anchors of their community offering events, finding ways to engage with different and diverse communities. so bookstores still have a very muscular and important role to play in american life and culture, even if they're not as ubiquitous as they once were. and even if they're not. even if when i walk down the street and i want to see a bookstore, there isn't one always there. you can watch the rest of this program and all of our book programs any time online at book tv dot org. we weekends on c-span two are an intellectual feast. every saturday, american history tv documents america's story, and on sundays, book tv brings you the latest nonfiction books and authors funding for c-span to come from these television companies and more, including

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on are we there. welcome, everybody. my name is katie vine. i'm a staff writer at texas. psychedelic science and the search for healing with our two authors here, eugenia bowen wrote have a good trip exploring the magic mushroom experience and nestor londono wrote trippy, the peril and promise of medicinal psychedelics encourage everybody to pick one up, pick and pick these books up right after this panel and the authors aren't just down the road here where they'll be signing copies. i'm going to give a quick introduction and i'll ask a few questions. and in the last 15 minutes or so, they'll take questions from the audience. i think we have got mikes here or there's just just this mike here. and please silence your cell phones.

eugenia bohn is a food and nature writer whose work has appeared in many anthologies, magazines and newspapers, including the new york times, the national lampoon, saveur gourmet, bbc science and the wall street journal, where she is a frequent book reviewer. she's a member of the national association of science writers and former president of the new york mycological society. she's a faculty member of the new york botanical garden, where she teaches classes on psychedelic mushrooms and mica. i don't know how to say that word. mike haffajee, thank. yeah, she's the author and or coauthor of nine books on food and biology and has won and been nominated for a variety of awards, including the nautilus, colorado book award and james book, a james beard award. eugenia has been featured on many dozens of radio shows and podcasts, lectured wild widely in diverse venues like the new york public library, the denver botanical society garden and the telluride mushroom festival, where she's a regular speaker. she's featured in the documentary directed by louis schwartzberg fantastic fungi and

the netflix children's show about food, waffles and mochi produced by michelle obama's higher ground productions, are now. londono is a national correspondent for the new york times, where he's worked since 2014. he was born and raised in colombia and has spent two decades covering some of the most important stories for his generation. covered the wars in iraq and afghanistan, and the arab spring served on the editorial board of the new york times and was the newspaper's bureau chief in brazil. ladies and gentlemen, eugenia and nesta. so i wanted to ask first, i guess, because of the research that has been renewed in recent years, psychedelic treatment and experimentation is such a major topic these days. you were talking about how i feel like everywhere i go, somebody is talking about it, and i imagine that a lot of people in this room are also bumping into this conversation.

other books have been written on this topic. of course, michael pollan's book, most notably how to change your mind. i just was wondering if you could start by talking about why you each wanted to write a book on this topic, what you what perspective you saw missing on the shelves. should i start? for me, i think that what really was like an instigating factor was has more people got interested in magic mushrooms? so i'm focused on psilocybin and certain species of magic mushrooms. as more people got him interested in their potential health benefits and mind expansion. all this stuff. and we're doing these mushrooms. and i thought, oh, you know, there's do you know what you're doing? how much is known, how much is unknown, and how much is unknown, viable. and so i thought, you know, it's timely to put a resource out there that answers as many

questions says the reader might have. and that are possible to answer. mm hmm. it's great to be in austin, which coincidentally, is where my book begins. so this feels like coming full circle. i think the seeds of my book idea were planted in 2018 when i went on an ayahuasca retreat in brazil, which is where i was living. and at the time i was in this period of really deep depression and, you know, kind of a midlife crisis on steroids. and i experienced such a dramatic turn around just in the span of nine days. and i became really interested in a handful of questions. you know, the first one was, what the hell just happened inside my brain? if this replicable and is it going to last? and i spent like months just really trying to wrestle with those questions. and the more i did, the more i found that the kind of character

groups that have sort of, you know, brought themselves to the frontlines of this movement in expanding access into psychedelic is so fascinating. and colorful that, like all of a sudden my journalist instincts were really aroused and i thought the era in which i stumbled into this, which is kind of like the post michael pollan era, just cracked the door open for everybody who had been dabbling or operating in the underground to show their colors and to speak really loudly about what they were doing in their belief systems. and i think a second strand of this is for many people that i encountered in my book reporting process, what began as a mental health intervention and a little bit of a hail mary of sorts, brought them to a spiritual awakening or sort of a rematch tuning of what their spiritual life should be and the intersection of spirit, duality and resilience and mental

health. so that became like a really, really fascinating line of reporting to pursue and, you know, it left me with so many tantalizing questions that i'm still trying to answer. mm hmm. did you ever hesitate to to to want to write a book about this? i mean, for any reason? was there anything. oh, my god. yeah. yeah. it's tricky. i mean, it's illegal. it is illegal in most of you know, in the u.s. in general. and it's only decriminalized or legal in a very few places. and you know, it's it's risky. and it was risky to interview people. it was risky to put their names. i mean, i messed out everybody that asked me to ask them, you know, who told their trip reports or who, for example, and and then i asked many who did not. and there are plenty of people who said, i will go to jail for this drug. you know, i believe in it so much. and i was like, no, not on my

not not from my book. so there's really, you know, there a i felt a certain kind of protective ness about my sources and how i was going to portray them. at the same time, i had an obligation to tell those stories because most of what's out there and known about these drugs is anecdotal and it comes from people. science is still nascent. yeah, there was a considerable amount of fear at different stages of the process, but i think for me early on in this journey, when i kind of saw in psychedelics a tool that helps you change your behavior and change your relationship with thoughts. to me, one of the really interesting kind of ideas or notions that happened is i think it gave me a sort of an ability

to renegotiate my relationship with fear and to kind of understand the role of fear place in their life and keeps us in a little bit of a state of risk aversion, oftentimes unnecessarily. so i became a little more comfortable in taking risks. and i think i also concluded that historically we've done a really bad job in this country at having open and candid conversations about mental health and about substance use, and particularly the intersection of these two things. and i think if we are to get to an era where we have better policies and a culture and a society in which we can have more constructive and evidence based conversations about how to think about mental health and substance use and their intersection, i think it does require a little bit of courage and more people willing to sort of step into the light and tell their stories and have

vulnerable and substantive conversations. so i think at the end of the day, i saw in my book project an opportunity to take a step and to be kind of a threat in that broader tapestry of hopefully, you know, better policy, better conversations and an era in which we can seize the potential of these compounds. but also have, you know, kind of a more realistic sense of their limitations and the risk. you know, let me add to that that i did a number of trips which that were safe and legal. and, you know, to the best of my ability, mitigating all risks. but i did a number of trips and before every one, i was trying to figure out how i was going to get out of it. so i was just personally nervous about it every time. so i wanted to add that to the fear. yeah, fear. and i think it's it's interesting to you both in your

books have as balance of on one hand there are great things that can come out of that risk, but you both really tap the brakes and sometimes slam on the brakes on on, on the enthusiasm. we need to be very careful about these drugs. there. you know, things can really go sideways. can you talk about how you dealt with that as you were writing? like, did you would you sometimes go in one direction and then either have an interview or an experience or something? and then because i can see it, i feel like happening in in both of these books, you would be going down and saying, well, this is really great, but and you really had had, i think, wrestled with that and can you talk about that experience? i'll start. so for me, there was a always this worry which is legal and also moral of sliding into giving advice, you know, and i

was that is absolutely not my mandate. my mandate, what i tried to do in this book is to provide a resource. it's up to other people to figure out what they how they fit into the scene and what what what's going on with their mental health. and and so on. so that is a tricky thing to do. it's very easy to uninstall and finally be giving advice, but putting this much space between myself and the reader. my experiences in the reader as i could was important. so like a typical example would be i could say, well, if i take two grams of this mushroom, it may not. what happens to me may not be the same thing as what happens to you. i can't i can't really see that that's already slipping into an advice state. it's more what i have to say is if i take too grams of this substance, what how it affects

me may differently affect someone else. you see the difference? it's semantic, but it really. so it really has to separate this notion of me as the writer suggesting what you should do. i can't do that. then there's another aspect that really was kind of a little bit nuanced, but in my book, a lot of people will call psilocybin a medicine, and some people call it an infusion or a sacrament, and others call them shrooms. and to me, those all imply use medicine implies you're using for healing. and anthea jain or sacraments implies you're using for spiritual purposes a shroom meal. to my ear, that implies you go into the gluttony. you know, so. so i felt by implying use, i mean i couldn't comfortably as a

journalist use any of those words. that's why i say drug use, because the one thing that's cancer resistant, no matter why you use it, is psilocybin as a drunk drug. it affects the functionality of living a drug function. it affects the functionality of living critters. so so i had to go there in that. and there's been definitely pushback from the psychedelic community about the word drug, which some people find misrepresents the potential and so on. but as a writer, i can't slip into calling this drug a medicine because it's a form. it ultimately is a form of ad efficacy. you see what i mean? it's like i would be advocating for the drug being used a certain way. and so those kind of nuances which writers encounter all the time, you know, had to not only recognize but be consistent in my language throughout. yeah, the word drugs certainly carries a substantial amount of

baggage that i think has become heavier since the nixon era. i think when i first stumbled into this field and i was really interested in the language that was being used, but also the marketing and. i found that there was so much, so many claims that were just too good to be true. like one thing you keep hearing over and over again is this was ten years of therapy and one night. and you know, when you when you kind of saw the way in which the field is becoming more competitive and more people were willing to pay more money for these experiences, the marketing kind of got really crazy. and, you know, retreat centers promise that you will have a miracle in a week as long as you can pay $7,000. and to me, it was important to,

you know, give people a more realistic sense of what they could expect and also to show them that there were red flags that they should be wary of. you know, i think psychedelic relics and altered states in general can be very useful in a therapeutic context because they put the mind in a state of disruptive thinking for a period. they can give you a window of opportunity to see things differently, to understand your own personal narrative with greater clarity, to connect dots that may have been elusive before, just to have sort of a burst of an ability to think clearly about the roots of what brought you to a state of depression or addiction or whatever your struggling with. but i think we talk a lot about the therapeutic value and not enough about how this can go wrong, meaning how this process of disruptive thinking and more

malleable thinking can be hijacked either by an inability to sort of bring you to reasonable conclusions and insights that are going to shape behavior in a healthy manner or, you know, by stumbling into somebody who's a predator and who will take advantage of the state you're in, where you're more gullible and more likely to act in in ways or believe things that will not serve you down the line. so i thought it was important to convey to people that these are not in inherent ently benign or healing tools. you know, like many medicines, if taken in kind of the wrong context or at the wrong amount or without sufficient sort of back end support, it, it can leave you more destabilized than healed. and i thought it was important to, you know, fuel that conversation and to give people a more realistic thing, sense of what to expect and more importantly, what to watch for

destabilized or traumatized or broke or or all of the above sexually assaulted. right, right, right. yeah. it seems like you have plenty of examples in in your book about sort of cult leaders. i was wondering, given the history of psychedelics in the u.s., i thought it was really interesting that there's very little mention of lsd in your book. so i was. can you talk about that? i mean, your book engineer is mostly is all of sudden there's this is a lot of ayahuasca, some toad venom in there, some some psilocybin. but i, i kept kind of looking for it and i was like, this is really interesting that i was like, i think in in your book is maybe one line and lsd and and that's sort of it yeah yeah. well in my case it's because i'm into mushrooms. i mean i just yeah, that's my background. yeah. i mean, i'm, i'm interested in mushrooms from a culinary perspective. i'm interested in them from an ecological perspective. i've been writing about all these aspects of mushrooms for

decades. so writing about psychedelic mushrooms, which i've written about before, but writing in this more kind of conclusive, like, here's a resource, maybe you want to take a look at it before you consume these. yeah, it is is a it's that's my that's my beat. you know, that's what i write about. so lsd and didn't pay much attention to lsd and i didn't pay much attention to dmd or, you know, or ayahuasca, for example. although there's parallels in what's happening in the sort of as earnest have said, this sort of marketing of these drugs. but yeah, i'm all about the fungi. yeah, i'm i mean, because i think my journey started in latin america where there's this really interesting and rich ecosystem of retreats and there's a really fascinating story of the indigenous roots of

many of these rituals and traditions that became my entry point. and there was so much to explore and discover that i was not lacking like new and more things to weave into the book. but there is a really, really fascinating, fascinating history from kind of the early period of the fifties through seventies where lsd was being studied oftentimes in really promising ways as a tool to help people overcome addiction or trauma. and that field of research was hastily abandoned. the nixon era, you know, sort of derailed much of what had been percolating and maybe i'm missing it, but i think in this kind of renewed interest in the healing potential psychedelics, i think lsd has been taken a back seat to the broader, you know, array of compounds that people are really interested in. so, you know, there's been a huge explosion of interest in ketamine, which is more of a dissociative than a classic

psychedelic. i think it's kind of like giving us an ability to test drive. what a therapeutic protocol might look like in sort of a medicalized brick and mortar sense. there was a huge amount of interest in mdma with also it's more of an in pathogen than a classic psychedelic, but it was sort of seen as something that, you know, you might get across the finish line in terms of fda approval. and, you know, this was going to sort of bring these compounds into an above ground clinical accessibility, you know, future. and i've never taken lsd. it's never been something i've been hugely drawn to or interested in. but i don't know, maybe we will sort of re discover that field of research and see if that's something that maybe useful. i think part of the problem with lsd is i think in our collective consciousness it's more associated with like a party

drug and, you know, things like ayahuasca are definitely not anybody's idea of a part. so i it's been easier to kind of like gravitate toward things that don't have that counterculture era stigma as we sort of recalibrate our assumptions of some of these compounds. mm hmm. and we were talking earlier about how. the incoming administration and especially with rfk jr, how that is going to possibly shift the discussion on on the research on these drugs. can can you talk about where you feel like this is possibly heading? you're going to get us in trouble now? yeah. you know what's going to happen. are there any red hats in the room? no, but if you know, i can imagine so.

like getting these drugs through the fda, that's like a process that, you know, i don't know. i can't imagine a structural change where the fda is thrown out. the window can happen. but i can imagine it looking. he's laughing. oh, my god. but i can imagine that there would be recommended, you know, that we could have a head of our department of health who says, you know, i think they're pretty good. and it might be, you know, so that in itself is a kind of license to try these drugs and, you know, without some kind of regulatory process that can say, well, if you have schizophrenia in your family, you should probably avoid aids psilocybin, you know, without that kind of stuff out there, then i think we're going to potentially see a lot of people calling emergency rooms and saying, you know, i don't i don't know who i am tonight, you know, and whatever kind of demoralization or scary things that can happen with these drugs, all the more reason

for, you know, books like what are your earnest doe and i are doing, which is trying to kind of fill these gaps because people are taking these drugs and they could very well there could very well be more people taking these drugs. so in the meantime, we join together and share what information we have and that's the most responsible way we can. yeah, there may be a sequel to be done titled make trippy again and make it to early, but so like on you know like the morning after the election as i kind of scroll through my timeline and you know there was mostly gloom and doom and you know but there was kind of a thread of really kind of upbeat thinking among people that i know from psychedelics stuff. and i do think like we're in this really moment where a lot of people who have president

elect trump's year are huge psychedelic enthusiasts, are. r.k. junior has spoken really movingly about the impact an ayahuasca trip had on his son as he was grieving the loss of his mother, who died by suicide. and, you know, he's pretty much taken a libertarian stance on psychedelics, and he's somebody who comes to this subject from a background of somebody who's been in recovery from drug addiction for years and who subscribes to the aa model. and, you know, there's obviously elon musk, theorist joe rogan, matt gates, who has been nominated to be the attorney general, is is one of the few republicans who signed on to a bill that wanted to expand research into psychedelics and also has spoken in, you know, pretty kind of libertarian and liberal ways about drug policy and marijuana legalization. so we do find ourselves in this really strange moment where,

like a very conservative new administration, you know, brings to the table. a lot of people who think these drugs should be legal and that people should have the ability to use them to explore their consciousness, to you know, improve their mental health. so i think it's fair to assume that, like nixon and nancy reagan are rolling in their grave as they read the tea leaves of what is happening. you know, on the other, you know, the incoming era may be so wild and chaotic that they were just may not be band with or traction for this issue to even get like a hearing. but i am fascinated by what we'll see in the years ahead. and also like on kind of the second strand of this, which is the religious freedom lane that has created a really permissive environment for practitioners.

