part mexican, part cuban or, you know. our stories, these telenovelas with endless kind complications. right. so much that i think the average family you could never fit. the average latino family into a netflix series because it would have to go on for six seasons. you know, there's so complication in it. and yet how are we portrayed in mainstream media? i mean, of yes, there's univision and telemundo in the english speaking media. what's the dominant image of us? well, cartels. cartel. cartel movies are the image of
1:20 pm
us. it's it's what? where most male and latino actors are likely to get a role right. is in as a cardio as a gang member in a show like breaking bad and the the other image of us is as the incarnation made in the background, lupe ontiveros, a mexican-american actress, played than 140 maids in her career. and so that dual image is is a lie, really. that image of us as as criminals, as cartel operatives, or as inconsequential people in the background. but the stories that are told us in the mainstream media, the more i thought about them, the more i realized that they're not really about us. these images they're really about white people and how white people see themselves. so, for example, you at a great television series like bad, which of course the protagonist of breaking bad is, a character
1:21 pm
named walter white. and so white has been dispossessed of his patrimony in that series lost. he's he's lost to some unruly investors that he got into business with. and forced to enter into this world where latino people are in charge. and so he's forced work at the beginning with for latino people, latino drug and these latino dealers are kind of like hyper capitalists, right? like working a cartel is like working for a really bad wall street firm. right. that's really cutthroat. and that's really cartel movies are about they're about they're a projection of white fears and white insecurities on to these latino characters. and in fact, if you look at a lot of of popular culture, that happens again and again. and so next, i want read to you
1:22 pm
a passage in my book in which i talk about the image of of latino people in the media, of white people and. i use that term white to meet white is a nonsense term. also. it's shorthand. it's shorthand for a kind of relationship. and i begin this passage. i also describe, my god, our relationship between the races is. so incredibly complicated. you know, i describe here a of a young woman who grows up in a beverly hills house where her mother works as a full time domestic. so she lives there 20 years in this house as a domestic. and her mother's a domestic and she grows up and she ends up going to high school with the kids. they get her into beverly hills high school. and they're lives become meshed where almost the mexican daughter, the housekeeper, becomes the favorite of the white, you know, owner, the
1:23 pm
house, that kind of thing. so in real life, our relationship ups between these different so-called races is really complicated, but it's all simplified and also very racist. and so i want to read to this passage about in my about the self-image of the so-called white middle class and how we fit in it, the self-image of the white american class as depicted in film and television, ad nauseum, begins with a block of large, orderly homes with big lawns, the kind you might see decorated plastic reindeer, christmas time holiday lights dangling from the pitched roofs or the curving, curving suburban tract of early spielberg drama with cul de sacs and boys humping the pedals on their bicycles to go faster. when the movie camera enters into the home, the homes themselves, we see carpeted spaces and polished dining room. and mom at the work in the
1:24 pm
kitchen, at work, in the kitchen. in heels and an apron. when i wander into these neighborhoods, real life, they do. in fact have the otherworldly feel of a movie set. the sculpted bushes and trees you see in the most affluent corners of southern california and southern connecticut, the newly painted wood, a ranch style home in the tonier neighborhoods of suburban arizona. the windows freshly washed, reflecting back mirror images of trimmed oaks and maples and greater denver or greater miami. i am taken in by the constructed perfection disposable income spent creating scenic in three dimensions. the magic here is that it all seems effortless. no one is sweating in these neighborhoods unless they're in jogging clothes, working out to make their bodies as taut and chiseled as the landscape around them. finally, i turn corner and i see a pickup truck with scratch skin
1:25 pm
and garden rakes and shovels arranged in the back and another pickup -- and span with a logo sticker on the door that announces the presence of a team of construction workers employed by a family run business with a spanish surname or a landscape business name for a state or city, mexico. i see a woman indigenous features with weary eyes walking down the street in her everyday work clothes headed to the bus stop, and i can feel the clean kitchen counters and the scrub faces of the white girls and boys she's left in her wake. at the end of the day, the pickups and the maids file out, taking their mexican and central american and caribbean and south american out of these places. and the fleets of bloated suv smiling, bringing in the lord's. of these magnificent properties in the class structure of this
1:26 pm
country latino role of the latino people is to build the movie set of white perfection again and again we see our mothers and fathers head out each morning to perform this task. when night is still darkening the dawn sky in the effort of erasing latino labor from the self-image, the middle and upper classes subtracts from the united states's knowledge of itself placing american families in a kind dream space, untethered from grim and unpleasant socioeconomic, socioeconomic realities. the spanish help appears only fleetingly in their family photographs, if at all. the public image of the privileged is an illusion. affluence and control and mastery of their surroundings. they would have us believe they summon the gleam and order of their gated communities and suburban estates with a mere snap of their fingers, a wink of
1:27 pm
their eye, like the famous benevolent blond, which the bygone television sitcom. so to me, this is the the hurtful and the most dangerous thing about a racing latino people from the country in the mainstream media. it's that, you know, we have a with each other in this country of, all these people of different races and class. and our work is the of this country. this country needs latino immigrants. 90% of the crops picked in this country are picked by latino workers. and most of the crops are picked by undocumented immigrants. and yet the image of us is not just one of invisibility. it's also one of passive. it's one of passivity. i've worked my whole life to try to erase this image of passivity from from the mainstream media and my work in newspapers and in
1:28 pm
books. i mean all of us in this room. we know a latino person who's a badass. yes, we all know someone, right? we all someone who has helped to transform their community. someone who has built a family? someone who's built a business. someone's an administrator. and that image, i think, is sorely is sorely lacking. instead, we have this this image of passivity and of being ensconced now. so and we have also the image the dominant image in the popular imagination of what latino immigration for is the wall. the wall is something that it's this symbol. it's really i called it in a piece for the new york times, a conservative art installation, because it's it's out there, it doesn't really stop. it just forces people into the desert where they many people die in summer crossing. or it forces to pay tens upon thousands of dollars to get
1:29 pm
their family across. and so that's that's the image we have this country and the complexity of our of our experience is lost. and not only that i wrote my book to tell my students know someone's loss only cause we're not the only one to suffer this kind of discrimination is stereotype. this is something that goes deep american history. in my book, i describe, for example, the 1925 immigration reform, which i did not know about until i started researching this book. and reading wonderful books like a man, impossible subjects, which is a history of immigration policy in this country. and and what i learned is that in the 1920s, the united put on severe quotas and immigration from italy, from europe, from to keep out the --, to keep out the italians, to keep out the slavs, because they because there was a
1:30 pm
fear in the 1920s that all of these slavic these these jewish immigrant rights were transforming the character of the country. and that exactly is what immigration policy is about in this country now. it's about it's about shaping the ethnic look and the feel of our country. and and to me it's important that we know that it's important that we know. bill clinton built the first wall in california at the of the anti-immigrant movement because he wanted to keep california in the 19 in the 20 reelection election, he built the wall. and in california, then in el paso. so this is a very, very long history. and what it's done is created separation and it's created a level of drama that is felt in places like los angeles and like miami, where we're separated from each other where we or families up not knowing the other one half of the family
1:31 pm
from the other. so, for example, in my in my in my book, i end up driving across the united states to visit all these communities where there are latino people. start off in california and i drive up to oregon, where there is a large community of people who are indigenous of indigenous descent. and then i go to idaho and i met i met a guy who was a legal of the u.s., but not a not a not not yet a citizen who said that if he could have voted in the 2016 election, he would have voted for trump. and he said this because he was concerned his wages being taken by income tax. and so there's this diversity of opinions. i later went to el paso and i went to the site of horrible massacre that place not too many years ago in a walmart in el paso. and then found my way to atlanta. and atlanta is. now, like the new miami or the new los angeles, as many of you know, there's a huge latino