and you also see kind of a future in which religious freedom will only be strengthened from a legal standpoint in the years ahead. so may be, you know, entering a really fascinating and probably bumpy era and what a time to be covering drug policy and psychedelics in particular. well, in your book, the religious freedom piece comes into it because. there are so many ayahuasca churches you know, or other. groups that are forming forming, uh, types of churches, i guess is what you would call it, just to, to try to be protected from that. like, can you talk about how you have been sort of running into them and what what, what their experience has been like? yeah, i mean there's a really interesting history on the case law at the intersection of, um,

drug use or substance use and religious freedom protection starting in the 80. so like kind of a decade into prohibition, the government recognized that native americans had been using peyote for centuries as a sacrament and that it was a very valuable spiritual tool, and they carved out a protection for them to be able to do that safely without running afoul of the controlled substances act. and then, you know, years later, there was law enforcement interest in a couple of small ayahuasca churches, you know, imported a belief system and traditions from brazil and started dabbling somewhat openly in oregon and in new mexico. and that set in motion a really interesting legal battle that wound up in the supreme court, which found unanimously that people who use these tools in a sincere belief that they are an integral part of the spirit of

spiritual practice should have the right to do so. so what we've seen in the past few years is a number of people who began in in the underground come to learn about this. you know, really interesting and somewhat counterintuitive legal history and come out of the shadows. so, like my book opens here in austin at a church run by a woman named whitney lassiter who happens to be in the room. and she was one of the people who kind of understood this history, who became a believer in the healing potential of these compounds and who said, i'm no longer going to be operating in the shadows. i'm going to you know, come out of the closet, create a website and show my true colors. and so far, you know, interestingly, we've seen very little from law enforcement to come in and investigate or go after these churches, i think, because they recognize that the

law, when this has been litigated in the past, has not been on their side. yeah, the psilocybin churches as well. magic mushroom churches there and they're run the gamut from being, you know, ultimately like beards for selling mushrooms. but on the other side people that use the mushrooms for the various sacraments in their communities and congregations, as big as 300 people who are using mushrooms for the various passages of life. and they come together and they have their own sort of homemade spear duality. it's a little problematic because if you're going to use an end theologian, then you kind of need an end theology. and that's what these different churches are evolving to do. but what's really kind of curious, and i write about it quite a bit, is the mainstream religious practitioners like rabbis and priests who are finding that psilocybin, which in some cases cause a mystical

experience for people where they feel oneness with the universe and they might even feel a sense of a, you know, of god and not. so these religious professionals will have been using these drugs and thinking about how they might better minister their congregations, even help their congregations have a more predictable. and i'm putting that and air quotes right more predictive all mystical experience. and so that's happening that what i've seen in some and have some protestant churches some not the catholic church some and the quaker community to a degree and in judaic some maybe because they're not as top down oriented so a congregation can decide for themselves this is the way they want to proceed. so it's, you know, it's psychedelics in general that have this capacity to to sort of

leak into the spiritual practices more widely. if you start a church, i would say right now, let's talk after in the tent, i, i think we're in this fascinating moment where organized religion is hemorrhaging believers, you know, people i think are losing faith in institutions and in particular in, you know, large organized religions that, you know, ask a lot of their believers. and i think one of the really interest sting suggestions that psychedelic churches make to the people who come to them is you can cut the middleman out and you can use these tools to sort of build a new and personal relationship with god or the divinity or just with a concept of somebody being a person of faith. so i think it gives people this radical freedom to go back to the drawing board and re-imagine in their relationship with some

pretty loaded terms, like spirituality of religion, god, faith and one thing that i've been really, really interested in in my book, journey in my personal inspiration, is, you know, i think the people who have found the most healing and the greatest transformation are people for whom psychedelic experiences altered. states have led to some sort of a spiritual awakening. so there's a lot of people who, like start meditating after, you know, they trip a few and understand that there is a really kind of fruitful set of practices that allow you to take blow off the mind and really rich in profound ways. but also i think people recognize faith in psychedelic retreats and settings, the value of community and ritual, and then find other ways to explore that without necessarily, you know, consuming things that alter their states. so you're ten, 20 years from now, i'll be really interested

to see what kind of changes this whole movement and this moment, you know, set in motion when it comes to our collective approach to spirituality. and i think we're at the time where i ask people to start coming to the mic. if you've got questions, i've got a lot more questions than i like. i can keep going all day. so if anybody wants to start coming up to the mic, well, while everybody's coming up, i get my my question is a, did you did you you know, you you ready? okay, we can go. so given that psilocybin is good, can you can you get a little closer to the mic as is? okay. yeah. given that psilocybin is in fact illegal in the state of texas, but amanita and blue lotus is not, can you perhaps speak to the comparison of those two? i'm sorry, amanita and yeah, blue lotus compared to psilocybin we were just talking about.

and i think you may have been eavesdropping, so amanita muscaria is like a dissociative. it's a different kind psychedelic experience. it's a legal mushroom. it's the red one with the white dots and some are experiment, experimenting with it. i mean, there's always going to be people who will try to trip on it, but as one friend of mine said, it makes your body feel so crappy that your mind leaves for a while. it's been used in indigenous settings for as a sleep aid. it 's got a history and it's definitely psychoactive and it's legal in almost all states. i think it's illegal in like louisiana, which is curious in and of itself. but the the other blue lotus is a plant and i think that i'll push so plant stuff over to our nestor since i might go centric but there are different that certainly amanita muscaria is a different experience it

functions in a different way in your brain and the results, the experience you have is is quite different. so there's not that you can't dose them same way, you know, they're two different very different mushrooms. yeah. thanks for asking. do you want to say anything about blue lotus? okay. yeah. there's been a pretty dramatic expansion in structured medical research on various psychedelics, including psilocybin and this kind of finding of kind of triggering real plasticity. i don't know if either of you dug into the medical research has been occurring over the last ten or 15 years in particular. do you have any thing to say about this sort of medical research, recent medical research? should i cover psilocybin. do you want to or you can you can start.

all right. so psilocybin, you know, i think in reason why lsd is not being heard so much is because it's got so much baggage. and psilocybin kind of started to be explored in a kind of academic clinical trial. so trials that are not financed by, you know, pharmaceutical companies like johns hopkins and things. and so there is this exploration into. what's the you know, whether the drug was safe and then you know, what its effects were to affect mood and and various mental illnesses, things like addiction, ocd, depression and ptsd. now there's studies in anorexia nervosa and other mental disorders. a lot of those trials now you're seeing trials being done by new psycho pharmaceutical companies. a lot of these trials, the vast majority are phase one. so they are small.

they've got the sample size is really small and they don't include people with like diabetes or you know, any co-morbidities. so when we extrapolate and go, oh god, psilocybin can cure depression, we're extrapolating from these really small sample sets of people that have, you know, no significant co-morbidities. so we that's why we kind of, you know, need to put the brakes on a little bit. i don't want to squash hope or anything, but, you know, let's like be real about where the science is at. it's nascent. i mean, some things are more further along, some trials, and we're further along. but it's important to you know, it's important to understand how the method works. if you're going to use the science as a basis for your own on advised use. so that's kind of how i look at it and learning how to read a scientific paper. it's not beyond your capacity,

you know, and if you want to find out what trials are going on right now, it's very easy. you got it. clinicaltrials.gov. and there's these different categories you want to put in the drug psilocybin and then put in the element that you're looking to research to see if there's studies. in the past currently or recruiting. so, for example, you might put in psilocybin and then you the next line you're going to input ptsd and then you'll find out what's going on with psilocybin. if you want to find out about mdma or ayahuasca, you would do the same thing. if you're looking to target, you know, find out what's happening in in terms of a specific mental, you know, study subject, you know, yeah, no, i was just going to add, i think there are some social barriers that have got in the way of better research on these compounds. one is the conventional pathways that we rely on to get medicines to market are very, very expensive and, you know, it's

unlikely there's going to be big money to be made off of things like mdma or psilocybin mushrooms because you can't easily patent these. and have sort of a monopoly on, you know, profits for a while and also like, it's hard to expect replicable outcomes because these compounds are so wildly so it's not like testing a blood pressure medicine that's going to act in very predictable ways. if i take it, or if eugenia takes it. and then there's a whole component of how you study and factor in the therapy that oftentimes is kind of, you know, a part of the experience and the spiritual dimension. so i think the science is really kind of stuck because the regulatory pathways and processes we rely on are really not ideal for researching and bringing psychedelics to market. so i think in the foreseeable future, i think we're likely to continue to see this proliferate in more communal and spiritual

settings than in a clinical environment. yeah. thank you both for bringing this conversation to the forefront. i love to hear about it. my question was actually you brought up the question of is it replicable? so just answer that. but second question, i had was it seems like this conversation is gaining more steam as the public feels a greater distrust in pharmaceutical companies, government agencies. what have you did you find that in your research and did those conversations happen to have with the people that you talk to? thank you. 100%. i think when you look at psychiatry and addiction medicine and they're failing too many people, you know, many who come in through the front door and avail themselves of what's in the toolbox are walking away saying, you know, this camp, me,

the only thing there is. so, yeah, i do think there's a moment we're in where there's an erosion of trust in institutions, and particularly the government, where there is growing skepticism about the medical industry and its models. and there's also like a huge challenge of access, like getting a therapist who is accepting new patients. it's really, really hard. so i think there is a very, very strong desire from people who are suffering to try something new. and oftentimes these interventions and these retreats are a hail mary of sorts. you know, they are so but it also means that you're kind of on your own and learning how to evaluate. you know, anybody can put out a when it comes to guiding. and so to learn how to evaluate, you know, the risks that you might encounter is is super

important i think like are expect patients in terms of the medical model are a little bit skewed because as ernesto suggests did the mushroom boom is not the cure the way an antacid did is the cure for acid indigestion the experience is the thing that creates the effects. good, bad, beautiful, horrific. and so the experience is ultimately subject of hence the important role of therapy. and what a lot of people in the psychedelic world talk about, which is integration most of us, which is, you know, kind of pulling together the learnings of the experience, putting the experience in some kind of context or helping you cope with an experience that may be rocked your world in a bad way or a good way. so that therapeutic piece is is

really key and that's where this community aspect that ernesto mentioned is so prolific. why it seems to be happening much. i mean, i wrote about community tripping and it's ultimately the chapters, not so much about tripping as it is about these integration groups. like if you go online and, you know, you look up like tripping groups, they're mainly people who come to trip separately because it's illegal and they're on their own risk level, but then come together to discuss their experiences and to learn, you know, to get some support and and so on. and those integration groups can be very specific. they can be gender based, they can be geography based. they could be like ailment based, like groups for people in recovery or or condition based for people who have autism. so all of that is happening. all of these little groups are emerging thousands of them across the country to help each

other kind of do the therapy that they need done in order to get the best out of their experience or resolve problematic experience is which happen, by the way, let there be no confusion about that. they do happen. and i think we have time for just one more. go ahead. yes, i was wondering, in your research, you've never come across the stone hypothesis. and if so, do you have any views on it? the word hypothesis, stone aid. oh, yeah. yeah. um, yeah, this is a theory that has been, um, around for decades. was it terrence mckenna? terence mckenna came up with a popular. but it's, it's the theory that our ancestors before we kind of became highly supposedly creatures. um, found mushrooms or some other psychoactive compound in

nature and that, that was kind of a catalyst for a cognitive leap that brought us to this stage of humanity. yeah, i think it's been widely debunked. there's nothing to debunk. it's speculative of nonfiction and it's wonderful and interesting and fascinating. and maybe it's true, but how are you going to prove it? i mean, it's just like one of those things that is, in my view, and there's a lot of that in mike in the mycological world. like, have you ever heard the thing about many of them as scary as being to, you know, like a a symbol or beard or a proxy for santa claus? yeah, i've heard that one. google it. i mean, so there's kinds of psycho myths out there and they're wonderful. and i i'm not putting the kibosh on any of that stuff, but i think it's important for us all to apply, especially in the world we're entering now, a little critical thinking like, where is the evidence and, you know, where does it fall on?

the spectrum of interesting ideas, you know, i think that's all we have time. thank you so much. this is a fascinating. study. and as a reminder, they're going to be signing books just around the corner. you can sign up for the church. they're. yeah, we got a list. we'll have more live coverage of the 2024 texas book festival after a short break. this is not the the america that my brothers and sisters and i

who wear the uniform risk our lives to defend. these people have so complete defied all that we hold dear. and so it's personal to me and to so many others that when we swear that oath to support and defend the constitution, to be willing to lay down our lives to ensure the safety, security and freedom of the american people, it is not only heartbreaking, it's my saddening to see these people in the highest positions of power in our country so completely disregard affecting our flag, our constitution, and treating our liberty, our freedom as something that is within their power to give and to take away as they choose.

it's almost as though they haven't read the declaration of independence. it's almost as though they are unaware of the fact that our founders recognized the truth, that our rights and liberties come from god and no one else. and so no one in government. our founders put these words into that declaration because they wanted to remind anybody who got into power, who had a crazy idea of thinking they could take away our freedoms. this was a reminder that these are in alien evil rights endowed upon us by our creator, among them life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

you'll see in my book, i dedicate a chapter to this situation, this mindset it's a chapter about and it's a chapter about where we gain our fundamental inalienable rights from and how dangerous it is when we have people in power who ultimate ali believe that they are the ultimate authority, believe that they are a higher authority than god, and that they have the power to take these rights away. you can look at examples throughout history, examples in present day of leaders who believe this and the danger is actions that derive live from those who believe they are more powerful than god. all of the outrage, all of this sadness, all of the fear that i

feel, it's natural for us to feel as americans who love our country should motivate us to take action. i don't want you going home tonight depress most. you're like too late. but you won't go home tonight feeling depressed because understanding why the democrat elite are doing what are doing. it's because deep down inside they know that they are weak. when we take action based on the power that is given to us in our constitution, they know that when we stand united as americans who may have different views on different issues, we may have different ideas on how we solve the great problems of our time, but who stand together

united on the foundation of freedom and our ability to live in a peaceful and prosperous society. we are the greatest threat to their power. and that's that is the call to action that we have. we just observe memorial day on monday, a day to pause for of us who have served, for those of us who have lost brothers and sisters who paid that ultimate price. it's a tough day because we remember the times that we spent with them. we remember the jokes and laughter that we shared. we remember those cold nights in the field, miserable. and yet somehow enjoying our bond and our time together. and we have this opportunity to reflect upon their soccer face.

and even with the sadness and the sense of loss that we feel, celebrate who are and ask ourselves, how do we best honor them? they sacrifice their lives in service to a country, to defend freedom. how can we defend that freedom? how can we best honor their legacy? it's by not losing sight of what we can accomplish when we, the people, stand together. it's not losing sight of the fact that our founders placed in our hands the power to have a government of by and for the people that they reminded us that our government only exists with the consent of the governed. so we see our free speech under attack. we have to protect the free speech. all americans. we have to stand up and exercise our voices, use our freedom of

speech to defend others whose freedom of speech may be attacked. we have to stand up for the freedom of religion in our country and make sure that our government protects that right. not only the freedom worship as we choose, but to express that in the way that we choose, whether it be in private or in public. we to stand up and recognize the fact that our founders passed the second amendment after the first for a very specific reason they understood the fragility of this system of democracy and how those in power are too often tempted, abuse that power. and so they they passed the second amendment after the first in the event of a tyrannical trying to take away our free to serve as that check on that

abuse of power. we have to elect leaders understand these facts who are committed to truly uphold that oath of office that. they take who understand that vision that our founders had for our country. on january 27th, in 1838, president lincoln delivered a speech that was powerful then, but is very precious to the moment that we are facing in this country. he spoke to the young men's lyceum of springfield, illinois, and said, quote, at what point then is approach of danger to be expected? i answer if it ever reach us, it must spring up amongst us. it cannot come from abroad or if

destruction our lot, we must be its author and. as a nation of free men, we must live through all time or die by suicide. so why is it that we have one private company determining the medical school curriculum and education of every medical school in united states? they have a monopoly because they write the exams and they accredit the schools. so imagine if every college had a curriculum and standardized exams written by one private company. what would that look like? you wouldn't see innovative advance spence in education. and guess what? medical education is? a joke. it's a joke. we are in dinosaur level practices of writing on stone tablets and memorize and regurgitate that molecules of

the krebs cycle. five different points in your medical education. why we're teaching technical skills, but we're not teaching the non technical skills, like listening and being empathetic and communicating clearly and humility knowing your limits. that's what makes somebody a good doctor interpreting the literature critically. instead, we beat these highly creative, altruistic young people with this memorize and regurgitate culture. you memorize all these drugs, you regurgitate, you come out with a reflex, you put your head down, you see things that just are bizarre. they make sense. they violate every piece intellectual curiosity, your brain, and you're told, put your head down. just keep memorizing, regurgitate, taking a five centimeter margin for a melanoma in the leg. but i half a centimeter margin, if it's on the face and nobody asks, well, wait. if different results are the same results, the average age of puberty goes down 1.5 weeks every year. for the last 30 years, kids are

having puberty now years prior, earlier than what they had just half a century ago. is anyone asking why it when pancreatic cancer rates doubled in the last 20 years? is anyone asking why the first day of anatomy class? i'm curious what your experiences were in the first day of anatomy. i remember we saw the lung, the first time i saw the actual lung, and it was black and, you know, as appalled all of us and the instructor here saw our reaction and said, oh, that's because this cadaver that we're dissecting was someone who lived in a city and people live in a city, their lungs black. but don't worry, it doesn't hurt you. and i just thought it's amazing how dismissive we are on these big topics, string theory, glasses of cows, milk a day for every adult. that's a recommendation that still goes on to this. still is anyone questioning the deeply held assumption students didn't. but the fact that there's i would argue the fact that the

the medical organized medical profession basically arranged to have a monopoly on the medical school accreditation system and the residency accreditation system has contributed because there's no competition of ways to educate people. it's right now you have david, you had you had the advantage of both getting m.d. where you got to regurgitate, memorize, and then a jd where it was take both the argument on each side of an issue. and so that was an interesting did you have like whiplash to that professional? socialization is very powerful, but don't assume law doesn't involve its share of memorization and regurgitation often as the building blocks to then trying to sort out a problem of look if medical education has been criticized for a longer than i think any of us have been on this earth. and i remember a long time ago when i was in medical school,

you know, the the latest iteration, people parachuted in to try and save medical education, tried to make us more ethical. and there had been previous iterations and there have been subsequent iterations. so it's it's a real challenge. the thing to understand about medical school curricula and about law school curricula is people have absolute property rights in to teach the same class next year that they taught the preceding year. and they look that way. the people who are making those decisions convinced that that is what someone needs to learn in to be a good doctor. whether they're correct or not. is a very different question than whether they have the ability to veto any new entrance book tv's. live coverage of the texas book festival now.