1:32 pm
community, atlanta. and i met this wonderful who is who was undocumented and lived in in mex in atlanta for 20, 30 years, racist there and had a daughter who went to harvard, too. went to harvard as a dacca student. he managed to buy a house through a city program up there in atlanta. and he had his own piece of property. but he told me that he had been unable to go home for 20 years, which of course, think everybody in this room knows someone right. who who was to see their family. i mean, how many people have heard a story of someone witnessing the funeral, a parent or a relative through face time because they can't cross the border? right. and so i take drive across the united states hearing these kinds of stories. and, of course, i end up in florida. and in this last passage, i'm going to read you before i ask if there's any questions, i'm
1:33 pm
going to read about my journey to florida and the people that i encountered when i reached, i entered flat florida and alighted of long straightaways that guide me into the foreboding of a moonless night, cutting through the habitat of, feral hogs, bobcats and wild turkeys. all of this is really exotic when you're from california, you know, driving through the center of florida. cuban miami is waiting for me at end of this drive, i reached a little havana the next morning and they said last layer of winter fleece because it was cold in atlanta when i was there and i feel beads of sweat down my temples. like today, on a november day, when 80 degrees the last i was here, i was reporting on the case of five year old elian gonzalez. the cuban refugee who landed in
1:34 pm
1:35 pm
1:36 pm
a visit to her family in cuba. and she is afraid the cuban government retaliate against them if their names are printed. so i don't ask her name. she hates the dictatorship and yet if it hadn't been for fidel castro, my children in, cuba wouldn't have studied, she tells me. they would have been shining shoes and selling newspapers in the street because they, the
1:37 pm
communists did one good thing. they taught people to read and write. her children and grandchildren became, doctors and dentists who now rely on their american relatives remittances to get by. i agree with capitalism. the woman this is the woman sister in law says she's in her sixties, intelligent and i sense she has a powerful truth share with me. capitalism is hard, she continues. you have to work and sweat and earn what you eat. but wherever they take freedom from you, no system works in cuba. she was at a university's humanities department and saw the bright people cowed into silence. not long after her son was arrested for making anti-revolutionary statements on a city bus, he left in the 1980, mariel boatlift. when castro allowed thousands to leave the island the cuban government repeatedly denied her an exit visa to travel to united
1:38 pm
states and live with her son. and she didn't see him for 20 years. during those years, the straits of florida, the florida current and, the gulf stream, were a chasm at the center of her home, a world pool of roiling, deadly waters separating her from her son as he grew into manhood and middle age. all that i suffered, she said. though the locus of freedom, i tell her i've just heard a story from a mexican immigrant who's been separated from his family for 20 years. also to be a latino americano is to suffer. i say seguro ceci, she says, without a doubt, the cuban and mexican are portrayed in united states media as opposites of social class and outlook. but now i found this emotional commonality. we people grouped together under
1:39 pm
the tent named latino, living with the hurt caused by and politics conquer quest and surrender revolution and dictatorship. we have seen borders redrawn and fortified by the american empire and by the conflicts set off by its imperial ambitions. we have crossed those borders by land, air or sea in a near or distant past. and the love, the division and the regrets in our families reach across these borders. our ancestors have escaped marching armies who they taught secret torture rooms, stalinist surveillance, and the outrages of rural police forces. and now stand in the united states. a miami street corner or in an atlanta suburb working to pull the strands. our family history together and to make ourselves feel whole again.
1:40 pm
thank. that's my book. are my crusade. okay. so if i'd love it, if anyone had any questions about my book, if anybody has and, we have a question here from this. not take me to the blog for your opinion. i've been very. involved. yes often very different. for example, case i got is a former professor, the university of missouri. i know what his funny. yes. you're former. yes. oh, my god. this microphones are working again? yes. there's a microphone there. i'm off on eisenhower and. he's saying that he's a former professor in argentina. you? yes. yes. in my case, i think that they it's a big market. where you put people for very
1:41 pm
differing profiles and 40. in my case, i only former professor at the university when i cited my route, sherman deutsch, my family, deutsch i know had family in latin america and in my case, not a lot of people are in especially in south america, argentina, chile, uruguay, paraguay, similar in my case. a for the reason i when i had to fork for, i put why no latino, because it is very different situation the situation that you put in your book. yes i understand your situation because i'm working here in florida a long time ago. but ebadi, different mentality, absolute. and this is happening. yes, but you for your piece, you know, and i think that as i read in my book every name that we have for a race or an ethnicity
1:42 pm
is really what sociologists call a pan. it's where you throw bunch of people together and those people decide have something in common. so white is a pan ethnicity for from ireland and great britain germany and and the -- and different groups even that group have been treated like a race. so the -- were treated like a race, the nazis. and there's you know, there's still in this country. and so latino. you and i, we we not have much in common, although i do have a daughter born in buenos aires. but when we grouped together and i they see me canela and they hear, you know, an accent of someone from argentina. to them were the same. and so we get treated the same. a lot of you know, so so a lot of people we might not have much in common, but we when we are in certain places in in california or in or in new york or in ohio,
1:43 pm
and we have something in common you know, the fact that we speak a lot, we speak spanish or that we've you know, we've crossed we you know, we have this experience of migrating that gives us something in common and. so that to me is the only thing that latino really stands for. it stands for the fact that we have certain things we share in common. so thank. you thinking we shared i spoke specifically. levinson i can you which i is the next person. yes. thank you. have you been in your travels to michael lee, florida? yes actually, i have. i have been to michael lee. isn't that amazing what they've done for the farmworkers and it's it's all over the country. it's almost like what cesar chavez did years ago. and i went up there with a group from my former temple. it was temple then a few years ago, and we saw what they were doing. and it's just amazing. everybody has to boycott tomatoes at publix and wendy's and kroger.
1:44 pm
yes. for those of you who don't know immokalee is what most of you probably. but on c-span, they might not know. in other parts of the country. immokalee is, the center of a farmworker, agriculture community, especially growing tomatoes that supply fast food many, many different uses all across the country a place that was once a, you know, had very, very strong battles for worker rights, even actually, you know, edward murrow, did a series called harvest of shame in the 1950s about the conditions the immokalee farm farms. now, most of the people that work there are if i'm not mistaken, mexicano immigrants, right? many of them are mexican immigrants. so yes, immokalee. so, yes, a history activism of oppression and, a history of resistance. so they've done combat. it is amazing because they they like places like whole, even
1:45 pm
wal-mart. well charge a penny extra for tomatoes and other parts of the country. they have other produce and it helps them live like human beings. instead, like slaves. one more question. i have time for one more question, senor, i. loyola lynnette, i see you in line. thank. hi. yes, thank you for the wonderful. my question about kind of the dynamics of racism against latinos in the united. you know, there's tons of anti racist sentiments latinos blacks and we also see it for anti-semitism and lgbtq. i'm wondering why, you know, recently we've seen a lot more support for black lives matter for supporting. right. you know, you know, pride and things like that. why haven't latinos had a chance to really capture the public attention in the same way these other groups have? well, know we're a younger community is the short answer. you know, we have know black
1:46 pm
lives matter comes at the end of the hundred years of struggle, emancipation and the civil rights movement. 1965. then two more generations of struggle to produce black lives matters movement where now you, you know, something that reached into american homes, latino community as much, much younger. we had a huge, you know, outpouring of a demonstration for immigration reform in 2005, 2006. and i think that i foresee a latino renaissance in the near future that will add that history to the history, the black renaissance and other groups that have come to this country to defend themselves and to express their to be full citizens. thank you very much. thank you. and i'll be signing books somewhere. with.