can welcome to the texas book festival and the c-span book tv tent. my is chris tomlinson and i'm a columnist for the houston chronicle in the san antonio express news. i'm also the author of a recent book called forget the alamo. some of you may know. i'm going to be your moderator for unpacking the extremism, the maga movement and the rise of the latino far right. this is a very topical panel, as you might imagine, and going to trigger some strong feelings. i'm sure. so i want remind everyone that we do have a code of conduct for the texas book festival. please be respectful of each other and of the authors. i will be opening the floor questions toward the end. so please start thinking about what you'd like to ask. we have microphones. we are live television, so

please your way to a microphone. and also i want to remind everyone we here to celebrate books. i am so thrilled to see so many people packing into this little tent. actually, it's a big tent. so thank you for being here. but we also want to sell some books. so after the panel, the authors will be available, sign copies, and they're available in the sales tent, signing tents a little bit down the street. and when you buy a book from the festival, it goes to finance the literacy program that the texas book festival does all year round to make sure that we get the books in the hands of kids and they learn the joy of reading as all of you have done. power, romance is an author and emmy award winning journalist. she's a contributor for telemundo news and msnbc, where she is the host of field report. ramos is a former correspondent for vice news and she's the

author of finding latin x in search of. the voices redefining latino identity. ramos was born in miami. cuban and mexican parents grew up in madrid and currently lives in brooklyn, new york isaac arnstein auf her latest book, which we'll be discussing. defectors the rise of the latino far right and what it means for american. some of it was reported right here in texas along those counties down along the border. isaac orange north is a national political for the washington post who covered donald trump the make america great political movement and the elected officials, activists, donors and media figures on the right who are powering the republican party? his on president trump's agenda for veterans won the sidney hillman foundation's sidney award and the national press club's sandy hume award. isaac will be discussing his book, finish what we started the maga movement's ground war to end democracy. please welcome these authors to

texas. -- y'all make me proud. thank you. so i'm going to ask isaac to set the stage. there's one particular person in your book, dan schultz. what did he do? and then allowed maga supporters to take over the republican party. dan it's funny, dan was just messaging me last night and, and dan, is this who for years and years and years was shouting from the rooftops that anyone who would which for decades was no one saying that the republican party is an actual organization and people are familiar with the republican national committee. but there are state committees and county committees all the way down to precinct committees. the precinct, like the the smallest building block of

politics, the place where you go to vote. and his discovery was that these lower level positions were often vacant because people weren't paying attention. people didn't care. people didn't think that they mattered. and so that was power that was there for taking. and if trump supporters and eventually, after 2020 election deniers over those positions, then could set the future of the party. and it was steve bannon who in the aftermath of january 6th recalled dan what had been saying and plucked him out of obscurity and and elevated as the answer for trump supporters who felt lost after january 6th and were wondering what they could do. and that really set the party and the movement on course for the comeback that trump just completed, you know, from from complete isolation to even within the party to being the nominee and becoming president

again, power picking really opens in texas on the border, you know, with um, with the people who frankly just turned several border counties into counties. it's very prescient us. tell us what you learned when you were down there. yeah, i mean, i think the what you just described right. think the idea was that so many latinos would would always reject that. right. and trumpism and i think what you find at the border and i have to tell any of you, is that the perception that the democratic party has had of latinos is very different from the way that many latinos, everyone but that many latinos see themselves as. one of the things that one notices at the border is the way that our story as latinos has changed in the last 30 years. right? what used to really unify is the solidaire, the sort of heart of our story was based on that immigrant narrative and that origin story. and for years, that sort of how

we built power, identity in these narratives. but here we are staring these border communities, staring at a community that is just vastly different right now. it is third generation latino. so the children of immigrants now, the grandparent of immigrants that are the fastest growing segment within the community. and so what that means is many different things, right? it means that we mostly speak english, that we are typically under the age of 50. it means that we are more americanized, assimilated and so within that reality, there simply seems to be some form of detachment amongst. some folks from that original immigrant story. and so you couple that with sort of this this overshadows element that is very much entrenched american politics. right. which is this idea and i felt it a lot at the border, which is this idea that no matter american, you are in this country, no matter how american you feel, there's this idea that in mainstream america you will always sort of be seen as a perpetual foreigner. and so think that is one of the

the added elements that i think drives some folks to to prove their belonging. and trumpism, we can talk about the very different elements that sort of flip these counties. of course, it's economic anxiety know, of course it's the idea many people are voting with the economy in mind. but i do think that that it is something deeper. i think it has to do with identity politics. i think it has to do with a lot of the racial baggage that we carry. i think it has to do with the way that simply we have become americanized and i think it has to do with with the real forces of discrimination that are on top of us that i think drives some people to want to be seen under trump's and isaac. when you're the people in your book, when they enter dens, call to get involved, they come with a very different sense of reality. and what politics i mean, help us understand who are these people who answered? call well, predominantly in this period, we're talking 20, 21.

and again, you have to remember it's time when trump was not in the picture, you know, he was basically in hiding for the first six months after leaving. and these were people who were inspired. the idea that the election stolen, that couldn't be that he had lost and that getting involved in party politics at the local was the solution to that was what they needed to do. and so these were a lot of people who were casual observers of politics, but but not dedicated activists. and this became what was so powerful about this was it became a way of of transforming their lives after coming out of the pandemic. it connected them with a new community, a new social environment full of people who who they identified with. and it took in the party organization.

it wasn't something that that they had to build the ground up. it was something that then took on a life and a momentum of own and and and became something that was spreading all over the country, you know, literally thousands of people signing up for these positions based on something they had heard on steve bannon's podcast and power. the people you talk to i love this turn of phrase, this idea of a fantasy heritage. i mean, it's what i write about, what did that distorted reality that that fantasy? herridge heritage, what was it for the people you encountered and how did it impact what they did politically? well, even so, even when when donald trump is always saying things like i will deport them, no, they are the criminals in. they are the ones that are stealing your job. i think for for some latinos,

they were they really bite into us versus them. game. and i think, you know, it's seems it seems like something unusual. but if we look at our story, you know, we understand who we are and even even if i think of sort the way that i've that i've navigated my own reporting. right. so i am from miami. my mom cuban, my dad's mexican, but i have a very spanish accent and so even even in my reporting with some latinos, this thick spanish accent stands out. and that is because i think some people will even tell me, oh, well, well, that that's the real spanish. know that that means you're the real latina, know you sort of romanticize this spanish side of me and i think that is very much at the heart of some of these, like, complex identities that navigating right to understand us is to understand the past. the past is born, and where, of course, the spanish colonizers really institutionalized this system, no caste system where, of course, enslaved folks, we always forget to talk about the very brutal reality of of of

that part of politics. but enslaved folks were all the way at the end of the ladder, of course, followed by indigenous folks and by the spaniards. and so that in and of itself, of course, creates now this idea of mestizaje, this sort of racial mixing. and i think in latin america, there's this illusion that we that latin america is sort of a faceless place in there. more than anything with that part of our did is that it always creates this this permission structure to have fantasy heritage, not a permission structure that allows every single one of us latinos, regardless of how we look like, regardless of our background, regardless of our skin color, that fantasy heritage allows us to always draw a direct line whiteness or to the spaniards. and it's interesting then in the united states, what you find is that oftentimes some of these more like latino far right folks and i think about enrique barrio or people other people in the proud boys or for liberty typically their entry into the

world of white nationalism is through heritage, is by introducing themselves as the descendants spaniards or the descendants of europeans to always. these are folks that can be presenting black and brown. but i think the point is that when we sort of carry this racial baggage into the united states, understanding that we typically these european brutes and we romance essays about this accent that i have and what that translates into is a racial dance that a lot of latinos to do in a way that black people don't get to do. right? we get to sort of pick and choose where we in a country, the criminal eyes as black and brown people so much. and so when trump opens the door and allows us to play the us versus them game, some people will take it, but some people under the illusion, the fantasy heritage will see themselves themselves through this light of whiteness. and so it's a very powerful tool that i'm not giving the trump campaign credit for understand. here.

that is really easy. no, it's the us versus them gaming that is so rooted in our history. and so i think in your book, it's it's really a kind of arizona, georgia and predominantly white maga people who see themselves as patriots as defenders of the nation. what are they afraid of what are they defending the country against? yeah, what struck me in palin's book is the what she's describing is this this craving for belong and identity formation. and that's the same thing that's happening with a lot of the people in my book. and the best way i can explain is the way that that i came to understand it was the way that steve bannon explained it to me. it through through a 20th century philosopher called eric hoffer, who studied the rise of fascism and communism and what he described was the opportunity

to substitute your individual frustrations with belonging to a collective identity that was empowering, and that is that is really, i think, the key to understanding why people would would choose an undemocratic outcome, why choose not freedom free people choose not freedom because they look around and freedom sucks, you know, they look at they look at the world that freedom got them and they don't like it it's just it's kind of the flipside of what what fdr used to say. democracy will save itself when it proves itself worth saving. and i think both biden bannon understood that. and that's that's what we saw in this election with the the decide faction, with the world as was. and so, you know, my guy is another heritage fantasy.

and idea of an america that was before this nasty idea for the way that things used to be and could again and the reason that that election denial to believe in the 2020 election was stolen became so powerful as a as a mantle for that was that you know it didn't the details about the machines or the the ballots from with bamboo fibers like you know that stuff would always up and go away and it didn't really matter because really mattered was just the feeling of who america belongs to and what america is for and that america is right wing country. and any election that indicates otherwise that's a problem with the election, a problem with america. and that's actually a very old idea on the american right going all the way back to barry goldwater and the and there's a

lot of continuity there. you know, we think about what birtherism was really about. and so election denial was just kind of the latest, greatest version of that. and trump was the person who had the political talent to elevate that from marginal view to a mainstream view. and i think where this ties into to of latino voters, i think there was this idea earlier that democrats had. right. that you cast donald trump as a strong man or as this powerful figure that could bring america back to those days. the theory when in the democratic party was that that would really, really. create a lot of rejection among latinos. right. why? because because of our very history with authoritarianism right and so i think for fruit for many years that was a campaign strategy. you know if you go miami dade county, obviously didn't work. but if you go to miami dade county, it was, you know, donald trump is on the ballot you know, it was an outsider. but i think what they failed to understand is, is the way that

that complicated relationship strongman rule in at times has conditioned us to believe that strongman rule necessary and in latin america. simon bolivar, the liberator of latin america, he himself already inferred decades ago that in certain strongman rule would be necessary, you know, to cure, in his own words and the wounds of latin america. so i think latin america has history of wounds. now, the wounds of the rise and the fall, communism and fascism and gang violence and economic instability in so latin america exposes to too many examples of of of when strongman rule wasn't just sort of rose in organic ways, but how the united states conditioned to believe that that was necessary necessary particularly to cure the west from communism. no, from el salvador, too. and he got out to peru. there was a united states that really conditioned us to believe

that when democracy feels messy the way that it has, both for many americans in the last five years, that when things to be, when things seem to be like slipping away from us now, when you feel that there's an invasion and that things are off, we're sort of conditioned to believe that. all right, well, then this of strongman figure like donald trump is necessary and so many times in conversations with with democrats, liberals unconsciously, no, their minds went went from from, you know, understanding that even is the the fundamentally rejected who donald trump was the essence of his strength was necessary in an america that seemed to be slipping away. and they yearned go back to to something. well and also you you're you dig in to how immigrants who have successfully assimilated the self-appointed guardians of the culture of the the status quo. is that right? i mean, yeah, i mean, i think i

think that's that's overwhelmingly what happened in in this election. like, yes, of course, harris won. but i think what you saw is that so, so many immigrants in were okay with donald trump's vision of deportation. and and they embraced that and i think what is what we're now facing is all of us understanding what does that mean? i think one of the questions that i typically get is in if what we're seeing is simply an effect of trumpism or if it's something deeper in in, i don't know that we that we have those answers right now. but i do i do think that it is something deeper. and i think i think once it's very hard for me to understand how collectively you go from embracing some of the values trumpism put forward and how do some latinos go from from embracing those values back to sort of our our myth of who were as a community? i'm i'm not sure i think you brought up steve bannon, the dark lord social media.

um, you know, the he you know, talk about he just keeps bouncing back. how important how important was he to all of this? and what what's he what his role forward. yeah so again so looking back to the to the period in 2021 where where trump was not in a leadership position, bannon was able to step into that void and play that role. i think that was really critical and i think that was also demonstrated for the for the five or six months where he was off the board this year when he was serving his prison sentence. and you really felt that absence like he he sort of grounded the maga information system by having the biggest and most influential audience and i think some of that listlessness that

that the trump campaign had the summer in august adapting to harris instead of biden like you really they really needed bannon in that moment. but he you know he's not going back into the white house. he's very happy where he is playing role that he is now, which is much similar to what he was doing at breitbart fueling trump's rise then when he was, you know, actually had to had to wear a sports coat and go to work in the west wing. and i think let me follow up with you and ask a bit and your next ballot, same question about the role of christian nationalism or the christian evangelical faith in driving this political philosophy. i get that question a lot. i think it's it's complicated. i mean, i think about the way was in butler, pennsylvania for

the for both rallies but when trump went back. to to finish the the rally that got interrupted by the assassination attempt and it really almost every single speaker talked about feeling that god was speaking them to tell them what to do that day and and there were prayer circle prayer circles. people talked about how he was shot at 611, which corresponded to a verse of ephesians as people talked about how the the flag that was set up over the stage became in the wind at one point and it looked like an and there were billboards around that showed it looking like an angel. it didn't even it was so well recognized that. it didn't even require the explanation if you just saw a picture of that flag twisted the wind, you knew what it was. and so there is a way that it, you know, i met a lot of people

at trump rallies who talk them as their church. you know, about them as a religious experience. so there is a way that it's it's separate from. and you see that that traditional churchgoing has declined while participation in the political movement has. and so there's i just want to distinguish between like pew membership and and movement membership because there are ways that that trump's coalition is actually more traditionally secular than reagan's coalition. if you think about like the role of the religious right in this election and ability to to say no to, the pro-life movement. yeah, i mean, for me, it's been interesting because so in the last eight years on often times when when i'm reporting the first question i ask is, you know, what's what's the first

thing you do politically to to immigrants and newly arrived asylum seekers, it's what's the first thing you do to find community in the united states now? what's your go to? and oftentimes it's the church. and so i've seen the way know that these beautiful, safe spaces in where so many people in immigrants for decades have found community and in and themselves and a voice that perhaps they could an outside i've seen i've seen the transformation and i've seen it in the valley and i've seen it in miami-dade and i've seen it in the central valley in california. the way that these these spaces have become very, very politicized and there's a reason why latinos now are the fastest growing group of evangelicals. and there's a parallel movement that's taking place in latin america that is completely sort of impacting the boom in the united states, like in latin america. oh, please. i want them all over percent of the population now is evangelical in brazil and in salvador it's around 30%. and so in the last ten years, a

lot of asylum seekers that have been carrying these sort of evangelical values have come to the united states, sort of stepped into these safe spaces and then have and then, of course, their children and their grandchild and then slowly among some of those spaces, they've become very politicized because i think the republican party, particularly trumpism, has understood that in order for christianity to survive, in order to play the long game, you have to go into those spaces. and i've seen campaigning in harlem, harlingen in texas, and so this idea of of maga in politics is really, really becoming in reality in those spaces. there's a reason why donald trump in 2020 launches his evangel goals for trump. the national movement, not in virginia or in ohio, pennsylvania. he goes to miami dade county. and so i think that that's an element that we definitely saw in 2020. one of the reasons why donald trump gets inroads in 2020. he does between 8 to 10 points

better in 2020 than in 2016 is because of that evangelical vote, a vote that in the past had voted with obama and had voted with clinton. and then you're seeing a shift. and often times i have the same question for them. no what do you i mean, how how do you how do your morals sort of justify trumpism? and i think in the latest conversations that i've had is they see him, they see they see as the only way to ensure that christianity survives. so they can they can put the the the deportations aside. they can put the vile language aside. but they see him particular in a world in which we are presented as good versus evil, where there's so myths and disinformation and where the anti trans message has become and i've seen it so deeply entrenched in these evangelical churches, they now see him as only way to sort of ensure the survival of christianity. so we're going to open it up for questions as soon as i ask this

next one. um, there is a microphone in the middle. so i'm going to do something that journalists hate, including me, which is you both. what's next for the people you that you on? you wrote these beautiful, really insightful books about these two critical parts of the maga movement. now that he has one and no one stole any elections, um, what's next? isaac? you know, trump. trump got what he asked for. he asked for vindication and a return to power. and the american people gave it to him. now it's up to him and, the people around him, for how he's going to exercise that. you know, we're seeing some early indications of through his cabinet picks. but, you know he he and people

around him sometimes talk i think as he older he's he's thinking about legacy he's thinking about how he wants to be remembered. and he he talks about desire to be remembered as a as a great president thinks that by winning the popular and being elected again, he has an opportunity here. but that's that's really to rise above. but that's obviously intention with a lot of his lifelong impulses about how he approaches things and so that's that's what's going to be tested immediately and so for me it's i think it's it's two things. i think now i'm very curious around around testing the the compassion around those american voters that voted for mass deportations. and so i'm really curious to see if we will collectively feel the moral outrage that was very evident in 2020 and 2018 when we faced zero tolerance policy and when the country remembered no,

the cries of migrant children being separated from their families, i'm wondering if we will return to that point, because i, i see myself really, really trying to capture what family separation will look like now and then on the other side, i am just again, really trying to dig into into this idea of of of how fractured or not are we as as latinos right. is is that is that something that we can aim to bring back together or? are we simply now being overshadowed by a past, a latin american past that always told us, even back to simon bolivar, who tried to unify america and then it didn't like, are we are those are those roots just this thumb telling us that it was a myth. this whole time, i'm not sure. okay. so we have 15 minutes. we have a lot of questions. so please keep your questions tight and we are live tv, so i will have to cut it off at at noon. so. yes, sir, please go ahead. i think you and isaac, at one