1:47 pm
you. yeah. we're currently in a break between events at this year's miami book fair. we'll be back shortly with more live coverage. voters as mad scientists is the name of the book essays on political. the author george mason university professor bryan caplan. professor caplan, what are you trying to accomplish with this book? really, i'm just trying to share 17 years worth of essays on political rationality. i think at this point, people have started to finally accept that there is a lot of political rationality. their opponents, at least a of
1:48 pm
what i'm trying to say is you're you're all right. both sides are correct. the other side is pretty crazy. but i get a little more self-aware now and realize that the craziness actually is pretty universal. give an example of a voter who's irrational. how? let's see. i mean, the first one that comes to mind is someone who voted for hitler, because national socialism means he's actual nazi slogan. in 1933, which i would just say would be pretty crazy. i mean, honestly though, the main thing about irrationality as social scientists think about it, is that it's hard to know for one person. it's much easier to have an idea. a general group is rational, because for one person, one person to just make an honest mistake, they could just happen to have gotten up on the side of the bed or whatever. but when you see that there is a general pattern towards, for example overestimating certain kinds of crime, underestimating certain kinds of crime, this is where you say it seems like in general the standard position is way off as to how that happened is a little unclear. but i mean, i would tend to say
1:49 pm
that whenever a person has a view that is just wildly at odds with reality. that's at least reasonable. i think probably they didn't come to that view accidentally. it wasn't just like, woops, i just read the wrong. it's probably more like they were not exercising normal intellectual self-discipline when they the belief. why do you refer to voters as mad scientists? great question. so a lot of people look at politics and they say problem is self-interest. the problem is everyone just voting to get good stuff for themselves? as someone who studies public opinion, a lot of detail, i say that really just doesn't fit facts at all. it is not very easy at all to predict what policy someone will support based upon their objective self-interest. rather, what we see is almost everybody supports the policies that they do because they think they are best for society. the key catch, though, is that the way they form their beliefs about what is best for society is really negligent at best. where you just sort of hear some slogans, repeat whatever it is. that sounds good to you. this analogy came from saying,
1:50 pm
look what we all like imagining. wake up on an operating table and there's some guy there says, i've got great surgical procedure. i'm going to perform on you. it's going to make you it's going to be so wonderful. you're gonna live forever. that'll be $1,000,000. and you say? ah, no, thanks. what? you don't want to pay? fine. get out of here. right. that's a lot better than you. when you wake up on the table and the guy. i don't want your money. i am just here to go and help you to protect jill. and there's like, no, no, i don't want to go. of course you would say that. natural that you're not perfect. so you don't yet understand the wonder of what i'm doing. do you? that's what i say. we're dealing with people that do want to help. they have thought so little about what would helpful that you would actually be better off if they were in fact just stereotypical greedy jerks. what is the importance or the significance of convenience for voters? nice. one thing that you will never hear in politics, at least i have never heard it is someone who gives the speech. give me convenience, give me
1:51 pm
death. normally politics. instead it's like safety, health first. the main to know about all these things that politicians do talk about is. and we saw this very clearly during covid, is that they come at a very price. they come with the price of. you can't live your life. you at least you can't go live your life in an enjoyable, convenient way when you're spending your own money, convenience matters a lot. if someone says, hey there's going to be this great vacation, all you to do is go to a four hour timeshare seminar first. like, no, i don't want do that. that sounds like a pain in the neck. i don't feel like it. so this where when people are spending their own money, they care a lot about convenience. there's a standard in the business. don't antagonize customers when they're in line to pay give you their money. speed them along. make them happy. but in politics, on the other hand, it's very common to say, here's a policy. we're doing this is the best thing to do, even though it's actually a giant in the neck. think about tsa. all right. well, if it saves one life. standard slogan. well, the same one life.
1:52 pm
almost everything that anybody on earth enjoys kills people. and yet when people are spending their time, their own money, they take these chances so they can actually live a rich, full life. political decisions, on the other hand, normally there is almost no weight put on the convenience of people. just whatever is safe, whatever is healthy has got to be done. convenience be -- or often don't even mention convenience because who could care about such a trivial thing as convenience. what do you teach at gmu? i teach economics and portion of economics. see, i do a wide variety of topics, actually, so i teach the microeconomics class. i just did new public policy class, which is a lot of fun. i do labor economics. i do economics of economics, of education, economics and politics. i've done macroeconomics now i've done intro. i mean, really, you like i'll say a lot of professors do not like teaching. you might not figure that out from what they say. probably you can.
1:53 pm
but i love teaching. i love to classroom, getting to talk to people, just to see the reactions. and i love trying to figure out a way to take something in my head and make it make sense to someone. never heard anything like that before. it's easy to talk to people that also have the same ph.d. as you talking to somebody that's never heard any of this stuff and having it make to them. that's the challenge. that's what spock, what do you refer to when you're talking about the social desirability bias? oh, excellent question. social desirability bias is the most important idea in psychology that hardly anyone has heard of. it's a fancy name for obvious, namely when the truth sounds bad people lie, often the lies become so ubiquitous that people stop even being conscious of the lie. the really mundane example is a myth that you don't have to move the camera and say, but there's only socially acceptable answer to that. of course right? or like, should we save lives or worry about convenience? again, there's only one socially acceptable answer to that. it doesn't matter how much convenience or losing or how few
1:54 pm
lives are being saved. still, only one acceptable answer. in psychology, a lot of examples that are very familiar with like people overstate church attendance. more people claim they went to church than really. people overstate voting. more people to have voted than really did. we know things like people overstate how nice are. well, notice that if you ask people like, are you in the top of niceness, like 90% of people saying their top half of niceness. right. all this, you might say, is pretty obvious, but once you share this idea, it's like, is there any of life or social desirability bias pretty much just takes over and is everything that you hear. and i say, that's politics. you just listen politicians and just go through their sentences, one by one. is it literally true? my claim is it's 90% of the time. what they're saying each sentence is just literally false. i encourage to do this with politicians. they like. it's easy to go and call the ones you don't like a bunch of liars. find someone you like and just honestly go through any and say, is that sentence literally true?
1:55 pm
it's literally true. we will do anything it takes to save ukraine. like we $1,000,000,000,000. we have world war three. no, in that case, it's literally false to say that. you will do whatever it takes or do anything that it takes. anytime says. cost doesn't matter. the cost matters, of course, when it's your money, once you get into politics, then you hear a lot of talk like cost doesn't make any difference, doesn't matter. i give it to him. it helps one person, then it's justified to go and spend billions of dollars like, are you crazy? that's like if you literally follow that through, you have nothing left for everything else. after the first thing that you brought up in the day. so that is social desirability bias and it does form a very big of the way that i think, especially about politics is to realize it is a realm, not just coincidentally, there's a lot of lies going on. you know, the kinds of things that politifact points out. i'm like, all right, you can say that. but there's the deeper point of almost everything they're saying is actually just literally false to say it's hyperbole. and yet a lot of the reason why
1:56 pm
politicians are doing it is because a lot of people hear it and they do actually kind of believe it. it's like, what does that social desirability bias play in to irrational on economics, immigration drug policy? oh, yeah, of course. i mean, really, when people forming beliefs about politics, almost the last thing they want to do is calm and look at facts and stats like what will sound good. what will make me sound like a good person? what makes me sound like a patriot, what makes me compassionate? one of the main things that i see when i'm teaching class on policy is how often i will agree with someone's conclusion. yet their arguments will just be stupid. so i've long been in favor of drug legalization. when someone says, well, drug laws don't work because they're still drug. i just want to say ridiculous argument. you just say legalize murder. they're still murderers. it's one where people are really just trying to find some argument that gives them a warm glow, just like you get. you get bathed in some positive
1:57 pm
emotion, whereas a lot of what trying to do in this book is to say, look, it's nice to be bathed in positive emotions. can we just pause that and try to really look at the world? it is. how do you libertarianism and are you a libertarian? i'd say libertarianism is. the view that there's a strong presumption in favor of letting human beings do what they want, and in particular government to not go and be able to pass to tell people what they want to do with their own person or their own stuff. i'm definitely libertarian by that standard. again, like i think this is the definition that is closest to actual use because there's a lot of libertarians who favor all kinds of government programs. but still, when you talk to one, it's like, what's the starting? the starting point is government shouldn't do this, leave people alone and. then maybe you can talk into this as an exception. so that's generally the way that i think it. it's one where you can totally disagree me on this and still
1:58 pm
like the rest of the book. but i do think that there is some connection between. what i'm saying and the libertarianism namely if you just were if every politician could only say things that were literally true, it would just no longer be very fun to support government if you had to actually say, all right, well, we're going to go and start a war in this country, 50% chance that makes things better. a 30% chance, no difference. 20% chance to make things makes things worse. that's an honest case for government action. but it's an appealing one. and a quote from bryan caplan. libertarians are no tory is for gratuitously alienating everyone who doesn't agree with them. hopefully i haven't done that right on this very interview. but like i know i know a lot of libertarians and we can all improve, but a lot of my friends need to improve more than a lot of other people. this is part of why these ideas are so unpopular is just needlessly antagonizing other people. i know i'm guilty myself, so i'm
1:59 pm
not going to say hold myself up as being a model of action. when i was in high, i was one of the worst big mouths i knew. over time. i think that i have improved. i've at least reinvented the wheel of dale carnegie's to win friends and influence people. and i am happy to go and share what i've learned, whether the people to try to become more persuasive others. and that's a little bit from bryan caplan, author of voters as mad scientists essays on political irrationality. thank you very much. this is great fun. and now more live coverage of the miami book fair fair.