point you said that one reason people voted for trump was due to a deep dissatisfaction. i'm wondering what exactly is dissatisfaction? dissatisfaction in reference to i mean, i understand there's this vast dissatisfaction with garcia economy, but if you look at economic measures, the economy is relatively there's dissatisfaction towards, transgenders and this the woke movement. but these are people that's like a relatively small minority of the population. so not affecting people's lives. your cincinnatus faction towards and yet on some measures is what kind of saves the day and gives us vaccines. so there seems to be like this huge disconnect between people's perception of reality and reality. and so my question is are is the country getting stupider and and in some ways less moral or. i think that's the question right there. and i got to go a no i mean, no,

i mean, i think i think you have to accept people are voting what they view as their enlightened self interest. and you can you can disagree, but their perceptions are and the their are clearly lived conditions that aren't captured by the traditional economic indicators, namely the distribution and, you know, you saw that across the world this year with incumbents getting rejected in elections. so so look, i mean, i think the other way of looking at that is it's not it's not actually the election is not an endorsement of every single thing that trump ran on. it's not a blank check for every single thing he said he would do that he wants to do as much as it is an electorate that really didn't pay that attention to the to the this cycle because of this feeling of, disillusionment

and being fed up with both parties and feeling like nothing ever changed for them. and was only one button to smash. and so they smashed it. okay, shorter questions, shorter answers. next. when i thought thank you for helping unpack extremism, i'm curious as to your thoughts on what is the solution to extremism. is it a multiracial, participatory democracy? is it primarily reform? how do we get out of this whole i don't know if i'm person to offer solutions, not know. my my my job is is to expose my job is to to warn a my job is yes. to expose the blind spots. i think to me, the converse nation starts. i see a lot of people in both in both sides of the aisle, but i see a lot of people in the party that in and i saw in 2016, i saw

this in 2020. they refused to see a lot of these warning signs. the idea no, that latinos were supposed to be at the heart of the multiracial coalition and that were supposed to be the driving force of the future. and in any 2045, that was majority minority, the idea that this could be slipping away, i think for for so many years and people kind of did want to see that. i see i see a lot of people trying to to make sense of this purely through the economic argument. i'm with. i do i do think that it helps explain a lot. but i think it's a to think that that that's all that it's about. no, i think it's it's very deep. i think trumpism exposed a lot of hard truths, which is that we too can be anti-immigrant and that we too be anti lgbtq and that we too, can carry a lot of anti-black ness. and and, and that to me, is a conversation that we need to have and i already see a party that some, you know, that's kind of reacting to this idea that

like they were too woke weren't so woke about the harris campaign but like this idea that they you know that the answer is is is to to just purely focus on on the economy and on perhaps rejecting what i think a lot of latinos were at least telling me in the last couple of days of the campaign, is this lack of political imagination that a lot of democrats had know that people maybe wanted more. but i think we're so scared to talk about these things now. where does this anti-trans sentiment come from? like, let's talk about it. and when we say that we're too what what are we talking about? the idea that, like, we're so discomforted by certain people. so let's talk about that. where does that come from? and i think that to me, as a solution is not politics. it's its own history. and i'm learning that. but maybe you the next conversation, someone else will have solutions, you know? thank you. yeah. hi thanks for both for being here, piggybacking that last question, you that the idea of that kind of democrats refusing to see the warning signs and it seems like we've democrats have have comforted themselves with

the narrative of demographics as destiny for the last 20, 25 years. and in doing so, we've turned a blind eye, really ceded lot of ground to the right. and i'm curious, that has looks like on the ground, as you're reporting, as you're speaking to people, how you know, double time obama voters become, you know, triple time trump voters and the you know, how that has how we see that ground and how does that kind of how how do they respond to that to recapture some of that ground. thanks. right in. i mean, it looks the ground, as you would expect. and i think for for for the last four years. and that's the reason why i wrote the book now, because for the last four years, i was noticing in very subtle ways how. you know, this anti immigrant language was just emerging. now in passing. sometimes when i would go to the bronx now, and particularly during the 2022 midterm elections and among some black dominicans in the language that

they used to describe african-americans and black people was disturbing. and when would go to the border and visiting all the people that i had reported on their stories years ago, and then seeing the way that they were then referring to immigrants and asylum seekers and going to evangelical churches. and then again, this idea that, you know transpeople were here to to destroy america or that they were pedophiles. and so to me, it was just like picking up on on language. at the beginning it was just language and then it turned into to your point, a lot of people that believe through through a very smart trump message, which was based around fear and anger and resentment in that message tapped into a lot of these feelings perhaps were were hidden for a long time. and i think the first question was around sort of this of of of perceptions. now, i think what people missed is in outside of mainstream media like joe rogan's audiences over. 20 to 25% latinos. right. and think we just weren't paying attention to the way that people

were talking freely and unfiltered and in very raw ways in those sort of media worlds, right? they were talking about their feelings. and in this sort of in mainstream media, they were seeing things here that they couldn't see over here. and that's so that's that's how i felt in. oh, yeah, thank next question. hello i have a question regarding well, we saw the elections, the results, and we saw how latino latino community specifically a lot of reckoning to do with where we are. i'm an immigrant. i've and i work with immigrant communities. we see how the shift has happened. and we also know that based on the results of 2016, the result, the answer is not to alienate people, but rather to bring them in. my question is what arguments have you noticed are more effective towards people rather than like just to immediately shut them out instead of having an opportunity to listen to what we're trying to say?

i mean, i think i think you just said it right now i'm with you like the the rhetoric online has been awful, you know, trying blame it. i mean, i'm sure so many people here in other news feed your feeds on social media as well deserve to be deported. it's terrible. and so, no, i think i think the the my only advice right now is, is to listen. and i think oftentimes as reporters, we go in with questions and with stories and with sort of these formulated ideas of what we're about to report on, like we to listen to what people are feeling. you know, and sometimes it's hard to make sense of all these things and polls and stuff. i think the most important thing is, is not to ask people, how did you vote for donald trump, but why? like, explain to me why and that i can work with non am and and then yeah i mean look, the last couple of days in phenix i was with a lot of mcs that is families and there was so much to because sort of they were feeling like the democratic party saw that a harris campaign

had shifted so moderate into the right and i think people are aching to go back to to being inspired not to feeling like after 20 plus years they do deserve, you know, this sort of comprehensive immigration reform and i think i also think we need to pay to to that as well. but i don't i don't i know that i don't have a good answer other than we need to listen. thank you. thank but thank you both for your time. and that's day. isaac, you mentioned a rally going referencing ephesians 611 and i can't help but point out that this is the most frequently referenced biblical in the q and n corpus. similarly, paul, you just referenced encountering the association of transport people with pedophiles. to both of you, my question is this in what ways, if any, are present? do you see the dispersion of the of the conspiratorial right other than, of course, election denial and its fallout? yeah. i mean, you notice cunanan kind of went away because it stopped

being useful or necessary and just became totally mainstreamed with with you know, again not not literally like there being a secret government operative but again, it's not about the details. it's about the feeling and i think you saw you know, there were also who who drifted away and got up with it. and to an earlier question about about deradicalization, you know, it's not terribly scalable, but but one of the few things that that has been shown to work is other who have left. being in touch with people who are who are still in and you know, the and and and making it okay. and that's the that's the big thing. one of the characters in the book explain to me is that admitting you were wrong so embarrassing that it's easier to accept ever more fantastical

explanations and so having someone who took that plunge makes it okay. yeah not just on the on the anti-trans message. i mean, i think the even the economic argument was was full of these obviously anti-immigrant rhetoric, but also anti-trans and all this this idea that you know, how dare the democratic party spend money on them and not on you. and i saw that so much. i mean, in nevada, in arizona, in colorado. so much of the spanish language messaging in the ads revolved around that. i mean, i remember nevada was in spanish. no, they are taking your tax paying, paying money and spending it on them. and so i think beyond truly it goes beyond the sort of conspiracy theories and it taps into two feelings. and i think what that tapped and i try and explain in the book is not just the resentment and the fear, but the disgust. and i think the disgust is very is something that you can

weaponize and disgust. as i said, the book, it's a stronger driver of dehumanization and stronger than than fear and anger in disgust is something that teach people and that in that you learn and i think there was a reason why the trump campaign wanted all of us to see not just immigrants, but black immigrants, pets or you know trans people being pedophiles. there's something about that image that was supposed to invoke a moral panic that felt very real for people, particularly latino men that were really uncomfortable around this idea of changing gender norms. when we're feeling disempowered for for real reasons, because some people just want it to be providers. but there was something very, very threatening about that. and in trump's misogyny in that message, they felt empowered as i think in their in that sense, it went beyond the conspiracies and what feelings evoked. okay, we only have 2 minutes left. so real quick and real quick answers. okay. hi. i'm from south texas, originally

a county, duval county. now it's really disappointing with with the flipping. but when i looked at the results, i was was curious to see that they voted for trump but blew the rest of the ticket. and so my question is, is this permanent is this reliant on trump? do you in your opinion, do you think that this is trump? what does it look like going forward if he's not on top of the ticket? because this is a county that voted for hillary. bernie was very popular. and so i don't know. i just want. okay. so i'm going to go. patrick, real quick because we're about to go off the air. okay. so, no, i think, look, aoc did she asked the same question, who who voted for me and for trump. and the answer that most people gave is because you were authentic as you spoke to. right. there was something about the populism and the message that was directed at them, and they didn't feel that authenticity with harris and i hate using that word. okay. so thank you so much for joining us today. by berks, by the birth, by the

book. we are we're going to go straight to the signing tent, come visit us over there. i thank you all very. so we'll have more live coverage of the 2024 texas poop festival

after. a short break. i think in her honor. if i may say, to come today to two hillsdale and cpi i to to about my fourth book which is just out stumbling towards utopia and in my role that focus on the family i travel about third of the time i a lot of time on airplanes living out of suitcases, etc. and i speak a lot when i'm on the road. i speak to two audiences in groups that people here would call or say deeply blue and progressive. i speak to audiences that people here would say ruby red and conservative, and i speak to a number of audiences that are mostly non-ideological and i'm comfortable in all of them. and one of the common threads

after a speech or a debate or remarks is something like this how did we get in to the mess that we are in? and if people have children and grandchildren, they will say, i'm not only worried about my country, but i am particular really worried about the country the culture, the civilization that i'm leaving to the next generation. and so about two years ago, after this common, you know, iteration, after her traveling, i got out a small stack of of american airlines napkins and i began to scratch an outline of a book that i hoped would answer the question, how did we get into this mess? not any mess, but this mess, this incredibly polarized, uneven time that we find

ourselves in and i love to delve empirical research and data. i love to read. and the more that i research the more that i read, the the the point kept coming back to the 1960s. and i began ask myself, did it really all begin in 1967, 68, earlier with the great society 80. and i found that the answer no. i found the answer and made it the of my book which is that if you want to understand the moral and social revolution of america in 1960s and the seventies you really have to go back to the turn of the 20th century and it was at the turn of the 20th century, relatively speaking a

handful of very influential men and women who were deliberately uncomfortable bold with the american way of life. they were uncomfortable about the declaration of independence and the constitution. they were uncomfortable with the natural nuclear. they were unsure with churches and seminaries. they were uncomfortable with entertainment. they were uncomfortable, overwhelmed only with the american experience. and if you trace a line, the 19 teens and 20 down to 1963, four or five, six, seven, eight, what you find is that all of the seeds that were planted proactively at the turn of the 20th century came to germination and fruition in 67, 68 and 69.

and being a lincoln man, i'd like to demonstrate that in a powerpoint that i have that i brought along and i'd like to go, if i may, very quickly to one of the most disturbing, anguished sitting circuit court judges in united states, harvey wilkinson. he wrote a fabulous memoir ah of his growing up and i particular really loved the the parts of his memoir on the 1960s and he said to overcome come the sixties we must first understand them one must go back in time in order to move forward. i thought that a kind of a beautiful thesis sentence for the research that i was beginning to undertake. i talk about a a small coterie of people at the beginning of stumbling utopia and i and i could talk at greater i've

written a greater length, as you will see about some of this handful of progressives that i think did enormous damage to our constitutional our way of life, and also to the kind of what i think of as the unwritten constitutional way of life, family marriage, parenting, human life, religious liberty, rights, basic magnanimity and civility in the public square, education both higher and the classroom and elementary middle school and and high schools and just for today at hillsdale picked out a kind of for example. ls beginning with john dewey. if you really want to understand and the radicalism of what happened to education culminating in the 1960s and 70 years generally speaking look no

further than john dewey very uncomfortable with the judaic christian tradition very very uncommon notable with objectives of reading, writing, arithmetic as the principal, you know, with the formation of character, the primary role of of public or government schools. and frankly, in private schools as well. he was also i think it's important to say, particularly unimportant and with expressions of faith and religion, which he felt was outside overwhelmingly outside the role of american education. next is margaret sanger, the founder of planned parenthood, a woman early in the american experience was particularly uncomfortable with large sectors of the people she was eugenicist

on steroids. she was very uncomfortable denominational. she with with with those in our american faith community broadly speaking outside of what you and i would say were denominational white anglo-saxon protestants and american, you know, kind of what became progressive protestantism. she had a very big role in shifting american protestantism, too, to a very progressive way of of an expression of a worldview that as a law and a libertarian, how do you answer the question? why should rely on. 1220 old white dead guys who wrote the constitution 250 years ago? okay, great question. i've heard it before, and i will just say this. the constitution that we need to

debate about is not the original constitution. it is the constitution have today. and the constitution we have today was amended 27 times to be an originalist that means you want to see the original meaning of the constitution enforced whenever that meaning was added to the constitution. so the original meaning of 14th amendment dates back to 1868. my last book was the was called the original meaning of the 14th amendment. it's letter and spirit published harvard university press. and that was all about that, meaning was. and so we don't need to privilege and maybe we spend a little too much time talking about the founders and we should talk a lot more about the republicans who gave us the the republicans of their newly formed republican who gave us the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments. having said all that, i do think the people that happened to write the constitution were smart and they were extremely knowledgeable and well-educated about political theory.

and that's the reason why they actually devised a system of government that was unique in its time. it some degree remains unique and it's uniquely good. but only if it's followed. and part of the problems we have with our government is that there have been important chunks of the constitution, which is what i call the lost constitution in one of my books, restoring the lost constitution that have just been ignored or discarded. and if we would be a better society today, we would we would function better if we could bring back all the parts of the constitution and and activate them all. and that's part the mission of i have as an originalist is to revive the lost constitution. all of it does the bill of rights stand in your mind? does it stand the bill of rights is important. it was something that the federalists did not necessarily want to add. it was put into the constitution because of the anti-federalists, but when the federal that there was the federalists who wrote bill of rights, what the anti-federalists were a bunch of amendments that would limit the federal government. but the federalist said, we just

set up this stronger federal government because. that's what we need. so how can we satisfy the concern of the anti-federalists? and remember, at the time they were writing this, they were two states that had refused to join the union. north carolina had not joined and rhode island had not tried. so when the first congressmen to consider whatever they were doing, who set up the government, they only had 11 states, not 13. and what james madison said is we know these people don't trust. we promised them, we give them a bill of rights when in order to ratify the constitution. and so we need to honor promise. but the way they honored their promise was not to effect. and madison explains this is not to pull back our powers, but to protect the individual that people have. and so that's the one reason why the bill of rights we have is so focused on individual rights, because they could mollify the critics by giving them a bill of rights without weakening the structures of government that they established. and that's the reason why anti-federalists we were all dissatisfied with the amendments because, well, all this is giving us is our individual rights. we already have our individual

rights. but it turns out over time, the anti-federalists were right. as governmental powers expanded beyond the original meaning of the constitu ation, we become more and more depend on the rights that happen to be included in the bill of rights. so we can thank the anti-federalists for pushing for that. what's it like to be a libertarian at georgetown university? it's wonderful. it's great. my colleagues are great. my colleagues treat me with respect. people think that if you're in a minority, a political in legal education, even in undergraduate education, must be put upon all the time. but if nice to them, they'll usually be nice to you back. and i haven't really had any unpleasantness with my colleagues. we have our disagreements internally about internal matters and concerning faculty governance. but politically, i basically leave them alone and they leave me alone and. my job there is really to focus on students, not really on my colleagues, my job. there is to be a resource for them, to be a voice for them

when they get into trouble. and i've been able to successfully do that and i get nothing but appreciation from our live coverage of the texas book festival continues. now.

oh oh. hello. hello. good afternoon. yeah, we're in the afternoon. hello and welcome to the 29th annual texas book festival. at this time, you might have heard other moderators say this. can you please silence your cell phones out of respect, the authors in the conversation. so i'll give you a minute to do that after this, the authors will sign the books in the book people signing tents located on 11th street in congress avenue. i know you all are going to be super excited to go gear books

signed after this conversation, so they will be available around 115 and the books are on sale throughout the festival weekend courtesy of book people. so you can help support our authors. texas book festival and the largest independent bookstore in texas by purchasing books by our incredible festival authors and the book people sales tent. a portion of every book sale helps support texas books festival's mission, which includes expanding literacy initiatives and access to literature across the state. those are some things we want to support right? yes. so welcome thank you for coming down. i'll just start by introducing myself. my name is maribel falcon. i'm the librarian for us latino at the benson latin american collection, the university of texas at austin. right over there. yes, i'm and i'd like to welcome our author as we have ray suarez. i'm going to read his bios.