2:00 pm
hello. good morning. my name is hy manzullo. tonight, proudly serve as vice provost of student affairs and chief investment officer at the college. welcome. we are grateful to miami-dade college family and volunteers and the support of our sponsors, including the green family foundation, zibi media, j.w. marriott, marquee and brickell and nicholas children's hospital and all other.
2:01 pm
we'd also like to thank friends of the fair members. friends receive multiple benefits. please consider being friends of the fair as we celebrate the 40th anniversary. sorry. please consider supporting miami book fair, where contribution to our next decade fund. at the end of the session we will have time for a q&a and the answers will be autographing books outside. we kindly request that your sentence your cell phones now it is my pleasure to introduce dr. richard haass. dr. richard haass is the president and former president of the nonpartisan council on foreign relations. he is also a consultant at centerview partners, an experienced diplomat, policymaker. he served in pentagon, state department and white house under former presidents, democrats and republicans alike. a recipient of the presidential citizen's medal, the state department's distinguished honor
2:02 pm
award and the temporary international award. he is the author of and editor of 15 books, including the best selling the world. a brief introduction a world of zero a foreign policy and begins at home, another bill of obligation. ten habits of good citizens. he is also an author. the weekly newsletter home and away available on form stock on substack. it is now my distinct honor to dr. richard haass. well, good afternoon. great to be at the miami book fair. great to see books being celebrated and some ways it's great to see them being celebrated outside library. i like the fair is the right word. there's a street fair quality to all this. and i love the fact it's on the campus of miami dade. this is one of the most, i
2:03 pm
think, important institution ins in the united states years. i was fortunate enough to get an honorary degree from here and. i learned about it. and for so of the students, they're the first generation to go to college. and miami dade is the gateway and education very much ties in with i'm writing about because education is the ladder. it's the it's the vehicle, the instrument that that makes opportunity in america, not just a slogan, but makes real. institutions like miami dade or for that reason are important to this society, to its economy and to the subject of what we're going to talk about. american. so it's perfect think that the book fair is located here i should say the way schedule changed a but i'm not keith. ellison if you were hoping to hear congressman, i apologize.
2:04 pm
so you heard him his introduction to me. and i've done all this foreign policy work in the course of my career. i at the state department, the pentagon, the white house. so it's a fair question. it's the obvious question. why is a foreign policy guy, which i admit to being. why is a foreign policy guy writing a book, democracy and a book on citizenship wasn't something i thought i would do. ten years ago, it didn't occur to me to to do it. but what would happen? i'd be speaking to groups like this one about foreign and people would always ask me, what's the biggest challenge is a china, is it russia? is it north korea? is it iran is a climate change is a terrorism, what have you. and i would always or increasingly say, look those are all big challenges. those are all big challenges. but the thing that keeps me up at night, the biggest challenge facing united states is none of
2:05 pm
those, but it's us and it's the divisions in this country that either make it all but impossible for us to meet our domestic challenges. and it's the divisions in this country that make it increasingly difficult for us to meet our international challenges. it's the divisions in this country that actually threaten the fabric of american democracy itself. and i said that answer enough the i looked in the mirror one morning when i was shaving and i said, look if that's your answer, why isn't why that your next book? why? why isn't that the book you're writing? so that is that is how we got to here. the bill of obligations. what am i worried about? as i just suggest that, i'm a i'm worried a lot about dysfunction the inability to get things.
2:06 pm
and if you think i'm making this up. look at what's going on in washington, look at what's not going on in. we can barely what are called stopgap spending measures to deal with budgets for a couple of weeks. we to the cliff. we then pass some incomplete legislation and advise maybe six weeks and then we start the process all over again. and the bill that was passed other day at the 11th hour, it didn't include any funding for ukraine for, israel for the southern border, for taiwan. president had put forward a piece of legislation request for over hundred billion dollars to fund those things. congress didn't take it up. so look at all the other things that aren't being done in washington dealing with with the immigration policy on the border, dealing with the deficit and the debt, dealing with the quality of american. i've got a long list of things that aren't being done.
2:07 pm
and then as if that were not bad enough, we're also beginning to see how would i put this the our political culture is changing. it's getting more violent. we saw it on january sixth. most graphically, but we're seeing it every day now. we're seeing how people in public are being threatened, whether they're shooting, whether they're jurists, whether they're people on juries, whether they are members of the senate or the house. mitt romney talks about it in an in his in his book. i know something about this i spent three years as the u.s. envoy, the northern ireland peace negotiations. i then went back and spent six months as an international mediator in northern ireland. and i mentioned this, of course, northern ireland, a part of the united obviously for 30 years, for three decades experience, suffered through what were known as the troubles, politically inspired violence, claimed thousands of lives.
2:08 pm
and what it is to me, it's a stark of how a lot of what we take for granted in this society, the ability to go to school safely, ability to go to work, ability to vote, you name all these things depend upon the rule of law about. security. and what we've seen here is northern ireland in the middle of the united kingdom, in the middle of europe. and we saw the breakdown of the rule of law there. and thousands of people lost their lives. if you did the math, that would be the of hundreds of thousands here. so to me, the lesson is it can happen here. no. should be sanguine. no should say this is only the kind of thing that happen in a in in other places. indeed, if i have one message to leave with you all, it's don't be sanguine. don't be pessimistic, don't be defeatist, don't up. indeed, my message is just the opposite. what we need are more and involved citizens. that's the only way american
2:09 pm
democracy is going to make it. but don't assume it's going to make it just because american has been around for hundred and 47 years. we're about two and a half years away from working. 250th anniversary of the declaration independence. it'll happen in the summer of 2026. we shouldn't that. what got us here will get us here for another 250 years or 25 years or two years. american democracy is precious, but it's also it's vulnerable. it is. it is vulnerable. so again, i want people to feel a sense of urgency about what needs to be done. i'll get to this. but the good news, there are things that can be done. how did we get here. how did we get to the point where american democracy is not functioning and even its future is in doubt? got a couple of explanations you may yours. one is we don't teach it very well. there was a time where civics or social studies were part and
2:10 pm
parcel of an education. now much less so. i don't think anybody set out to remove it, but it almost like musical chairs. we started putting more, more things into the curriculum and discouraged. there were when the music stopped, there weren't enough, and civics often lost a seat in the classroom. again, maybe we assume we didn't need it, but it's not. so you can graduate from. the bulk of america's colleges and universities with about 4000 institution of higher learning. you can graduate from over 3000 of them without having taken a course that requires you to read the constitution or the declaration of independence, or knowing the first thing about democracy. these courses are offered on almost every campus. they're not required on most. same thing about high schools, the middle schools. they're either not taught in many or if they are taught, it's maybe at most a couple of months worth and it's, shall we say, rather perfunctory. so we're taking for granted that american somehow what have internalized what? why democracy these are valuable
2:11 pm
and what they take to operate. not clear to me why educational system is no longer a stepping up. social media has made it really difficult for. two reasons. one is social media traffics in misinformation. there's no policing. if you will, or very little policing or quality control over social media. just to give you a hint, we call it social media. we do not call it accurate. we do not call it serious media. we do not call it educational media. the idea that anybody goes to it for basic information or analysis is, to me a frightening thought. but social media has another effect. besides trafficking and misinformation. it divides us. whether you go to this or that site on facebook or instagram, whatever, it tends, we increasingly don't have common experiences. and this is this is magnified by cable, by radio and so forth. when i grew up, i'm old enough
2:12 pm
that we're basically three television networks, and it was the year of broadcasting. now we have thousands and thousands of networks. radio television, cable, what have you. you know, probably millions of social media places to go. so we live, in the era of narrowcasting, much harder to build and society in such a society. i say one other thing, particularly if you're younger than i am, if you're say, under 40, 45. so you've been politically aware for 20, 25 years. well, think the last 2025 years. say let's begin it with 911. we had the 2007 eight financial crisis. we've also had more recent problems with inflation. we had wages stagnating for many. we had a pandemic where more than a million americans lost their lives. we had wars in afghanistan and iraq that by no means were worth
2:13 pm
the human or economic or military investment. so a lot of people get up and say, look i can see what this democracy see this government have done to me. i don't to be see what they've done for me. and as a result, we're living an age of populism where people basically say, hey, democracy is not performing democracy not delivering. let's think about something else. and that, in many ways explains the appeal of people who are less democratic. and by the way, it's not just happening here. it's all over the world. if you are measuring the state, the prevalence, the the strength of around the world. it's almost like a stock that's lost value. it's been a correction. democracies are less robust and less numerous today than they were 20 years ago. authoritarian in countries are partly authoritarian. countries more authoritarian and more numerous than or these are hard times for political systems to perform and deliver.
2:14 pm
so what we do. so. so let me give you two images here. one is the one i began with, which is when you think about national. think of a coin with two sides. one side is the side of the stuff of foreign policy. the other side is this. it's domestic. it's what happens at home and national security is the sum of both sides of that coin. but let me give you a second coin. not that any of us carries coins anymore. but let me give you a a second coin. it's it's the coin of citizenship. and on one side of this coin are rights. and the other of this coin are obligations. the rights are obvious when we think of the words like democracy, we think of freedom and rights. and if you think about american political history, we we opted for independence because of rights. that's what the experiment began with. we then had an initial was called the articles who.
2:15 pm
if you haven't read it recently, you might. it's extraordinary that anybody actually thought it could be a blueprint for government. it failed dismally. the country was essentially not functioning. all was going broke. so a second constitution was proposed. what we now call the constitution. it was quite controversial because we created a much stronger government at the federal level and a much stronger executive branch. and the only way we could get the requisite number of states to ratify the proposed new constitution was introducing a bill of rights, and hence the first ten amendments to the constitution. as you all know, a rights that guarantee freedom of speech, expression, second amendment arms trial, jury, you know, quite familiar stuff. and rights remain central to the american experience. we fought our one and only civil war in many ways overwrites and
2:16 pm
there's there's two phrases that come to mind. one is in the basic document itself where we talk about in order to form a perfect union. well, we're still on that road making sure that our rights are more or available to more americans. that's part of what a more perfect union is an abraham lincoln. i so often said it best, talked about the unfinished work of america and the unfinished of america was to make sure again that rights were not just on paper. we're not just ideas, but were realities for americans and would simply say we've made, i believe, significant progress over the decades on rights, but there's still progress to be made. lincoln's work remains unfinished. and my point is that while we continue down path to finish lincoln's unfinished work, that's not enough. because even if his work somehow to be finished, even if all americans enjoyed the rights, they should, it's still not a
2:17 pm
recipe or a guarantee that american democracy work. rights come into conflict. take, take. what's one of the most controversial issues of the moment? abortion? how do we navigate the friction between a woman's right to choose and the rights of the unborn? those are both rights. how do how do we deal with that? because there are such powerfully views on both sides of that equation. the right to bear arms pursuant to the amendment and the right to public safety or the right not to get backs, aid or to wear a mask and someone else's right to health. how do we how do we deal with that? and my view is and the reason, again, i was i was persuaded to write this book is that rights alone, not a successful democracy, make that alongside rights we have to introduce the idea obligations as equally important. and let me just say, obligations are things you should do, but
2:18 pm
not as a matter of law, but the things that you should do, because they are good for the society, good for the country, good for one another. indeed, obligations into buckets. one of the obligations everybody in room, everybody watching us has one another. what do we all want? another what are what are both what do i owe you? but also what do you owe the people sitting next to you? what do you want me? and second, what do all of us show this country of ours? it's almost echoing the of john f kennedy in his inaugural address. not what this country can do for you. ask what you can for your country. i think we've lost that. so again, what are we owe one another? what? what do we all hope to this? to this american experiment of of ours? i've come up with ten obligate tions. a lot of them are things about behaviors that the first is to be informed. thomas jefferson couldn't us
2:19 pm
today. but but if he if could have, he would have said that's the important attribute of a citizen to be to be informed. he actually celebrated the role of journalists in society saying that was essential. he had to make choices between having a free press and a government. he knew which way he was going. that was the only way to hold the a light up to what happens to hold people accountable. so we need informed citizens, but then we need involve citizens informed, involved or the first to it turns out the way it's more difficult to be informed than one would have thought. here we are you know, everyone here has. i expect, has a phone you can get on the google machine any time you want. but part of the problem is swimming in information. we're swimming in misinformation. and how do we know the difference? so it turns out to be more difficult than we would have thought. and just like there are rules for how you navigate the
2:20 pm
internet, what might call cyber hygiene, we need rules of information, hygiene, what some people call information literacy in new jersey. now it's required as a high school student, you study, how is it know how to think critically? it's not what to think, but how do you deal with this flood of information, how do you how you navigate it, how do you tell what's a fact from something else? how do you tell the difference between different types of shows or publications? how can you be a informed citizen? and then we need people involved. the most basic form of involvement is obviously voting we had midterm elections a year ago this month. more than half of eligible voters didn't didn't exercise their right to vote, which is quite stunning to me. we're going to have a truly consequential election just under a year now in about 50 weeks. traditionally, about a third or more of eligible americans don't
2:21 pm
exercise their right to vote. and i'll back to that. but i think given how consequential it is, we really want those numbers of those voting percentage in absolute numbers to go up. i talked about any number of other obligation, the 10th and most basic is that we want people to put the country before their party or their personal benefit. it's sad that i thought it was necessary. point that out. you would have thought that was maybe so obvious it wouldn't have to be pointed out. but it's true. and whether you agree or not, with somebody like liz cheney thought what she was willing to do was a good example of that. and she paid a price. she lost her she lost her seat in congress or some of those people at the state level i thought was quite extraordinary. there were some conservative republican secretaries of state, as they're called, at the state level, who were in charge of overseeing political process. the elections both the procedures and the counting of the votes.
2:22 pm
some of them were passionate. republicans wanted the republican candidate win. but when the when the data came in, when the votes were tallied, they say the democrat won and came under enormous pressure to change it, they wouldn't. that to me is if you ever needed an example of putting country before party or person truly, truly admirable behavior, all sorts of other obligations. i talk in the book civility, an openness to compromise nonviolence. we don't like the kind of scene we saw the other day. members of the senate or congress or are literally exhibiting physical violence or threatening it against one another. one of the other of the ten obligations is respect norms. whatever else happened the other day in washington, that was just the opposite. what we've seen so it is a, you
2:23 pm
know, go through it. and again, these are things that we we ought to do. these are not things that we can legislate. we can't legislate that you need to be sensitive to your fellow citizens. but we can we can we can. we can. erdrich and we we should urge it. i want to highlight, though, a couple of the obligations and then i want to how are we doing on time? then i want to save a few minutes for your questions. one is the obligations, as i said, a, about teaching our history. it seems to me this is something that could be done. we are, you know, parents are getting involved more in education in principal. that that's good. we've got we've got public schools charter, schools, parochial schools, private schools. we've got public universities, private universities, college. why? why is it not a a an obligation of these obligations citizens to prepare their young people for citizenship? we wouldn't think of them turning out a student of graduate student couldn't read, couldn't write, couldn't think
2:24 pm
critically, couldn't deal with the internet. why is it okay for them to turn out students who are not able to be good citizens? that has got to change. it's interesting, this year, in a couple of months, stanford, for the first time, one of the major universities in this country, the tulane of the west i guess we call or the miami dade of the west, given where we are here, stanford is requiring that all freshmen take a course in civics. that's a major statement. understand how stanford resources that other schools don't. i get it and we can debate over what the actual content of the course should be but good for them and hopefully other schools will follow follow suit. another thing is to respect public service. the idea i think we want more and more americans to have to get in public service. it's one of the best ways i know of undoing this separation.