the author of we are home the coming american in the 21st century an oral history. ray suarez. as a writer and broadcaster who currently hosts the weekly affairs radio program and podcast on shifting ground. he was the chief national correspondent for the pbs newshour, host of npr's of the nation and a reporter in chicago, los angeles, london and rome his books include latino americans the holy vote and the old neighborhood. he lives in washington, dc. welcome, marie. thank you. yeah. and our next author is monica jimenez, making neverland race. and law in the creation of puerto rico her bio super easy. monica jimenez is the assistant professor of african and african diaspora studies at the university of texas at austin. and so welcome. thank you both for having us. thank you. texas book festival and all the

people that are involved in the organizing this is really an amazing festival. so thank all for being here. i just want to touch base on both of the books so that we can contextualize the conversation if that's okay. so we are home american in the 21st century. an oral history. ray suarez is a really amazing job of contextualizing immigration in today's times. it's very, very relevant. and actually i wanted to make a point i don't think there are there is a more. panel with two books in this entire festival right now in terms of the political climate. so it's really exciting that you are all here here. yeah, educating yourselves and reading the book and telling more people about this content and this. and so it's a history of immigrant narrative, of merit. oh, how was i going to say this? like a weaving of immigrant narratives? i would say. so it's very good highlights. immigrants from all over the world. so i was very educated in

reading this book. i will tell you that. and making never neverland, monica, a human, as she contextualizes puerto rico and i know that it is it should be an interest to all of us the understanding that we have of puerto rico as a place, the legal precedents that it the relationship that we have with it today, the united states and puerto rico. so we'll be talking about both these books. thank you. so my first question is and i know maybe you've talked about this before, but to contextualize it for the audience here, you know, what what was the motivating to to the moment that you had to write these books and? you also write books that are very personal to you both. you know, you don't write about a history that you're unrelated to. you write about something very personal. your family history. so can you talk a little bit about that moment, that you said, i have to write this book and the process you had in completing it. thank you. sure. thank you for that question. and thank you all for being.

can you hear me? okay. it is felt like it wasn't on higher up there saying, okay, now can you hear me? yes. okay, perfect. so i am originally from bonds of puerto rico. my family. yes, yes, yes my family moved to houston, texas, when i was a kid and we moved as a result of economic shifts in puerto rico. made it difficult for my dad to to find work at the time he was working in the petrochemical industry in puerto rico, which a very small industry was a very small industry that was sort of winding down. so the next sort of logical jump was houston, texas, right? it the industry he knew and it was the closest place where that industry existed. and so as a result of, growing up in houston and sort of wondering about my own family's migration, how we ended up there, why we were there, why

there were so few puerto ricans in houston, and then really wanting to know more about that history, always reading, you know, oral memoirs, histories of puerto ricans in the diaspora. and they were always very centered on the east coast. and that was not my experience in houston, texas, in the nineties. right. so for me, it was really a question of trying understand why we were where were and was here at the university of texas austin in law school and sort of querying those. when i stumbled. the thing that obsessed me for like the next 15 years, which is the subject of this book, which is the legal relationship between the u.s. and puerto rico, so not just you why people move, but the kind of underpinnings why people move, right? and my interest in law was always about law shaping us, always, whether we know it or not. right. it is the thing that is kind of like an atmosphere that we don't ever touch but touches us all the time. and so that was sort of the

motivation in trying to understand how this law that is sort of the underpinnings or the clouds that hang over puerto rico impacted my family personally. but all of our sort of diasporic families and and the history of this place and this should have had an asterisk somewhere in the program because it's probably the only or puerto rican author panel in festival. indeed but as luck would have it my family didn't move to houston it moved it moved to brooklyn. so i sound like i sound. a book was sort of swirling around in my head as numbers. immigrants numbers of attempted arrival has continued to rise through the 21st century. but if there is catalyzing or crystallizing, it was sitting in

my living room in washington d.c. and watching a torch lit parade not too far away, really, in charlottesville virginia. the unite the rally where, thousands of young white with torches marched around the statue of robert e lee and chanted you will not replace and kind of a pull on the road to damascus moment. i said yeah now i know the book i have to write because the discourse in the united states around immigration has now so badly off track and so little related to who comes what they do when they come, what they've contribute and contribute every day to the life of this country that i thought i have to write a book that pushes back in the other direction. so.

i got a contract and started to write this really angry book. and my editor who got first couple of chapters, said, no, no, you're not writing that book. i understand why you want to write that, but why don't you take these terrific people who are showing up in your chapters and instead of them standing in the wings, move them to the center of the book. it is a very thing for a writer to admit that is is correct and he is wrong. but that's what happened here. and so immigrants became the really driving narrative force, the beating heart this book and they really they are the the framework the skeleton the spine but also this wonderful wonderful set of stories that will make people remember why

they love this country instead of contributing to the anger around immigration. a confident country is not a angry about immigration. in order for us to, be a confident country again, we should remember that been gathering in from the rest of the world for. 275 years, not 25 years. and that's really how this book began. thank both. i have a question. the legal cases that were referenced in both books, so both are amazing. the history, learning about the history of of puerto rico and our relation in the legal relationship that we have with it, the united states and even in the end, through the immigrant narratives you reference specifically immigration act of 1965, which was signed by lyndon johnson, who's a texan, which related to

us here, and and you, monica, referenced 1901, the downs versus bidwell, which is part of the insular. can you help educate the audience a little bit briefly about the significance of both of these? one is an act signed by the president. another is a supreme court case and kind of reference to to work in the book, you know, because all want to learn today write a little bit. yes, just a little briefing and then you can read the rest it's very common to hear people say now in 2024, you know, i don't mind these people coming here, after all, my ancestors came from fill in the blank ireland italy poll and wherever. but my fill in the blank. great great grandfather great great grandmother did it right way. they did it the way. and every someone says that you should pinch their cheek, show them this book and say, well,

don't say say baloney, because immigration was hardly regulated at all until 1924. so for the first 150 years of the life of this country as a separate nation, if you showed up, you got in pretty much so all irish people and all those sicilians and all those people from eastern, they showed up. they got in unless unless they were sick in a way that could kill them and kill the people waiting for them on shore. you were pretty much waved in. and so the immigration and nationality act of 1924 is a big milepost. the chinese exclusion act is another law which excluded from becoming landed from becoming

legal permanent residents and the asian barred zone act of 1917, which i'll bet all of you were thinking about this morning as you made your way here took the chinese exclusion act and basically ran out the borders of it to most asia, which is, after all, most of the world and if you come here from those places, you cannot become an american citizen. so effectively. from 1776 to just after the civil war, only white people could become citizens of the united states. after post civil war, reconstruction era constitutional amendments black americans could become citizens because they were not citizens until after those amendments were. and then for a long time that

they were the only two people who could naturalize become legal permanent residents. so wong ark, who was born in california, takes the case all the way to the supreme court to prove that he could be a resident of the united states and be a legal permanent. and so could his children. that's 1894. and then until the 1965 act, where we open up the rest of the world to immigration from more places and junk the pro-european europeans centered quota system that. from 1924 to 1965, pretty much it was a europe only thing since then since then we built the country that we're becoming now, much to the dismay of the guys with the torches marching around the statue of robert e lee. i mean, this is this is all hooked up. this is all related.

so yes. law, as she noted, just a moment ago, is a scaffolding around which we build our lives. and in this case, in the case of immigration, it's been absolutely crucial. and everyone was notes right. i love that you said it's a scaffolding thing. and i think thinking about the immigration system in particular, for most of us, we're very privileged and not feeling the effects of that scaffolding or not touching the scaffolding. but if you come as an immigrant, you are with the scaffolding, right? so it is constant sort of part of your life. and so in in my book and in my study, what i was interested in is the way that that scaffolding creates what i find to be a really sort of illogical relationship between the united states and puerto rico. so the book is called making never neverland. when you buy it and read it, you'll see where the title

comes. it's actually a quote from ruth bader ginsburg. but the reason i loved it so much was because to me, the legal relationship between the u.s. and puerto rico does create this kind of in an unknown, intelligible sort, untenable, never, never land where puerto rico is a unincorporated territory. so you asked me about danzy bedwell in particular. this is this 1901 supreme court case that tries to answer the question, what is this place? right. it's after the u.s. first acquires its overseas territories, guam, the philippines is with the rico. cuba and the question is now, what do we do with these places? right. we have these places. they're mostly populated with people who are not speaking english. right. many catholics, which at the time, you know, not seen as sort of white, a similar ball. people. and so it's really question of these folks are mixed race and they're not they are decidedly

not so how do we establish some sort of relationship and so there's series of cases called the insular cases from this early early period. and they deal with things like citizenship. right. they try answer the question, well, if these people aren't us, are they citizens? like what do we do with them? and the the one that i'm most focus on is 1901 decision called down dancy burwell. and it the place where the supreme court first sort of lands on what puerto rico still is in 2024 an unincorporated territory of the united states what that means is that puerto rico is in kind of legal question mark status, right? it is not sort of on a course to be a state which prior to 1901, that was the common trajectory. right? you acquired to make it a state. that was our sort of history of westward expansion. that was the history of hawaii,

which incidentally, was acquired in the weeks really months leading into the acquisitions of puerto rico and the other insular territories. so this question of why did this happen? and so it's really about trying to unpack way that the supreme court in particular my book focuses on congress and the supreme court, but in particular supreme court has created this, like long of territorial status, this untenable that's now very, very knotted, complicated and not easily undone. and in fact, they themselves in most in their most recent decisions, sort of question in how to undo this. right. and kind of like why did we do this right. that was sort of ruth bader ginsburg's point, like, why did we do this? so so that's that's the kind the

scaffolding, right, of the u.s. puerto rico relationship. we're apologetic imperialists. we raided all these places and then acted britain and france and and portugal and belgium were somehow different. they were flat out take places and around the world and that was just the deal. they used the same money. they used they in the case of france they they allowed deputies to sit in the chamber in paris who were from martinique and guadeloupe and algeria, places like that. the united states has always been bizarre and not quite upfront about an imperial power. 1898 was was sort of this moment where you had a kind of cop to who were all these people, millions of them in the philippines and guam and and in the in the weird twilight right way that cuba was occupied and.

the platt amendment which and this is something a lot of americans don't know cuba you can be independent if you do anything we don't like reserve the right to re invade and reassert our authority which was passed by the senate. and when i say the senate, of course, i mean the united states senate, not the cuban senate. and this is not a way of knocking america kind of funny. one of the reasons one of the things that makes america different is that we are apologetic about being imperialists. we are uncomfortable with the idea of sailing oceans and taking people over. that's good. but we did it anyway. yeah, it's going to say, is it good? if we do it anyway, don't know that it's good if you have the grace to be apologetic. i kind of. i kind of think it's better be outright upfront about your colonialism, just like this is who we are and this what we're going to do. because then it's harder right then? i mean, it's a bit more nefarious, i guess, right?

because then you can convince the people colonized that they're not colonized, which is what's happened in puerto rico for a long time. it's why we have an olympic team, among other things. right. so i don't know, i kind of i kind of i appreciate the frank, you know, this is what we're doing. we're here to take your stuff. not like we're here. teach you. which was the american and the us imperial sort of savior. yeah. american tutelage system. we're actually going to show you how to americans. we're going to come and teach you about law. we're going to come and teach about democracy. this is. this is in the supreme court decision right there, like we're going to we don't know how long this will take. so we have to give ourselves a buffer of space to to teach you to be. and in the case of puerto rico, that buffer is 116 years, 120 years. my math is bad. but yeah, over a century we're still learning. apparently. so we have to contend with that too. thank you. the point that legal cases and

they have real on everyday people. and even though 19 01i mean that's still referenced today the way we treat puerto rico. so we might care who's on the supreme court or who's in congress passing immigration laws. so just a point of reference. it does affect all of us and we are all implicated these because we elect the representatives that make these choices. and i'm just i was thinking so much when you were talking because you mention puerto rico, like and the state that the way that the u.s. treats it goes back and forth as. so it's a very complicated history but very fascinating in her that she lays out like i again, i encourage you, even if you've ever been to puerto rico, even if you haven't even if you have no relation to the puerto rican being, americans united states, we still have a relationship, puerto rico. and we should, you know that knowledge so that we better informed. and your book does a really good

job at that. just to switch gears little bit to immigrants, to the immigrant community and the amazing stories that you put together. ray i mean, there's so many i was blown away by these stories. and yesterday i mentioned to you one that particularly, you know, stood out to me, but there's so many so many, you know, as a library for latino studies, you could consider me latina, a mexican american chicano. what you have, you sometimes we think we know about immigration because. we're so close to mexico, we have lot of latin american immigrants. we're like, yeah, we know about the immigrant story. and i did it. after i read this book, i was, i was blown away by immigrants from all over the world, from the african continent, which you have a whole chapter on. we learned that 64% of nigerians that come are college correct and maybe don't know those statistics and just the communities that that they come with and that they build here in the united states, several them were faith based immigrants that

and became i don't want to say the wrong term, but priest leaders in their faith community and build their whole family and networks around this and continue the traditions so don't know if you want to talk a little bit about some of those stories or ones that stood out to you or the one that became a politician too, was good. i just want to so many you know, so many. one of the reasons i include, i did a chapter specifically african immigrants, is because for most of american history, the sons and daughters of africa did not come here as immigrants. they came as property they were coerced, they were kidnaped they were sold. no one said, you know. maybe i'd like to move to baltimore. and they got on a ship and the fact that today, one out of every ten black people in the united states is an immigrant is a kind of redemptive story in a amazing kind of way.

i asked the people from nigeria, from ethiopia, senegal, hey you must have known there were race problem in the united states right. and they all said, oh, yeah, absolutely. you know, we're not we don't grow under a rock. we know what's going on in. but we figured the worst was over. we figured we had a better shot there than we did at home. and that's an amazing whether it's a nigerian uncle largest or an ethiopian banker or a senegalese imam who first joined the united states when he got to the united states. they have a belief in the future of america, where if you watch newsreels of german and fire hoses and you might say well, no, that's not really a country us. it's 20% of all black people in america are either immigrant or the child of immigrants it is an amazing story. so i made sure that i put that

in there and as was alluded to, they're changing the religious demographics of the united states in. the very same moment immigrants, because they are more congregational the affiliated and as part of their immigrant experience which is true of immigrants in 1880 and 1910. and and 2020. part of assimilation journey, part of your acculturation journey is helped by being in many cases not all a member of religious community. so there are west african and african mosques in brooklyn. i visited an enormous hindu temple in frisco, which on a tuesday night was so packed that i had a park like half a mile away. i think of that as a texan thing.

i like a little where you know, for your convenience, walk a half a mile away. i like texas, don't get me wrong. but of course. but this hindu temple was just sort of jaw dropping because you don't think frisco as sort of a new home for people of the asian south asian subcontinent. but, boy, oh boy is it. and as native born americans are becoming rapidly becoming less congregate affiliated, that is people who have no religious identity, no religious activity as part of their lives are becoming rapidly more numerous. it's like a hockey stick trend line in. immigrants are not an. whether it's a leader in the brokering jewish community, which has moved almost en masse out of uzbekistan after, the

fall of the soviet union and are more booker ins in queens and tel aviv than there are in uzbekistan now. they remember a place that no longer exists for them in the united states has become kind of an arc. or the story of the lee family from vietnam that came as boat people after being attacked by pirates in south china sea, making their way to refugee camp in thailand and now the five lee brothers who made it to the united states are retiring from the family business, which is. a $250 million baked goods business. so if you go to a big box retailer on your way home today, you'll see their sugar bowl baked goods. madeleines, brownies, palm buyers and so on. just amazing people, but also

changing in ways that we barely perceive. and that's part of the reason why i wrote this book to, i guess. yes, very good. thank you. another thing i thought that was so interesting, as you're mentioning, they're coming with they with their with their communities something. they say that i think resonates all of us is, you know. we just want what's best for our family, our children. we want a good education for them. we want, you know, like anybody else, sometimes i think there's the narrative around immigration or immigrants is, you know, criminals, which is the talk today on the news, you know, which is anyone which know they're they're they're not criminals despite their their status. but or but they say we want we want good for our children. and i everyone in this room can agree with that. you know like the relating to that that there are people and

they come from communities and they want the same as anybody else good things for their children a safe home i was trying to find the quote i can't find it but i underlined and you know that an american sentiment in a way we can embrace that as an identity inclusion tolerance compassion. you know and i feel like in the stories you that you that you put together they talk a lot about that even despite targeted for who they are. i asked everybody i spoke to what would you tell somebody coming from your country today and almost to a person they said you know i would tell them how hard it is. and after while, i wasn't surprised at the answer because. everybody said it and that lines up. so with the narrative that you hear from a lot of native born americans that they come here for free stuff because they come here because they want to take and they want to get stuff. and when you talk to them them,

they all tell you just how hard it is to get over in. one of the people i profiled came as a young teenager from a civil war torn el salvador and graduated high school and went to work in the office buildings of washington d.c. overnight, cleaning buildings as a career. nobody said to him, oh, well, i guess you're here for the free stuff. he would have been shocked to find out that he was getting any free stuff since he walked into office buildings starting at seven or 8:00 at night. and still in them at 6:00 in the morning when people were coming to do their their regular shift of working in that place, whether it's people who really struggled people who had a relatively easy time because they were nervy and aggressive

and talented all kinds people for all kinds of reasons but one of the worst parts i mean the 19th century is sort of coming back with a vengeance disease disorder and free stuff to take advantage of us. that's a 19th century narrative about immigration. it's almost like we we have this flex that we can't get out of our system. so we just waited an extra century and we're still accused housing immigrants of the same, even though they are workplace affiliated than native born americans. i'll say that again. immigrants are more workplace affiliated than native born americans. maybe i should say it again again and the free stuff thing has just got to go along with the my ancestors played by the rules thing. yeah, maybe we can get rid of those things. that's why we're going to read book so that we can let people say that to us. we'll be informed.