2:25 pm
we all have separate, separate experiences and we don't have common experience anymore. when tom brokaw and others write the greatest generation and write about the draft world war two, one of the reasons they liked it so much is it brought americans together who would normally their lives would never cross. i'm not suggesting we bring back a draft, but we want to bring back public service. we want to incentivize it. the white house of about a month or two ago just announced a new climate corps. 20,000 jobs will be created for young people to go work on climate issues. california has started several programs. but every state, every major city ought to incentivize young people, or maybe not so young people could be gap years, but it can be later in life to go do public. breaks down the divide between society and government. hopefully people would then stop using phrases like deep state deep state as us hate to break the news to you. we are you know government is of the people tens of millions of americans work in government.
2:26 pm
so instead of criticizing it, instead of treating it like a pariah, what we want to do is attract the best and brightest to go work in government. so we ought to incentivize it give people an experience. it's great training, even if they decide not to make government their career. hopefully it'll change the way they. they are. think about it. look, these these obligation, these ideas, public service, civics country before party, a person getting informed, getting involved, ruling out violence, open to compromise, being civil and so forth. these things just going to happen and we shouldn't wait for someone to show up here. mr. smith ain't going to come to washington and this all happen. it's only going to happen from the bottom up. it's going to happen when american citizens to as voters, for example, demand of their politicians, those who want officers want reelection, that
2:27 pm
they put the country before party or person. that's something we can demand. we can give it to those who do that and withhold votes from those who don't. business leaders, business can give employees the off to vote or to work at polling stations. business leaders should think twice, just like the other day. if you noticed, ibm and apple and others pulled advertising from used to be called twitter for macs because of the antisemitism that elon musk was trafficking in. well, they could just as pull their advertising or support outlets that are undermining democracy, that are giving airtime to elections. iowa, that ought to be that ought to be possible for businesses, something the people who preach. i mean, americans are many things, but americans are fairly religious compared to other societies around the world.
2:28 pm
people go to church, to synagogue, to mass work, what have you. for a lot of sermons. add it all up, a lot of homilies, a lot of sermons. okay, well, who is better position than religious authorities talk about nonviolence, to talk about civility, to talk about openness to commerce, to talk about your obligations to your man. we are our brothers and our sisters keepers. who better than people who stand at pulpits to to do that. do journalists have obligations? teachers have obligations. parents have obligations. ronald reagan. one of my favorite quotes about reagan said most important room in the house is the dinner table. that's where families can have the news converse sessions where parents can model certain behaviors and can encourage their their children to be informed, to to debate the the issues. what i want to leave you with and open it up to any or
2:29 pm
comments you may have is that if american democracy is going to persevere and i think it ought to persevere, your democracy is delivered like no other form of government over the ages. i mean, think about it in terms of wealth in, terms of longevity, of lifespans in terms of over the last 75 years, how well we've done the world. the last i checked, the war stayed cold and then ended on terms remarkably advantageous to our interests and values. this is worth this is worth. but it won't just keep itself. it'll be kept by citizens of this of this country. and i think a lot is stake. and normally, when we have elections. and i've looked at a lot of the history of it in most of the occasions, the similarities between the candidates, the differences that may not be the case in november 24. so you the word democracy
2:30 pm
doesn't isn't on the ballot, but it may be on the ballot all the same. and we ought to take the the obligation to be involved, to be informed, to put country before party or person. we ought to take that to heart. thanks very much. and i look forward to your questions. sure i want to applaud like everybody else just did for you're writing this book and bringing to our attention. and i like that you opened up talking about john at jfk. i remember i was in fourth grade, probably about time and there was a little placard on the bookshelf and it was the quote by jfk, ask not what your country can do for you. ask what you can do for your country. so that was emblazoned in my psyche in fourth grade, and i kind of transited that. but i'm going to ask you your
2:31 pm
definition, how so? the question is, if i could isolate one data point where may have gone off the rails and you can respond that i president his name was ronald reagan who said government is the problem and i'd like you to address that issue. yeah. look, i let me say, i worked for ronald reagan for five years. full disclosure. and i thought he was a good president. i thought he left the country better off than he found it, which is the mark of anyone who leads institution. yeah. i wish you hadn't said that. when he often said it, it was a little bit of red meat for the for the crowd. he sometimes said it with a little bit of i would say with the wink, but it was unfortunate because it fed into this idea that government is the problem and the answer is got government can be the problem, but government could also be the solution or part of it. so yeah, i wish he hadn't said that. i think it was a contributed to the where we are now. but again, i think on balance
2:32 pm
lot of what he did was really beneficial. but it got to if he could take one back, that's one of the ones i wish he would take back. yes, ma'am. i became a u.s. citizen in 2020. i'm also a norwegian citizen, so i've lived in this country close to 50 years. but as two things that puzzles me and it's the role of money in, elections and the length campaigns. yeah, because i believe they wear us out. sure good questions. role of money is one of the things that i think has us to where we are now. essentially, money is increasingly unregulated aided in politics and what regulates that are there are truly inadequate. the problem is that the supreme court has essentially equated with free speech so reigning money reigning in the length of campaigns is essentially, i
2:33 pm
think would be see, it's not feasible. so i think we're stuck for the time being with way too much money. hopefully it washes out and offsets one another and campaigns are way too long. but i don't i don't argue your point. i wish our campaigns were shorter and there were far more controls over the spending of money. but the the supreme has made it clear that ain't going to happen. i like the idea of citizens feeling a responsibility to the country. but i'm wondering if our country over the last years or so has shown very much responsibility to them. whether you look at nevada or admitting china to the wto or a variety of other things have made life precarious for much of our population. is it not unreasonable to expect people whose lives have been a misery to to feel loyalty to the country, which has a misery to them? thank you. look, it's you know, we might disagree on the specifics of the
2:34 pm
cases you cited. indeed, we would disagree on the specific of the cases you cited, but i take the point more broadly, which is if do not believe that the government is delivering is performing ways that serve their interests and those of those they care about they are going to turn away. and that explains to the lure of populism, not just this country, but all over. world. so when governments make big mistakes, it has real consequences. i think the war in iraq, which i would describe as a mistake, a big mistake, had real qatar. what it does is it, among other things, it breeds certain skepticism or even contempt for elites and governmental authority. so governments do poorly. it is it is bad for what we're talking about here, for the fabric of our for the relationship between government and the government. so, yeah, we we pay price for when government gets it wrong.
2:35 pm
high you talk about the obligation to stay informed and. now we're in a world of narrowcasting. and back in the day you your local publications your you know your local tv stations where people would get exposed naturally to things that were going on in their community. and i'm curious to know now with paywalls how, we expect citizens stay informed locally when have access to so much free information, but yet the information that they should obliged to know about. they would have to pay for it. the question how that all fits. interesting question. i hadn't about it. so let me think on my feet, which always dangerous what some publications do and probably wish more would do it is have some of what they have outside the paywall so it's free and more and then additional material the paywall. when jaime introduced me. you mentioned that i have a newsletter substack called home and i make it free. i want it available. i want the ideas out there circulating with some other
2:36 pm
people do who livelihood depends on it as they make a percentage of it or a portion it free outside the paywall more. some of it is behind the paywall, so i like that. but i take your point. that said a lot of what's out there, i mean, if you think about the paywall, a major newspaper, the new york, the washington post, the wall street journal, these are not lifestyle changers. the costs or the economist magazine to to it. the idea that would cost a dollar or $2 a week to stay informed, it seems to me, is not a prohibitive cost for for most american and again i like the idea of putting some outside of paywall rather than it. we in the broward county democratic party engage with voters all the time how do we deal with the ignorance of the adults who are supposed to be teaching the children. and i mean things like.