and that's you. that's the task for all of us to maintain, to know what the current dialog is happening, but also to kind of debunk those things when they're set front of us, you know, and repeated and over again so that we don't allow those to to continue and we stop because we know better. right? and the free stuff thing is a big part of the puerto rican story, too. and this idea that people left the island almost in a whimsical way. just yeah, actually, thank you for bringing that up because sitting here thinking as you're talking that other part of the narrative, right? so i think you're focused on the arrival narrative and like what happens when people get here. but i think the more are perhaps equally important narrative that we often don't talk about. and you mentioned and salvador in particular, right, is why people come here how the us. so the story that i tell of of colonialism that i name as colonialism, right? i don't want to play the game of like this is something else. no it is that we can talk about

whether new forms of colonialism or it's just same old colonialism. we always knew. but that's why people to leave. right? so. having sort of had a migration experience, one that was legal right. people don't want to leave their homes. they don't want to leave their families. they don't want to leave their community. it's a really painful and difficult decision. it is discombobulating. it is wrenching and wrenching in there, like it's a right. so so we have to really ask ourselves, why do people undertake what is described as a perilous experience right to come to this country in the hopes of something better? and not everyone finds that something better. and in a lot of it, certainly in hemisphere, a lot of it has to do the way that the u.s. operates in colonial fashion. right. it's certainly an inside of other certainly in the cold war, certainly in puerto rico the

post, sort of hurricane maria, post debt crisis migration out of puerto rico is is pretty outstanding. the numbers of puerto ricans who have left in the last 15 years as a result of being unable to stay because the infrastructure is not there. the investment in developed in developing that infrastructure not there. so i think i think the the the sort of other coin side of the coin is that we really have to look at ourselves as a country and ask ourselves how are how is our government complicit in destabilize housing these places and creating the conditions by which folks then feel the need to take this very difficult journey to then come here and experience a very difficult system that's saying thank you there's really so much touch on i mean we didn't even get to all the points i wanted to make and talk to you about, but hopefully afterwards we can continue talking. and then after we all read the book and discuss it, really, it

please educate yourselves. these are amazing books. they're very accessible to read and as i said, i learned a lot even in my field that is. and i still we're always learning. i think we're going to open it up to. a couple of questions. if anybody has one, i think a really good one would be the future and solutions. just a suggestion. if you have one, you can come to the microphone. yeah, right up here. it's a good question. a question, right? the question. yeah. what are your thoughts on climate migration? very good. that's a good one. okay. relevant climate change is going to be one of the big draw. it already is one of the big drivers of people moving from place to place and, creating civic commotion in homeless as people fight over dwindling resources of. the late ambassador richard said to me in an interview that the

syrian civil, which has just been carnage in syria, we can really call that one of the world's first climate change wars. but there's other ones in somalia, in sudan, in the central african republic, in the congo. it's happening all over the place where. and now a lot of young men are leaving farms in central america and heading north because the work, the agricultural work that they had done for whole working lives is now becoming less reliable, less something that they can on in order to support family members. so climate change is going to be a huge driver of migration. it already is. but if you've got a government that doesn't even fully embrace the idea that it's happening, it's hard for them. concede that that's one of the drivers of what's going on. but but people are running across borders all over the planet. and the idea the biggest,

richest country in the world, most powerful country, the world was just going to sail without being implicated as millions of people go to turkey and greece and italy, germany, and somehow were just going to look back over our shoulders and, say, oh, what happened? as if we weren't implicated in this was always a pipe dream and now we are getting climate casualties all the time on our southern border. yes. and it directly affects puerto rico. well, the hurricanes, which we all saw on the news and it continues to be an issue. it to be a daily issue. right. so rebuilding the infrastructure decline, puerto rico has made it such that daily people lose daily. right. so we remember that kind of like long term, the grid failure. post-hurricane maria where it took nine months for a certain parts of the of the archipelago to get power. but since then, sometimes a strong breeze will knock out the

power. people live with that daily. people live with the sort of, you know, generators in the house that's now incredibly common trying to figure out what's the emergency plan. right. because it's every year it's an it's not like it used to be there would be a major storm every couple of years. and that is one of the reasons that people leave as well. right. for some the destructions of the hurricanes. seven years ago now, they haven't recovered from that. right. so whole communities where the infrastructure wasn't built back up, where sometimes people couldn't rebuild homes. and so the choice was stay and continue to try or leave. i had family members, my grandparents had to leave as elderly people. they just couldn't be there anymore. right there. wasn't the structures for them to do to survive, not even to thrive. right. but to survive, you know. and so, again, when we talk about puerto rico, it's a legal migration so, you know, we don't

think about the kind of legal implications of the immigration system. but in terms of what people experience when they come and the difficulty of making that decision that is still very much present and impacting people's choices. yes. and definitely relatable to all of as different disasters are happening okay on that nice note, we're going to take question when authorities thank you so much for your work and unpacking. the ways which we create environments that people desire to come to. but when they get here, they're as desirable as they thought. so my question to you is, how do we create a welcoming in the in the of the reality of immigration? how do we challenge the narrative that you mentioned? right. and in your book, monica, you talk about the codification of of othering, right? like by law, we other people.

how how do we make our way back to being a welcoming country like we for the first 175 years very good question. thank you. well are we just kind of put that on hold for a while, didn't we, the last couple of weeks of the national campaign in. a candidate who talked about people coming into your kitchen and slitting your throat and invasion and animals and vermin, you know, and that guy one so how do we make the country more welcoming? we're not going to do that for. and, you know, economics is often a lagging indicator, so people don't feel better until. they've been better for a while. so even if the economy turns around and more people are more secure and more confident, it's

going to take some time. part of this latest generation of immigration that we haven't really talked that much about is the fact that almost all the immigrants who come to the united states now are nonwhite and. almost all the immigrants who came to the united states in the first century of the country's were white and a tremendous difference. and it's one that we're still juggling and still sort of wrapping our heads around and. until we do that, not going to be a more welcoming place. the guy who's going to take oath of office on the west front of the capitol in january lamented the fact that more norwegian ins weren't coming to the united states. and why are so many people coming from? well, i won't use the word because we're c-span, too. but he disparaged the countries they were coming from and that nigerians probably didn't want to go back to their huts missing.

the fact that was mentioned. nigerians are the most educated of all immigrants to the united states. so you know yeah, how do we become more welcoming i guess just be welcoming and know more about coming but the national mood, we just reward the guy who who wanted to take us to a very different place. so we'll how that plays out my minute counter with a slightly more optimistic view yeah thank god which is i am an optimist you'll read the book and be like wow, but i am truly always an optimist and always positive and i believe in people. i don't necessarily believe in the nation. and if you read the book, you'll see why and to raise point right, just elected someone who who ran and and is very vocal about disparaging everybody not i mean everybody women can disparaged puerto ricans get disparage everybody gets his merits but.

what i am optimistic about is for that community in ohio was lorain. i can't remember springfield springfield right. when when for whatever reason they were made a target in this vile way that community actually sheltered their haitian migrant community. right. they came together and said, i don't know where this narrative is coming from here. we appreciate our haitian neighbors. right. we appreciate what they have done for this community. we are shoulder to shoulder with them. right. and i think that's a teachable moment, i think, for us again, the atmos sphere might be one that scares us, right? that feels really negative and impossible. but what we do have control over is the micro right? we relate and how we build our communities, schools, our churches our, you know, community centers. and that's where we.

neighbors, right when people arrive in this country, yes, they are buffeted the system. right. and the system that the nation creates. but where they find help is through mutual aid, right through churches, through groups. caritas of austin, right. or catholic charities come and say, hey, welcome and let's help you. and so when i was a young law student, i did a lot of work with those organizations here in town and i you know i will welcome you all especially in the face of what's happening here in our nation and on the larger scale to the work on the smaller scale, if you're already doing it. thank you. and please continue. yeah. and if you haven't think about it right, if you care about creating a welcoming space, then then please work to do that in communities, because i think that's that's the best we can do for now. yeah. and, and has an yeah. can i say yes so we can support

communities we can buy from their businesses and we can, you know, stop others that maybe think otherwise and we can drop. the i-word too. there was a huge campaign, i don't remember ten years ago or something, you know, where we stopped using the term illegal because human being is illegal. so, you know, little things that we volunteering sometimes we have time we have space. we have we a privilege to to help organize asians. and i think in the in the next year and what is ahead we're all going to be relied upon to step up and really support immigrant communities and all, and not just immigrant communities, but the all nonwhite communities. this is a racial issue in america, which is we can't even touch on because running out of time. but i don't know if they'll let me take quick. no, i'm so sorry, but let's continue this conversation. the book signing tent. and you know, and, you know, if part of book clubs or you're part of a church read this book together and continue the conversation is so much we did not touch upon.

honestly again, i learned so much and i thank you both. ray suarez, monica jimenez, the both authors of this wonderful book, thank you all being here. if you want to follow us, the book signing ten, we're going they're going to sign some books and spend some time. you all enjoy the festival. thank you. yeah. book live coverage of this year's texas festival continues shortly. try to walk pain. i was like a crab. it was very strange and i almost the the floor went wriggling away from me and i almost fell

over and i sat back down and i said to my wife something never thought i would ever have occasion to say. i think i'm going to need help. i've never felt anything like this. and so my wife sort of dragged me down the trail, back to the driveway and put me in the passenger of the car and ran in, told the bear that teenage girls like needs help, try to get a cell phone signal. and one of them got one. but i remember her sort of walking a figure eight on the dirt driveway, like trying hook a signal. and he finally got one bar and called the ambulance. and meanwhile in the car and i'm i'm going blind. all of the all these symptoms, the dizziness blind are symptoms of blood loss. and so what i didn't is that i'd had a aneurysm in my pancreatic artery is like this little artery that really ever need to think about who they are and i'd

my whole life aneurysms developed years decades and it was because of a ligament in the wrong place it was literally a freak structural abnormality and this aneurysm had developed a sort of ballooning in the blood vessel at one particular spot. and when a blood vessel that the artery walls get thin and weaker and eventually they can rupture. and if they rupture. there's a very, very good chance that you're going to die two more. excellent. i've already introduced you guys, so know you'll hear from me later. and so what was happening is blood was pouring into my abdomen internally. i was losing a pint of blood every ten or 15 minutes, probably. and like i said, we had one hour transport to the hospital. i was a human hourglass. there's 1010 pints of blood in the human body.

you can lose maybe two thirds of it. and then you cross over to a place where you most people can't come back from. and even if they get a pump. you're full of blood. you've gone past two thirds. it's very very hard to undo that. and so the ambulance came and we drove to the hospital and was feeling a little better because you go into something called compensatory shock and that's your miraculous body realizing that something's off something's wrong, you're dying and it shuts down circulation to all the areas of the body where you don't need it right now. the legs, the arms, the skin and so you of like reboot. i sort of rebooted a little bit and suddenly i was sort of clear minded again. my wife said, i've been going in and out of consciousness. i was babbling and not making any sense. every time i lost consciousness, she thought that was it. and then i would come back and i came and went the whole i was with her. and so finally into the

ambulance, just screaming down road i get to the hospital, i'm still feeling pretty, pretty okay, thinking maybe i didn't even know i need to go to hospital. what a waste of time. and we get there and i go off a cliff and i'd gone out of compensate to shock and into end stage hemorrhagic shock. i was shaking, i was convulsing. i was hypothermic. they rushed me into the trauma bay. the doctors knew immediately what was going. my blood pressure was 60 over 40. i had apparently about 10 minutes left to live, ten or 15. they rushed me into the trauma bay and and they started as one doctor started to insert large gauge needle into my neck, through my neck, into my jugular, transfuse me. no, i had no idea. i had no idea. i was dying and he asked permission to do this. and i. i reacted like most of you guys

would react like, is that really necessary? i it actually didn't hurt at all. so hopefully none of you will ever have to confront this. but if you do, it actually wasn't painful. but but, you know, i could feel some pressure. i think they of numbed the skin on my neck or something. i don't know what they did but i could feel some sort of pressure sort of working on me and what while i'm lying there, i feel i sense this black abyss open up underneath me just to my left edge. of course, there were doctors all around me, but in my mind, we experienced it. the doctors, the nurses, the technicians that was about life was on my and on my left was this place. i didn't want to go. i didn't know i was dying, but i knew i was sort of outbound and i was outbound. i was getting pulled into this abyss this infinitely black pit. right. and i was very scared of it. and i.

at that moment, my dead appeared above me. my dead father, the physicist miguel, is his name. he grew up in europe. very, very sweet brilliant. vaguely spectrum disorder, kind of man. like probably half the physicists in the universe and. he died eight years earlier, and there he was above me in this sort of. it wasn't like a cut out of him, right? it was his essence. it was he was this his energy was there unmixed equal right above me. i was shocked. i mean, i was like, dad, basically. like what you doing here? and. he communicate hated to me, again, not in words. it's very hard there. aren't english words for what was i was experiencing. but he communicate to me, it's okay. you don't have to fight it. you can come with me. i'll take care.

you and i was horrified. i horrified. and my mind. i'm like, you're dead. i'm not going anywhere with you. like, i was actually almost offended at the suggestion i would want to, like, go with you, like you're dead. i'm alive. what are you doing here? we'll talk later. like. like a lot. well, i don't want to have anything to do with you right now. our president often says that he is the champion of black americans, but his policies have not been the champion for black americans. in fact, they're quite unpopular. what a lot of people don't realize, and this what i the reason that wrote the book, black americans assumed that since the large percentage are democrat it's that they're also woke progressives black americans are not woke not as a

group there are some but like their woke and any group if you compared the woke progressives on capital punishment, you'd be shocked to find that black americans from radically diverge when you talk about crime, especially during the george floyd riots, polling numbers were coming out often about we need less law or more law enforcement. black americans in many polls where there was waters, whether it was gallup, were saying they wanted more police, not less. so why was the defund the police movement so visible? so in ways most of america spills, blame and for the plight of black america now what booker t washington's what frederick douglass said was leave black

people alone because the things that you're trying to do on their behalf are harmful. many news stories now have covering the serious level of when woke days won't prosecute. here's what they will cover when a tourist comes to town and gets harmed or injured when they break into someone's house in newport beach. those kinds of stories are still making the news. but what's not making the news are the overwhelming number of black americans who are victimized almost systematically late. and when officers in chicago, in detroit, even though detroit claims they're a lot of progress, you police officers leads, new york city, we need those officers, especially actually in black communities.

one of the charts that you have in your book is about prison rates. explain that. so in beginning of the 20th century, black men were least likely to be in federal prisons. if you say that the trend that we see now the phenomenon that we see now is an outworking of slavery. what explains this drop? the truth of the matter is this is all the police did was arrest people and convict them who were last name of macdonald for crime of that mcdonald's have committed the prison would be overflow ing with these mcdonald's. so what we then argue that somehow our prison system is anti mcdonald's when young black and that's what i talk about in the chapter.

young black youth are overwhelmingly more to be the victims when a grandmother reports to the police that she was assaulted that she was raped. what progressive would have us believe that she identifies black person that did that even though it was a white person that doesn't make any sense. when you see some of the brutal crimes that these people are reporting, they're telling who did it. and all too often, the most victimizer is someone between the age 14 and 28 who happens to be black. you're getting between 35 and 45% of all of the felonies being committed by this smaller cohort of people. is it no wonder that they're disproportionately arrested and

behind bars? what should we be doing to prevent people from assaulting grandma, from doing a home invasion? that's the conversation that we ought to be having, not a conversation that says, well, he really didn't have any choice. he had to do it. too many americans, too many young americans, are dying now because of fentanyl in particular grandson and that son and grandson. and i'm so ma'am, the elections matter. yes, they do. elections matter. communist china. i've been railing about that since thousand and six. they send the chemical in to mexico. cartels. mix them up. they send them over with mules and kill americans. and they want to kill americans. they want to take out a young youth. they to take out a working

class. they want to hollow out and take us over. nobody takes them seriously. donald trump did. we did did. the iron maga triangle, top of the top of the heap. long manufacturing, secure borders. the third element of that and the endless wars. yeah, yeah, yeah. the showman here how was not an endless war that was five years we beat the nazis and the japanese imperial forces we got in we got out we had a mission and. we allowed people to shoot people. yeah. afghanistan, iraq, decades between the two of them. trillions dollars of treasure. i would have occasion to go to walter reed.

and it was said i would see men and women in the rehab places at gyms missing an arm, a leg two legs, two arms, all. our live coverage of the book festival continues now. i'm sorry. hello. hi. welcome. the 29th annual texas festival. at this time, please silence your cell phones. after the conversation, we are going to go over to the signing tent where you can get your copies signed by our two authors. books are for sale throughout the festival weekend courtesy of both people. so can help support our authors that book festival and the largest independent bookstore in

texas by purchasing by our incredible festival authors like these two women next to me and the book people tent which is right over there. a portion of every book sale support texas book festival admission, which includes expanding literacy and access to literature across the state. i'm kathy blackwell, an executive editor of texas monthly magazine. thank you so for joining us on this beautiful day. a little warmer than i was expecting, but still beautiful. i'm going to introduce our authors. we'll have a conversation and then afterward, i'll leave about 15 minutes for questions. we'll take as many as we can. a microphone in the middle. but i'll give you a i'll give you a heads up when it's time to get up there. so me introduce our authors. alex graham is a historian and professor at stony brook university in new york. she holds from princeton, yale and, m.i.t., and has learned how scholars whisper scheme wander

and guard secrets. she is the author of three academic books and. her most recent book, book and dagger, have a galley here, how scholars and librarians became the unlikely spies of world war two. is out from echo this year. liza mundy is an award winning journalist and new york times bestselling author of books, including code girls. a former staff writer for the washington, mundy writes for the atlantic and smithsonian, other publications. her book is the sisterhood the secret history of women at the cia. it was so interesting reading these books. i started with this one first kind of go in chronological order. so i want actually, at least if you want to talk about your book first and why you decided to write it, and then i'll have you do the same. i've been reading about the history of universities for a while and became curious about why so many students in history and literature departments in

the 1950s and 1960s were getting recruited to the cia. it turned out that their professors had all spies during world war two. they couldn't always talk about what they had done, but they came back to the classroom with a bevy of skills, including the ability to fold newspaper into a deadly weapon. is that a deadly weapon right now? it could be a. and then what about you? well, i it started with my book that i was here, my prior book, code girls, women who were recruited to work as codebreakers during world war two. thank you. and and that arose when i came across declassified document saying that school teachers from southwestern virginia, which is my neck of the woods, including potentially my piano teacher, because i ran across her name in the archives, were recruited during world war two to come and break russian codes systems. and i thought, you know, i mean,

that was just it just seemed incredible. a change of fortune and change of and then it turned out that that that tens of more than 10,000 women were recruited to work as codebreakers during the war. and a lot of them from from the south as it is one of the one of the best. carey barry was from texas, a schoolteacher from texas, and she would stay with the russian codebreaking project for the rest of the cold war. and so of that, i was always i mean, i was always interested in world war two as this terrible, wonderful moment when women were competed for in the workforce for the first time, not just in factories, but in in in spy agencies and in codebreaking units. and we had to build our intelligence capability for the first time because pearl harbor, the big wake up call that we didn't have any intelligence capabilities to speak of. and but i was also very interested in after world war two during the cold war, when, you know, all of these major institutions grow up.