2:37 pm
i'm not registering to vote because vote doesn't count. and it goes on and on that. what do we how do we educate them? well, look, i mean, i thought you were going somewhere else, which is educating those who teach the children. one of the problems in america is the quality is the quality of teacher training. it's a conversation for another day. but we need to do at that. we need to really, i think, rethink the model of teacher education in this country way too. much of it is on methodology and. not enough, i would say on an issue content side issue. look, in terms of the reasons people don't vote, i'm too busy. my vote doesn't count. i haven't had time to look at the candidates. i don't know how in some cases have genuine problems. can't get childcare. my my boss won't let me off from work putting. aside where people have legitimate reasons, all you can do is hope that people get up to speed and you remind people how much votes count. look how close our elections are we. look at the several of our recent presidential elections. less than 100,000 votes.
2:38 pm
distribute it in a couple of states. tip the difference. i'm from new york, a couple of congressional in new york, which traditionally went democratic, went republican last time. that's the reason the speaker of the house is a republican rather than a democrat. you may think that's a good thing or a bad thing. that's not my point. it's simply a thing. so it turns small numbers can have large outcomes. dr. haas everything you say is true, everything you say important. i was going to say the same thing about what you just said, and you're preaching to the choir here. how do you get the word up on this? do you bring this message, the people who need the education. this is a room full of readers. it's great. well, look, part of it is what schools offer up in their curriculum is not in segment parent. we saw the debates months ago or years ago about, you know race and so forth and educational. why aren't parents clamoring to have civics taught in the schools? you look at what some of you have or are paying for private
2:39 pm
school, private, you know, private education at the level. that's a lot of money. why aren't people saying, hey, are we getting value for? that is the curriculum, what it should be. so there's to be involvement. one thing i'm doing my small way as i wrote this book, the bill also i'm working with pbs public broadcasting, and on january 2nd, mark it out, 10:00 eastern, a documentary based on this. so pbs is doing that. and then i think the also, we're two and a half years away, as i said, from july 4th, 2026. what i'm hoping we can use the next two and a half years for something of a collective teaching. this is a real opportunity to about democracy, why it matters needs to be done to make american democracy better. so i'm hoping over the next couple years, as i said, my message is not to be sanguine. i want people to feel a sense of urgency and possibility about american democracy. sure, i have two questions. one, i might ask you to keep it
2:40 pm
to one, just because you've got a line of people behind. okay. choose your favorite. what do you make of the fact that your your old party the republican party is, no longer the party against, russian expansionism. it's the other side. i find i was a republican for over 40 years. i'm a conservative, but this republican party isn't conservative. conservatives believe in precedent and institutions. they're cautious about change. i don't see that anymore in this republican party. will this republican party able to go back to being a conservative party? i don't know. i think we need a conservative party in american politics. so so i worry what american democracy wasn't made for one of the two major parties essentially getting radicalized. and that's we have it's one of the reasons this is a perilous in american democracy. and i say that again as, someone who's been a pretty much a lifelong republican. yes. actually, according to my
2:41 pm
reading, the 35 was really didn't like republic. i mean, parties, political and people are are you? i'm very much in favor of democracy. but i think what occurs to me is in one definition of the democracy gets the most votes, wins the election and. you know, that's not true in the united states. yeah, well, look, we have the electoral. you're going to explain me why it's a good idea to not have whoever gets most vote wins, wins the election. maybe you will. yeah, well, look again at my enthusiasm for the electoral college is finite for what it does, but i don't any way to change it. the reason i wrote this book is there are dozens of ideas out there about how to deal with the college. what this gentleman just popular versus electoral votes about gerrymandering and the distortion of district in ways to threaten one person, one vote. someone else raised the question of political the funding of elections. i get it. there's lots of things that need fixing. but because of how polarized we are because of where we are collectively, these things aren't going to get done. so what i'm when the reason i
2:42 pm
wrote this about obligation is i'm trying to change the context in which these issues are being debated. so hopefully we can get to a point where we can begin to repair or address of these challenges of american democracy. but we can't get there today when think about civics, i think they're mostly thinking the declaration, independence, the constitution and maybe the state constitution, but do you believe that it go beyond that and where the courses of civics would explain how the government is organized why we have deep theory. assistant deputy assistant deputy not at that level, but the answer is yes. i mean, i you know, when i grew up, it was the shorthand was how a bill becomes a law. sure. some of are nodding your head because you're my generation and the figure i think it's useful to understand how think the federal system, the executive branch judiciary legisla tive
2:43 pm
executive federal the federal system, federal state, local. i think it's useful to understand how the system is designed, how it's made to work. the basic principles checks, balances and so forth. yeah, i think those things are part of a of the necessary parts of the civics curriculum. yes, sir. first, i'd like to thank for your contributions on morning joe, and you're on. i turn up the volume in your analysis and commentary is excellent. thank you. the question i have is tomorrow morning. i'm sorry, what? 6:00 tomorrow morning. she'll be right there. so i work in entertainment. i deal with logistics and i think in pragmatic terms, when you're talking about 30 or 40% of a party body and hard core. you're about 50 or 75 or more million people that are siloed off. so there's a communications breakdown which you touched on and they're all in on a guy that's espousing nazi propaganda perspective, speaking people as
2:44 pm
vermin. what do you do to kind of break get them out of the closet, see the light? and that's the whole argument for more informed political space for more people who disagree with you to get involved. and if you don't like the trajectory of american politics. get involved and change to directly. one of the great things about our political is how open it is to citizen initiative, whether mothers against drug drunk driving or the move against gerrymandering in michigan, the san francisco school board. these things were changed by people like people like you in this room who got involved. they're there. they're it's not impermeable. it's not immutable. i think we got time for one more quick question. so i noticed a number of the obligations that you identify. i think, pretty readily. ten years ago, we would have described as norms, nonviolent things like that. how do you view, given that we've watched norms deteriorate over the past ten years, how do
2:45 pm
you these obligations as being different from norms and how would you how do you think about making them more resilient than the norms that we've watched? i struggle with that. obligations are like responsibilities. they're like norms. again, they're things you can't legislate. they're things you can't require. they're things that ought to happen. and that's it comes from people have influence in the society or in a community advocating for them. and then everybody here rewarding, those from public life who practice them, penalizing those in public life for done. very quickly. sure we have about one minute. just real quick. this is a city of immigrants and exiles are a lot of folks here from other places. but we recognize the importance of america to the world. how do we get that so other people understand shifting of our coil and the isolation of stars, why it is important. what we do here is the best thing we can do to promote democracy abroad. but we've got to walk the walk and not just talk the. talk. quality of life here depends upon the quality of order in the. quality of order in the world depends what the united states is prepared to do. that's a third coin, if you
2:46 pm
will. so, yeah, again, but we're not going to effective in the world unless we're effective unless we're we're working here at home with that. a perfect place to end you very much. and we reporters, i think we can do something outside. i'll even sign a few books before i hop on a plane. so thank you. all. we'll have more live coverage of the miami book fair after short break.
2:47 pm
yes. yes. victim two, black victor identifying the ideologies, behavioral patterns and cultural norms that encourage victimhood. the complex. mr. coleman, were you a black victim in words at one point? what does that mean? basically i was very much so looking for excuses in my life. i wasn't taking ownership of certain things that were happening throughout my life. and because of that, i was failing. and it wasn't until i started overcoming these things and start of changing my mindset that my life started to take off. and the trajectory that it did. so. very much so. the book talks about black culture and, the victim ideology that exists within it, but it's also talking about myself and what i went through and how i overcame it. was that experience or era that changed? i think it is series of things,
2:48 pm
one from a sort of religious aspect, you know throughout the bad times that i had, i realized that it could have been worse. you know, i experienced some homelessness for a short period of time, unemployment for a period time raising my son, and then, you know, the best opportunity came from after i was let go from a job after a couple of weeks, couldn't get unemployment i had to ask my mother for money, moved back home. but then my career opportunity came out that. so, you know, those type of things that i became grateful of. and and kind of understood that if as long as you keep fighting, you will succeed. and you don't have to make excuses. and i want to quote from your book and this is what you write, our public relations department has failed us by denying reality and onto victimhood to accrue more social currency. but it's a terrible strategy.