and we've seen mad men. we know what various workplaces were like. but this was true in the spy agencies as well, that there were women who wanted to continue to serve and did serve in a very environment. and that's what i wanted to write about with the sisterhood. yeah, that's and so just as a refresher the ss was the precursor to the cia. it was founded after we entered world war two. we didn't really have an intelligence as central intelligence agency and. it was mostly civilians, scholars librarians, mapmakers. i'm sure i'm leaving out a lot of people, but they played a really, really vital role in the war. after the war was over, the cia kind of sprung that. so that's why i was so fascinated to read these two together and at its peak, i wasn't ployed 13,000 civilians, a third of whom are women. you talk about the importance women women specifically played

in the us, as you say, about a third of the members of the ss were women so out of 13,000, maybe thousand 550, which is a good number. pianists were highly sought after to add to what you said also for making. when the us went into world to there were exactly two map portfolio areas of japan in the entire country. the army corps engineers had to mapmakers on the payroll. they needed to make a lot of maps extreme quickly. there weren't good map resources in libraries either, because it had been assumed that you could always go to europe if there was something you especially needed to look at. so the intelligence services immediately took over the map of the new york public library, for example, and recruited a nimble fingered, among others, in order to make situation maps in order to, make tide maps in order to make all of these maps that were needed for strategic and tactical purposes. women served lots of other roles. they went into field undercover

in in occupied europe. a woman was less visible than a man was partly men were taken the germans and sent to work in factories, germany, for example. so you'd be less likely to be stopped or swept up in one of these raids if you were a woman. women worked as also called pianists, but they were the wireless. and this a job where you would be expected to die within like a matter of weeks at the army, treat not the army, but the intelligence training camps and the other didn't look, the students who were training to work the wireless in the ai because it was expected that they were going to be captured and you didn't want them to remember your face. women worked in deadly situations. they also worked in a research analysis in sort of the situation where you are working out strategy or working out you're breaking codes, you're working at the meaning intelligence, the work that they did transformed the course of the war. so that's really compelling, especially given that as soon as

the war was over, you would think that women would a vital part of the cia, but that was not the case. can you talk about eliza? yes. and just to on what elise said, the other the other reason that women were recruited into is intelligence agencies during the war. and this hold true afterwards is a stereotype was the thinking that women were really at menial tasks. that required a lot of focus concentration but didn't require leaps of genius. and and so that would be a stereotype that that that they could come in and do low level work. and one example of that during war when the ss had to figure out your recruiting people to do spy work and analysis work that our country really never done. and you've got figure out how to assess how to assess a person's capability of doing that. i mean, because a lot of the work overseas, not all of it is overseas analytic work at desks and then there's the sort of

derring do of parachuting into a occupied france and working with resistance networks and operating wireless transmissions and and and coping with these very difficult task in a foreign country and it might be in europe, it might in asia. so how do you assess the capability of somebody to do this? we didn't have personality tests and ways that we have now, a lot of which we're also developed during the war. so the oas has developed this sort of by different by gender. they divided people up. and so the men who were recruited were put in these what we would call role playing situation. so they were taken to the northern virginia countryside. they were put in front of a brook and, said, okay, imagine this is a rushing river and it's a chasm and you're being pursued by the gestapo. you've got a wireless or something and you've got to get across, but the bridge is blown out. and then they would this group of recruits to see who would emerge as a leader who could figure out that there were some two by fours that they could make into a bridge and and they

would also evaluate people after to see who could hold their liquor, who could keep their cover story. so that was the task for the men when they recruited the women very highly educated, often bilingual college educated, perfect, often and often even professionally employed, making a good salary like these women who were signing up or were very well qualified for high level. and the the evaluation and they were given was also role playing. and they were put in a office setting and they were given ten memos and they were to develop a good crossref science filing system for of this information. and you know, you could file it effectively and, you could retrieve it. and so that was the thinking about women and, their skills and talents and and wonderfully because, war is an accelerant in so many ways women would rise out sort of that stereotypical

box and and and go overseas and work as you know running exfiltration networks for airmen and and doing all sorts of activities but. but that thinking held true and it held true after war. so the cia knew again that it needed these women. i mean, what we is that, is that once information is collected overseas, got to be kept track of. and so the cia immediately started building this massive class. database that consisted of three by five cards for decades aids. and and they and they had women who were the keep hours of these archives and building the ability to to to know who's important there in the world and which spies for other agencies know each other and which scientists are meeting with other science tests abroad. i mean, this isn't the data gathering part. it's really important. and these skills would come into play with a group of women who were tracking osama laden. i mean, that the ability to databases and to process

information might not be as glamor as the sort of james bond out on a ski slope a spy work but but it is critically important. yeah and your books are my favorite kind of nonfiction books because they are full of so many or like ordinary people put in extraordinary circumstances. right. so you each built these stories around real people, these characters. how did you choose, the people in your books that you kind of these narratives around? it's one of those things where some of the things that happen to these women and in your case and in men of course, to saw is that they if you were to read it in a book of you wouldn't believe it like you would. oh, this is this would never happen. but of course, these stories really happened. so can you talk about some of the characters in your book and why you chose them.

the characters in my book, it follows largely three people who were even before the war, there was joseph curtis, who is sort of a yale professor who found himself yanked of his library and thrown into wartime, where he was asked to track down german agents and make them agents sherman kent, who is a history. he was he spent his whole life waiting for a war when he was teaching, would throw chalk past heads of his students to keep them awake. they don't let us do that anymore. and adele keber, who was a archive hunter, a bibliographic detective, she would take pictures, archives for scholars in the united states. one of the things i came to believe while i was reading the book is that in a time of crisis, you don't rise to the occasion so much. you fall back on your training and it turned out that people like adele kiba been training for this situation their whole life. they just hadn't known about it yet. she was able to go abroad and

she became the most prolific document hunter for the ost. she sent home literally tens of materials. she went. she was undercover in wartime stockholm and she was finding all of these books, all of these documents, all of these maps that she shouldn't have been able to get her hands on. she, for all of the people that she was interfacing, she seemed to change her character, become who they most wanted her to be. so she was talking with german bookstore, german bookstore owners who were sympathetic with germany. she was sympathetic with germany, too. you know, all of this. she had been preparing for before the war took place, so that when happened, she was ready for it. yeah, yeah. so picking up on that, i one of my characters, eloise paige, served with the ss during the war and she had this sort of she wasn't from one of the northeastern ivy league schools, but she had this sort of blueblood resumé that while bill donovan, the head of wasps,

really liked. so he liked people, well-connected, affluent, well-educated families. so he, you know, recruited certainly from from wall street and from yale and from brown and from harvard. but louise page went to a number of different southern schools, including my mother's alma mater, hollins college, in virginia. she was ran a randolph and a page. and those were first families of virginia white families, obviously. and so she, too, was recruited at in having sort of the the right family background and level. and she during the war, she worked well. bill donovan's secretary. and so of course she came to and that then she her career was accelerated and she went overseas and she began files on escaped nazis. so again the ability to keep track of people and to keep files on people and to know where they are would be a thread that would be important for decades. but what's what's interesting

about it, these pages that she she wanted to stay on after the war and she liked the job and she was felt gratified and invested was also from a conservative background. so she was a she was a cold warrior, a staunch anti-communist. and so she stuck around and she is representative of the sacrifice faces that women had to make after the war when it was widely held. if you wanted to stay on with spy work and this was true in other workplaces as well, you couldn't get and you couldn't have children because it was thought that that would just be impossible for a woman to have a career and certainly no spouse would follow woman in an overseas career. but i love louise page also because she's very example. she's a great example of the the kind of personality that thrives in or that that's recruited and you're evaluated for having personality that's comfortable with living undercover. she could be easily put under cover this sort of little woman

you know from virginia with her southern accent mean who would think she was a spy and she became the cia's first overseas station chief athens and but but she was also very willing to be manipulative. she knew where all bodies were buried. she knew all the skeletons in her boss's closet. and there were a lot skeletons because this was a workplace, both during the war and after war, where for the guys at, the top anything went. and so mr. says to mr. says wife and mistress, just all sorts of things and louise page all that and she would use it she one time in a meeting with other with younger she said i had photographs so she was totally willing to give them the same characteristic they were created for. she would turn it and, use it within the building and turn it against her colleagues if she needed to. so that's what i love. i was looking the women who learned how to run operations and then ultimately ended up running them against the institution that hired them. and my favorite one was when louise page was sent to athens

as the first embassy station chief, and they did that because the guys wanted to get rid of them, she had risen to an administrative position in of budgets at the cia and every bigwig had to come and beg her for money to run their operations, you know be it during iran-contra or whatever, you know and they like men to beggar, so they want to get rid of her. they made her overseas and when she was there, though, there was a they thought she would fail. but she succeeded because. she was so gracious and she had these social skills and the greek people loved her. and and so they wanted now to unseat her. so they they an operation against her in which was called back to headquarters for meeting. they sent i just happens all the time in the cia they sent an officer to collect dirt on her from the people in the station and you know, talk about what a lousy leader she was. whatever. and the guy kept saying, well, i'm going to be the next of station, so tell me everything. tell me everything. and so when she came back, she'd brought everybody into the which is the classified facility in

the station. the classified, i mean, the secure room. and she said, okay, you, you, you, you over here, you all can stay. she knew what had happened. she had her own sources. she found out she kicked all the guys out who had ratted on her. and that's i mean, that's how you had to comport yourself. yeah. and time and time again, an issue of your books. you talk about how women were great spies because they were underestimated over and over. can you give a couple examples of that? yeah. so in movies, spies are like their they're what they're buff hunks who have like cool gadgets, right? they spend a lot of time in casinos. yeah, i'm a top. so everybody knows their drink order. but the thing is, spies who act like that in real life, they are not good spies. all right by that. when joseph curtis arrived in istanbul, the spy chief was in a lot of trouble because was acting like a kind of proto james bond. his cover was so blown that every time he went into a casino, the city, the band would start playing a song called boo

boo, baby, i'm a spy. the guys who want to be the center of a spy story. not good spies. it's the people who are easily overlooked. the librarians the professors, women. you know. i mean, i mean, this in the book but in the in france roseville and a woman who a who was working as an administrative staffer at one of the french museums. the germans didn't know that she could understand german. and so they would listen she would listen to them, plan to, take all of these various famous and put them in some nazi official's bathroom, and she would listen to them and pretend not to understand. and then she'd go home and read it very list of where everything was going, which is partly why museums still have good paintings today. some amazing great. and what about you for? i mean, there are many examples, right? right. so after the war, when women want wanted to get into the spy

part of the spy service that oversees the these are the fighter pilot jobs at the cia when. you're the case officer working overseas and it's your job to try to recruit foreign nationals to pass secrets. that's like the tip top job at the cia. it's the most glamorous, most sought after, an absolute. the view was that women couldn't do it. that women couldn't close the deal. they didn't have the social skills. they didn't have the moxie it was the same sort of stereotype held true on wall street. you know, that women couldn't work rainmakers, dealmakers, and also the view was that if a woman was going to recruit agents in foreign countries, that she would likely not be able to recruit men and that women didn't have any about you. so she recruited a woman, she wouldn't get anything for it. so one of my favorite characters, heidi auguste, is a woman who was hired in 1968. she was a college graduate with political science degree. she wanted to be in the cia since the 1950s when she read about it and she hired as a

clerk because. the women had to come in. even then, you know, 20 years after the war, hired as a clerk. and it took her ten years of being a clerk and overseas stations in libya and cambodia and really dangerous places where had to burn out the station or escape on a helicopter or when cambodia was being taken. it took her ten years to earn her way into the spy corps to become a case officer. and that was very unusual. so her first posting was in geneva, switzerland, where the cia had been trying to get a certain piece of technology for a long time from the that the u.n. headquarters in geneva are where the spy services operate often. and so, heidi, went into these big cavernous conference rooms, and she looked around. she saw these male diplomats and their staff, and then she saw all these women clerks and secretaries sitting in that were sitting around the side. and the view was that women like that didn't have access to information, but she knew because she had been a clerk for ten years that she had every in the station, she had access to everything she, burned the

burned bags. she locked up the files of the night, she ran the coding machine like she could get to anything in the office. and so she started she told her boss, she said, i'm going to recruit women. i'm going to target women and then recruit female agents. and so she did one of my favorite recruiting. she had to learn how to play squash because the woman who had the keys to the kingdom that they wanted access to the coding machine for the country that they wanted was a great squash player. and so, heidi, a squash club learn how to play squash asked this woman if she would give her some pointers. they became friends and then they executed this great heist. and so she showed much access. women do. in fact. and also that resentment that the woman and the other in the other office felt that she was being mistreated and overlooked. and because this was a feeling women all over the world were starting to experience in the eighties. and so and being -- at your government or your boss is a big reason why people power secrets

absolutely and you know in your book the nazis hate intellects the mean not in your book you know the nazis hate and in yours we talk about osama bin laden and how he dismissed women right. he he they were so low so that fueled for both the intellects and the women. it fueled kind of their their passion to do this work. but do you agree with that? yeah. and it's also working on the idea that you if somebody is under estimating you you can play them. so one of the tricks that spies used during world war two and i imagine they use to this day, most informants don't know. they're informants. so you can learn to play squash and get amazing information out of a secretary, but also you can make friends with someone you just get him very chatty and stay friends with him. over a series of years, he will give you lots of information. now, the trick, if you don't want to be noticed is people remember who ask questions. so don't ask questions. see the wrong thing and you'll

get you know what i mean? and this i don't know if you've ever experienced having someone explain something to you. never, ever. i don't know what that's like. so this is a of the gender divide that can be weaponized weaponized. did you have anything to add? yeah, absolutely true. there was also the young french woman who also was working as an interpreter for the germans, occupying and she did she took advantage of the mansplaining tendency the part and she got the the rocket plans for the latest rocket that the germans designing and the and the british were able to bomb the rocket factory. selwyn jepson was one of the recruiters for the british. so actually preferred to recruit women. he thought that women had that men didn't, which is that they didn't need to rely on women. they didn't have wives, didn't have secretaries. so he said, you know, this gave

them a kind of cool and lonely courage in the field. wow. so the other the flipside to all of this is are the moral dilemmas that come with being a spy. and each of you talk about that in your books. you know, you have at sometimes you actually address the reader, say, what would you do? you know, and it makes you really think about because you think, oh, sure, i would do this for my country, but you know, your information will probably lead to someone's death at some point. you're turning people, turning assets who you're putting them in danger. so i'd love for you, both of you, to talk about that as well. well, spy craft in particular forces you to solve problems or to come to a conclusion on ethical issues on your own. you can't constantly be calling home to get advice. so, for example, this is a real situation. suppose that you're in wartime and there is a it's going to be crossing a certain you are told by your superiors that there is

a substance. it's heavy water is used in the creation of an atomic bomb. but you don't know that there's a substance that near the germans can't have that ferry can't be allowed to cross the so you are going to have to bomb the ferry. that's bad enough but one person on your team, his friend is going to be on the morning ferry and another person on your team. his mother is going to be on the ferry. so the question is what do you decide to do in that situation? do you tell your mother and maybe mother tells her friend and then maybe it to the germans and the ferry doesn't sink and the germans, when world were two what what do you do in that situation. i'll spoil it for you. which is that the whose mother was going on the ferry, had dinner with her, drugged her food so that she wasn't able to get on the ferry which is a good solution. and the person whose friend was going on the ferry allowed his friends to go on the ferry. and i'll add that they able to plant bombs on the ferry because person who was supposed to be

the ferry recognized that they worked for the resistance didn't know that they were bombs. he thought that they were just smuggling something and he let them do it. and then he was on the ferry when it sank. so they you know, in a sense betrayed someone who was on their side because they knew something about, what they were doing that he didn't. wartime brings incredibly challenging problems, nowhere more acutely than in the life of a spy because spy really does have to solve these problems on their own in a very lonely way. i don't think i could say it any better than elise just said it. and i mean, it continued on in, you know, the in the counterterrorism period when it became a just a completely different form of spy versus bi warfare when you're not you're not up against a country, you're up against individual terrorists who are working together all around world, who are in secret

communications with each other, having secret meetings, hiding out, maybe not technology. you know, the person that you want maybe isn't using technology. they know you're being tracked. so the cia in this case had to figure how to how to get to access the individuals they were after. and then what to do about them. and that to enormous debates within the agency itself over whether you take these people or not. and it also led, you know, the same women who back in back in world war two were recruited for their data management skills. this became a job card target her and the job of the was to use those management skills and the knowledge people around the world, not now so that they could be recruited necessarily to pass information about so they could be killed and and that was just so the people desks who didn't think that they had signed up for this search suddenly found that their skills are being used for a completely

different purpose. yeah. and of course, it's always infuriating to read about women being passed over for promotions or getting the recognition they deserve. but part of your book lies you talk about and some of this was new to me and i was really stunned. the the women who worked in, the women who who tried to flag obama as osama bin laden, who tried to to let people know that we were in for a terrorist war and they were completely ignored over and over again. and it's just devastating. and you feel for these women when 911 happened, they they did their best, but it wasn't enough. yes. we talk about you know how it is definitely an advantage, be an advantage working in the field to be underestimated for whatever because you're nondescript or because you're female. and that can help when you're operating in these lonely outposts, when you are a person

in a pow awful institution and a bureaucracy and you're trying to get your voice heard in meetings and the meetings have to do with, you know, what the major threats are and what they what should be done about. there was a group of women who had been sort of sidelined before 911 into this field of counterterrorist ism, which in the cold war was not regarded as the glamor job. it wasn't the big you know, you weren't going to rocket to the top if you were in the little tiny counterterrorism center, the basement of our headquarters, the cia, a windowless room full of computers. but the women were there and they were very, very. and i have to say, i mean, we saw this again with october 7th. the women who were watching the border between and gaza. that was an all female team that had been assigned a study. these monitors and and history repeating itself. as with as with the 911 attack, these women had spent years

really studying a kind of signals that were they weren't maps and papers. they were people communicating each other and in arabic, also in code and and they tried over and over and over to convince the in washington that shadowy group of terrorists and for years they weren't even sure what their name was the name of their organization was they weren't hamas. they weren't hezbollah they weren't the plo. they were the ultimately their said al and so it took one of the endless years get just get the agency to admit, okay we call them al qaeda. we they they actually have name and so it was very painful for them in that instance to be underestimated and overlooked. i do want to suggest, you know, i'm sure that there are going to be conversations in the near future about, you know, not wanting wokeness in our agencies and that sort of thing. sexism is a catastrophic

intellectual handicap, as these examples show. of, oh, yeah, oh, i'm going to do one more question and then if you have questions, go ahead and start lining up. there are so many other things i want talk to you about. i just think that should be printed up in frame. yes, i agree. just take a moment. especially because and so your book is being made into you're making your back into a tv series. i'm not doing it personally, but having it, that's really exciting. so. it toward the end of the book, when you're talk about the capture of osama bin laden and the women who help make that happen, you write it's that it's not that women are better. it's that women bring something different to the table. it's not an exaggeration to say that the decision be what we now call inclusive is one reason the mission succeeded. so it's just a completely different things are being politicized right now?

all the conversations this past week about women in the military that must be so frustrating for both of you after doing this of research and pouring so much of of your time into these books, to have these things keep coming up. at the same time, we do know that can learn from history right? that's great. i mean, if you want the argument for inclusion, look at world war two. look, the allies. i mean, it wasn't perfect. our military was segregated, but we had the navajo code talkers. we had thousands of women join the effort where the tuskegee airmen, we had, you know, the african-american women wax the 688 six, six, six, eight, eight eight postal battalion. we had we had we were inclusive of i mean, it was a forced inclusion, but but the axis powers by definition and the germans were trying to exterminate a portion were exterminating a portion of their population like if you if want the japanese weren't bringing a diverse group of people into their war effort. so if you want an example of the

importance inclusion and one reason that the allies won look at world war two, that's great. okay, take questions. and just a reminder to keep questions short, they can get a lot of people who want to ask questions. time to do that. okay. thank you so much this was so interesting. you mentioned, i think, laser i'm about the african-american wax. and i that was sort of about my question. i know about the tuskegee airmen, of course, women joining cia efforts as well as in my five efforts in britain. but can you talk a little bit more about black women's roles in world war two? i mean, can you also recommend authors are writing about this or researching this? yes. so was a black codebreaking unit during world war two women, one of the and i think, they were many of them came out well they came of, you know, segregated school system, segregated university system had worked even harder to get their education than than anybody.

i mean, in world war two, only 4% of american people, a four year college degree. and so women who were part of the black codebreaking unit were graduates of howard university. h h historically colleges and universities. and they were working the codes and ciphers of the private sector. so they were charged with seeing what companies be secretly, illegally doing business hitler or with companies, japanese companies like mitsubishi. so it was a the the army's codebreaking unit was was civilian, it was segregated. but there was an all black codebreaking unit and. there is an author who's working on a book about that unit and if you email me through my through my website lies on money.com, i'll give you the name of author because i've been in contact with and i just can't summon it off the top of my head and and the cia mean correct me if i'm wrong i mean the cia owes us was

not the us has employed black in research and analysis for example in the economic warfare unit based in manhattan. if you were me i'd glad to give you information about them as well. that's great. thank you. a number of years ago, i an interview on npr with a woman who was recruited as a cia in a foreign country. part of her job was to get to get assets. people from the country and her job was to tell them. if something happens, give you and your family passports be taken care of. and she knew along that was a complete lie that the u.s. government was never had any intentions of doing that. she eventually left the cia because she couldn't stand that moral bankruptcy that that was and i was just curious, do you think women have a higher moral standard as spies? it's interesting. well there were definitely women who participated in the enhanced

interrogation program in the counterterrorism period, you know, the waterboarding. and so, say in my introduction, the book, that i would never make the argument that women are better than or have a higher moral standard. i would make the argument that that like anybody, women and, they can bring a different skill set to or or sensibility to to a situation. i don't know specifically what your what who that was that you're talking about. i will say that a number of the case officers that i to felt a very profound commitment to make good on whatever promise they had made their asset who they're working with it is pretty routine for agency to resettle people in this country to get them passports to get them medical care for their family members or themselves, to get them education, their kids to give them money. i mean, that's a big inducement there. you know, in some ways, a cia case officer is like being a

journalist. you know, you're trying to get people to give you information, but we can't do any of those things. and and so generally the case officers i interviewed were, you know, regarded it as a profound commitment to to their assets, to make good on what they had promised, which is not to say they didn't find themselves in difficult moral dilemmas many times and women might have might have been evaluated partly on their ability to construct a good filing, but they also went through training the same way that men did and that training included training in how to fight someone in such a way that you leave your opponent injured but dead. so they how to weaponize not just newspapers but their make up compacts they learned place they learned how to use different places. you could hide a cyanide pill. they learned how to restrain him in with his trousers which isn't as. anyway anyway they went into the war knowing. they might have to do all kinds of things.

yeah. and to this day i one of the one of the women i interviewed for book and talked to her afterwards at an event, abigail spanberger, who's a member of congress running for in virginia, and she started talking about the way that they were trained yet to get out of a situation. and just if you have to commit some sort of harm. she had a big pen. is something about its shape is is something that they're trained be able to use and that i not to over politicize this but after the events of january 6th, four years ago, her former colleagues at the cia sent her a bunch of big pens. that she i just read this fascinating book about josephine and i was amazed that we had never heard story before. and, you know, when professors write books, you know, that they're probably, you know, all the details. well, somebody is going to write back and say, what were they went wrong. but this was written by

journalist that was like this was fascinating. can either of you comment on that? josephine baker was a spy during world war two. did marvelous work. although she wasn't a professor, she certainly very cunning, very good at her job. i don't have much to add to that. yes. i mean, and she's i'm so glad you brought her up. she's a great example. i mean she was a marvelous entertainer. she was also a great businesswoman. and and she was a true patriot. and did great public service. the allies, she she important codes, instructions for the allied invasion of italy to northern africa and. so she smuggled them in invisible ink on. her sheet music. she was one of a number of women entertainers who participated in the war effort. again. marlene dietrich did write who i mean, they were prominent in their famous. they still weren't suspected. and so she smuggled instructions

out on her sheet music to north africa. and then when she was there, she was ill and her hospital room became a safe house where people who were planning the invasion of italy would meet you know who's going to think that that people who are visiting a sick entertainer are in her hospital room were meeting to actually discuss war. and i think that's also a good example of how women you from time immemorial in in rooms and dining rooms and salons in their private homes and in her case in a hospital room are able to create what is literally called a safe house. i can add some other examples. the sister of christian dior, the woman for whom the pair of you, miss dior, is named, worked for the french resistance, was caught by the germans and sent to a concentration camp. although she survived. hedy lamarr is anyone familiar this? she works research and development, which was the section of the ss that builds like gadgets, bombs, that sort of thing. they named a bomb after her because of the effect that had

on men when she walked into the room. and she ultimately invented the technology. that's the basis bluetooth. so there's actually in leesburg, there's a photo of josephine baker at her bar paris, and there's also julia child, another famous person, the bathing. right. she she worked on trying to develop shark repellent among other things so that limité she worked on trying to develop repellent, among other things. yeah. and also the person that when you reminded me we talked about the photos in my book, harriet tubman, an american history is one of the greatest example paul's of the power of being an inconspicuous and under. and she basically invented, you know, on her own the art of exfiltration, exfiltrating and slave of americans from the american south, you know, to free north. no training, no instruction.

she is just the most remarkable example of what women in world war two would eventually do for airmen as well. and so she must not be forgotten. and there's a there's a statue of her there's a statue of her on cia at cia headquarters. now. statue? yes. are any more questions? how? oh. oh, i got one more minute, grace. oh, my goodness. which question should i ask? so will quickly books were the nazis were afraid of books, right? they saw them as that's why they were burning them and, confiscating them. but they didn't really understand the power of them right. can you talk sense? right. the book festival i thought would be really great to talk about the role books played in world war two. oh, my goodness. i mean, how much time do you have a minute there's look sherman kent, the history professor i mentioned earlier, the fellow who could throw daggers better than a civil sicilian. he believed that scholars can find out 90% of what an

intelligence agency to know. you just have to do the reading not even secret sources. you just have to do reading. and he proved this after the war. he got a bunch of yale professors to spend the summer reading public documents and finding out a bunch of military that caused a big scandal because congress then found out and believed that was doing research for the russians and. everybody got in a lot of trouble. a cia agent showed up at the yale library and tried to confiscate entire yale library, but he proved he was right. books were put to a lot of uses during the war among them, you know, uses spycraft. and you know some things were given away because. they were accidentally left in the index of books, censorship, that sort of thing. but my point is this that we shouldn't underestimate the people who do the reading. you know, great. that's a great note to end on. thank you so a reminder, the signing tent over there to get your book signed. you guys, so much for coming.

book tv's coverage of this year's texas pop festival continues shortly. the government grew so big and became involved in such seemingly trivial things as magic acts and. orchid growth. yeah, well, you know, maybe when this started coming to my mind, i'm sitting on the 10th circuit in a federal court of appeals. case comes me from new mexico. in my circuit, seventh grader, you trade in burps for laughs. now, you might have been guilty that someday too. i probably was. and instead of going to the principal's office or his parents being called, he was arrested and handcuffed. that's how we're with these things today.

and and we'll get into why. but what is the scope of the problem? it's part of its administrative actions, for sure. it's on all levels. we're all guilty of it. all right. 100 years ago, the entire federal could fit into one slim volume. today, it occupies a whole wall in my office. all right. it's doubled in size since the 1980s. all right. my lifetime, many of you in this room, how many criminal laws are there on the books? nobody knows. in the reagan administration, somebody sat down to try and them all and to count them. and they're just scattered throughout. they gave up gave up get estimated around 3000. right? today it's probably double that. it's at least 5000. the criminal laws today on the federal level. what about regulatory output?

because really statutory outputs, just the tip of the iceberg using congress isn't busy. did you know that on average they they enact laws nodding to 2 to 3 million new words every year. okay. federal regulatory output many times that 100 years ago the federal register which is where they write the rules and publish them was 16 pages long in the year it started recently, it averages 60 to 70000 pages every single year. how many crimes in those regulations? truly, nobody knows the answer to that. but there are at least 300,000 of them. so that's kind of the scope of the growth of law in just really my lifetime. about 1970, there are more people serving life sentences today in our prisons than there were serving any sentence. 1970.

so one out of 47 americans is subject to some form of correctional supervision today, that's all new. that's not the new deal. that's our lifetimes. so that's what i wanted to really explore and write about and how it impacts our liberties, our institutions, and maybe even our respect for law itself. right? what respect have for something that you can't understand that you can't comply with that you didn't know about? is that different than respecting rules that you know, intuitively are right and yeah, and you lay a lot of this at the feet of woodrow wilson why well woodrow wilson did many great and wonderful things, but he also had great for our three branches of government. he believed kind of the madisonian structure of our government, you know, separation

of powers. we have three branches, supposed to be three third of americans can't name them. 60% of americans are estimated that they would fail the citizenship exam that my wife. it's not hard. but now filling out paperwork to become a citizen is very i because i tried and it got sent back. all right. think about that. i'll never live that one down at home either. well, at any rate, you, woodrow wilson, believed that the ideal thing we should do is allow experts to govern us instead. democracy, right. and he his ideal was the prussian bureaucracy. now think that prussian bureaucracy as your model government. all right. and i don't doubt experts have

very important role to play. an increasingly complex world. they do, but thing our founders knew is that no men are angels none of us perfect. we all have our flaws and the way to deal with that is to counterbalance power. power, as madison put it, balance against power and bring to bear all ideas and in debate and discussion, and that there is more wisdom in this room than in any single head. right? might call it the wisdom of the masses we call it today. francis, who was a cousin of charles darwin, put it this. he went to a county fair, england, and there was a guess weight of the ox contest and looked at all the guesses by the experts. and then he averaged up all the guesses by the ordinary people and he found that the average of the guesses by the ordinary was

closer than any by the experts. and that's how our system government was designed, right? is that we would make our laws in the legislature where our representatives come together and they debate. they disagree, they hash it out, and the best we trust will emerge from that process. and that's something that i think that woodrow wilson didn't value enough. he denigrated democracy and said we need a fourth branch of government or really in his mind maybe one superior branch of government. and i again, i'm not to second guess that we need expert peace in our world, but there is another of wisdom that we can forget about to. and i think daniel halberstam put it maybe a way that we can all relate to is relating a story of lyndon johnson talking to sam, then speaker of the house, the beginning of the kennedy administration, and johnson's bragging on all of kennedy's appointees.

they all went to harvard. the phds, one's brighter than the next. and sam replies, yeah, that's great, but i wish one of them, just one of them had run for sheriff. so my question is, to what extent do you think that sanctions even intangible, to what extent? one i'm sorry. oh, sorry. to what extent do you think sanctions could have an intangible effect as opposed to a tangible act either positively or negatively, for example, by undermining public support for a regime? they making on the ground conditions a lot worse or on other side, possibly strengthening regime's cause, a belligerent cause against our interests. and yes just what are the intangible effects? maybe i'm not sure i entirely understand your question, but i think some of the pro we run, for example, which seem in a way to me to run somewhat parallel with american foreign policy

council, that we run democracy promotion programs or programs that encourage looking at broader questions than ideological. these are all to the good i take, and i suppose i'm a bit compromising so that i've been involved in quite a lot of republican institute projects and some their trips to talk about democracy in a and all that. the the the current president dan twining happens to be a good friend of mine and one of the characters i often invite as a guest lecturer by the way and so i think there's a role certainly for what you call public diplomacy, which is not based all on economics, but based on trying to teach other ways to

think about how you organize yourself, how you run a political party, how you run a campaign, how you do elections. i'm not sure if i touched at all on what you were. i yes, i think well, you know, so i think there's a very big role for for places like the council to cause you to think more deeply and and to look at what might be the real factors involved. and why things happen the way they do and that are sometimes are economic, sometimes are so well. and to that point you can when you talk economic sanctions right there is outcome and iran is a perfect example sanctions can be an economic success. i mean, tactical success, but a strategic failure right, they can they can draw down resources. they don't necessarily change the long arc right. of a country. right. and that sort of what we've seen time, as you point out about. yeah, that's exactly right.

and it and simply giving iran $6 billion for five. i mean, some of this just boggles your mind that somehow you're going to change the regime by handing out this chunk of money to them. i mean, this is ridiculous. and so i agree. you can certainly generate some suffering in another country. but whether that in change policies of the regime, it seems like the kind of regimes want to punish are the ones least to suffer from our sanctions in the sense that the, you know, kim jong un lives pretty well, frankly, and it's obviously too much. and so also the iranian regime, the russian regime, the all these regimes who the elites don't really care that much what's what their populations

and therefore it's obligatory on us as we think about them and what motivates them to try to understand one better and again, just at the risk of being a broken record, it's always all about economics. it's just not so. thank you, thank you, thank you. yeah, just in selecting your four pilots, are those on real life characters. and so how did you do the research into them? they're all real life. okay so it's history. yeah. so every bit of yours is all true story. yeah. yeah, that's so the trick is to a true story and make it sound it was made up. so in other words, take these people who did such amazing things. amazing things that you and i could not comprehend doing. and then telling the story in such a way that people go that never happened, you know, that guy never flew head on into a messerschmitt, you know, playing at 5000 feet, 300 miles an hour that would never happen. all those things if can do that. and at the same time being true

to their own written word, how their own descriptions about, what they did, their and their own squadron logs about the events that took place. if you can that fantastical experi and make it something that the reader goes. no it's it's all made that's that's magic that's what i'm doing my job and then my last question i'm going to or perhaps a suggestion have you ever thought about doing a children's series, something that makes it more and only because what got you into history was when you were a kid. and i think that when you discuss how boring history can be and how they just it's a grind i think that is true for many children. and so i just i thought maybe you'd and that's a no here's i think i, i yeah when i was a kid my dad will tell you i think he feared that i was just to become one of those kids who never left the house and just read books all the time because i was one

of those kids, you know i did little league and all that kind of stuff, but that a book, kid. but i don't have it is a special skill to write children's books and. i'm not saying that to be pandering. it really you have to know how to tell a very, very broad story in a very limited number of words. but i go back to this quest. i'm on history is not boring, but most history books are, boring history, the way history is taught in the school, its history should be taught as if it was, you know, it was a big story. yeah, great. you know, like that. people should go to history class saying, what's going to happen today, you know, and they should leave like, never believe that that's what real history is like. and so i'm trying write my books. i love when people say, oh, your book read like a movie and and i will say, i still steal some elements of a screenplay. it with just with a with a kind of the opening of