2:49 pm
what that mean and who's who's our public relations department? very much so. i believe that the upper class black celebrities basketball players, you know, lebron james, you you can you can keep going down that list. they're the ones who have the mouthpiece. they're the ones who always get the attention or even down to like someone like sharpton. he always has the attention of the world and he gets to speak on behalf of us whereas normal people, black people get, to say nothing and we're and everybody gets to say, well, we what they think. andy, are saying that a lebron james al sharpton encourage or perpetuate black victimhood. yes. and they they a message that's hypocritical to own lives. so, for example, lebron james said on television, talked about he doesn't if a cop is going to wake up one day, shoot somebody, as if this is a an active thing that most cops go through. meanwhile, he's being escorted from court court by police
2:50 pm
officers. his entire life, he's protected by this very that he thinks might murder him. it's a he wants us to believe that he actually believes that. and if he does actually believe that, that's really disturbing. but he wants people to believe that this is the reality for most americans and most black people, that we are worried that someone's going to wake up on the wrong side of the bed and murderous. the statistics don't show and reality doesn't show that it's it's a farce. and in fact, in your book, you talk about the perception. you ask the question, how many black men have been killed by white policemen and the is greater than a thousand for most people. right. per year. what's the reality. 2019 is about 13. and that just saying who are unarmed. it doesn't mean that if you're unarmed you're not dangerous. so if i'm unarmed and i'm wrestling for the cop's gun, then the cop shoots me. i'm still an unarmed statistic,
2:51 pm
but i was still dangerous. i posed a threat to the to the officer. so i mean if let's say they were all completely innocent. wrong by the cop. cops should be prosecuted. they should be going. and that's a terrible thing. when in the grand scheme of things, when you talk about upon millions of police encounters with all americans, including black americans and the final number of 330 million people within this country, and i don't even know the total amount for four black americans and you have 19 who die. you know, that tells me that the narrative is is far more absurd than the reality. and you go on to talk write about black on black crime. yeah. i think what every demographic commits more crime, their own demographic. so people commit crimes in proximity. so if most black people live amongst other, that's who they commit crimes against. i think what ends up happening is people want to overshadow the actual violence that's happening in certain people because it
2:52 pm
doesn't fit a particular narrative. so the pain that these people are experiencing, the families who have to mourn these people, they get overshadowed because the person doesn't look the opposite of them. it just becomes the status from black victim to black. victor quote we dare not speak out loud so that others outside the black can hear our disdain. yeah. i mean, i think there's this there's a narrative that we're not supposed to talk in front other people like, you know, in front of white people, white people or anybody else. what's our garbage or what's our dirty? this is our dirty laundry is our dirty laundry. but the reality is, like everybody see that we're dirty. just like we see that other people are dirty and a it's a way for us and not address actual issues. it's a way for us to have who never get heard or change the outcome of people's lives, all because we're worried about how other people might see us. well, nothing changes.
2:53 pm
so what is the benefit to being a black victim in your in your thinking about this? the only people who benefits are the people who make money off of it. so the media makes money off of it. people like al sharpton makes of money off of it. as long as you can financially benefit or just get some sort of social currency from it. like we talked about lebron james, now he's an activist, right? so can take a rare and counter profit off of it, maybe start some nonprofit or at least show that he cares so much he's an activist. well, that's it. they're the only ones who benefit from it. everybody else suffers. mr. coleman, in your lifetime, have you experienced overt racism? sure, absolutely. i can count on hand. i would say that this ever happened to me. the vast majority of my encounters with everybody has been generally good. i'm one of the few people in this country.
2:54 pm
most people live in one area or one state. i've lived in five states. i've lived in urban rural and suburban. i've been racial minority of most people look like me, and the vast majority of people i encounter are good people. and i think that the idea that just people are waking up every day or in just large swaths, waking up every day looking to find a reason to hate me just because i look different, i don't think that's the reality of the world today. i don't think that was a when i was a kid living rural new york, like that's not what was actually happening. vast majority of people were actually nice to me. good to me, helped me out when i was homeless. you know, my boss is white and. all the all the other managers got together to put me in a hotel. right. so i didn't and he didn't want any money back. and this is someone who doesn't look like me. you barely even knew who i was. in the kindness of his heart. he did something beneficial for me. so identity politics, in your view, are doing what to this country? it's used to divide. i think race something that's
2:55 pm
always going to exist and don't think race is inherently bad. you know for black americans, it's like a cultural thing. it'd be like if you said, my parents are from italy or my grandparents are from italy. you with a foreign land for americans, a lot of black americans, we don't really have that. so black our cultural reference. so in that aspect, i have no problem with that. just i have no problem with someone who says i'm italian descent. the problem when someone weaponizes that when someone says because you're black, you must behave this way. you must think this way or predetermine your your your outcomes in life. because it. that's where i have problem with it. in your book, you tell story about a package being delivered. yes. to an old address. after reading that story. i'm not sure. i would have reacted the same way. yeah. happened. yeah. basically, i had moved from actually was pretty like upper middle class area and i moved
2:56 pm
back back home in a different area and i went some website, ordered a shirt and i didn't realize the last time i ordered a shirt was when i lived there. so i went and it was dark out and i just. ladies doorbell she was home. her kids. i could hear the kids. and the white lady. yeah, white lady. she was home with the kids in the background. she was peeking through the blinds and she was scared and could hear it in her voice that she was scared. and she said, you know, like i don't have a package. there's nothing going here. and at some point, i didn't try to. and i said, listen, i'm just saying you're scared. all i'm trying to do is get my shirt. and she said nothing came through. and so i went to my car wrote down my address information, my number. i said, if you do have a package, let me. i rang the doorbell again. she's offering my doorbell. i'm called the police as i'm just leaving here for you. i'm leaving. i mean, any harm. and i felt shocked because. i'm not trying to pose any danger. and she actually called me the
2:57 pm
next day and said, actually, it was in my mailbox. and so all you have to do is leave it outside your house. i'll pick up. you don't even have to see me. and that's what i did. but it took me some time to realize if that was my who's sitting at home in some strange came to the door saying is a package. it sounds like a scam. it sounds like something's going on where someone say that lady was racist and reacted. i was black. whereas there are there are so many different ways to kind of view this. and i think it's an easy to singularly go to. i look different than her. back to the book, black victim two. black victor. why is racism or race in general always mentioned talking about conservatives. simple. it is a mechanism of control and behavior over reaction. the fact that race is so demonized in america means it is simply not calling someone a racist. 1920 probably didn't have the same sting it does in 2020.
2:58 pm
this unacceptable reality is a positive in our country, but there are those that have found a way to weaponize racism and benefit politically. yeah, absolutely. you racism is a thing that is to defend. someone calls you how do you how do you defend? you're not a racist. right. if you say i have a black friend, my friends have black families. but you say, oh, now you're tokenizing people. so it's a and actually a pretty ingenious way to slander people. you don't need proof. you just need insinuation. if you look different than someone else, then, well, that's that's a valid reason why you might be racist. maybe there's something there. and so we go on this exploratory mission to defame you, to slander you with no evidence. and that's ultimately what happens with identity politics as. we can say that the reason this person is is this way or this this person is part of this party is because the racist and there's not. what's the evidence?
2:59 pm
did they say something, do something or don't know anything? quote, you could publicly call a black conservative out of anything you want without. repercussion. yes, i've seen it. broadcasters call people. uncle tom's. there's actually a twitter account that i follow where they out all of the and most them are white liberals who say call them uncle tom's. you use the name name calling goes the list even the n-word and no one says anything. and because they're conservative because they're conservative. so god, you know, clarence thomas does something and you know, the doesn't like it. well, then it's current laws. you can say whatever you want. joy-ann reid called him clarence on national television. she's out of a job. nothing happens when you slander black, conservative or republican. you can call them whatever you want on, television on radio and no cares. and i think
84 Views
IN COLLECTIONS
CSPAN2 Television Archive Television Archive News Search ServiceUploaded by TV Archive on