america. hello. good morning. welcome to the 29th annual texas book festival. my name is olivia aldridge and i'm the moderator for this session. a couple of reminders for you. it's a great time to make sure your phone is turned off. and after this conversation, the authors will sign books in the book, people signing tents located at 11th street and congress avenue. books are for sale throughout the 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 from our incredible festival authors in the book people sales tents. a portion of every book sale help support texas book festival's mission, which includes expanding literacy initiatives and access to literature across the state. so we'll get started. i'm here with shefali luthra, the author of undue burden life and death decisions and post row america, and elizabeth dyas, one of the authors of the fall of road the rise of a new america. so, first of all, here we are at the texas book festival, and both of your books that are about national abortion rights more or less began here in texas, the fall of roe begins with wendy davis and the second chapter during her 2013 filibuster against senate bill five. an undue burden begins with a teenage girl outside houston who has an unplanned pregnancy after

texas has passed its six week abortion ban. so i'd love to hear from both of you about the decision to start these stories here in texas. we'll start with you, elizabeth. sure. thank you, guys, so much for coming to this session. it really means a lot to all of us up here and to the festival. how is this? i would think, oh, there we go. there we go. thank you. i was just saying thank you all for being here. so my book with my new york times colleague, lisa lerer. it's called the fall of roe the rise of a new america. and we start we spend a lot of time looking at the last decade, what we took to calling the final decade of the roe era in american life. and it turns out that sometimes in the moment, you might not know that something is a specific era of american history. and it actually is. and so we were writing when we were anticipating the

overturning of roe v wade and we wanted to look at how this really happened. there have been a lot of work done about the anti-abortion movement and the religious right in the eighties and nineties and we were looking specifically at this time when, you know, if you think back, so what the country was like ten years ago, president obama had just been reelected and the trajectory looked quite different than it does now. and many people were not anticipating that roe would be overturned. so we looked back to what was happening at that time, both with the conservative christian right, which is a lot of the anti-abortion movement, and also with the reproductive rights movement. and we were both struck. i mean, lisa and i have been covering politics and religion and women for a long time. and we both remembered covering wendy davis, which was, of course, right up here on the hill. and we were struck by the difference. right. this was the time when here here in texas and for many in the

reproductive rights community, it looked like they were going to be making advances in reproductive rights at the state level because they felt that the national level was pretty secure. so there was this moment i don't know if any of you happen to be here for that or remembered that, but we have this scene of what it was actually like in that moment. you had a woman standing up against a republican and an and largely christian state legislature and making a stand to protect abortion rights and the key the what ended up becoming that case at the supreme court, the legal case out of the law that was passed the time really set trajectory and that ended up being quite different than what many people ended up thinking. and of course, roe's a story that in many ways began in texas, right. 50 years ago with roe herself and the sort.

it had some resonance for us about what we wanted to understand. what is the role of a place like texas in setting the stage for all that came in the future? all right. i think am i speaking loud enough? perfect. thank you. just to sort of reiterate and build on what elizabeth said, the centrality of texas, i think, has just always been so clear to those of us who cover reproductive health and reproductive rights. my very first health story as an intern at the texas tribune was covering wendy davis's filibuster and it changed how i thought about the beat to see her standing here and telling story after story of women who had gotten abortions, them talking about what this meant to them, how it changed their lives, how it would have changed their lives to not have access to this form of medical care. and that's a real ethos. i have tried to take in telling the story in undue burden and

thinking about how journalists cover abortion. and so when i sat down around the same timeline as elizabeth, thinking, well, what what should this book be about? i wanted to do a health care book because that is what i write about. and whenever i talked to doctors, whenever i talked to health care professionals, what did it mean or what will it mean to see roe be overturned? all of them said the same thing, which is, well, for us, this began september 1st, 20, 21, months before the dobbs decision. it began with sb eight taking effect in texas. and if you want to tell the story about a health care system under siege and people's lives being changed by access to health care, you have to start here. and so when i built out this book, it structured state by state by state. we travel from texas to oklahoma. we go to kansas, new mexico, colorado, all of these different states where the fall of roe looks different, but similar, where themes emerge and you see different people understand what

it means to see a health care system shrink in response to the loss of a reproductive right. texas is a through line. texas is where the book begins and where it ends, because roe so as elizabeth so adequately put it, it began here and then it died here. and i remember talking to donna howard, a state legislator, and she told me there was a real sense that if this is where it began, this is where it has to end as well. and whenever we think about where this country is headed, what it will mean for so many people to continue to live with the fallout of roe being overturned. texas is always a leader. you can look at infant mortality data, which is earlier here, because it looks at the sba impact as well as the jobs impact. you can look at pregnancy related deaths, pregnancy related health outcomes. and texas has pretty consistently given us a preview of where the rest of the country is headed, which is why i think it's just for anyone covering this topic, whether through

politics, whether through health, whether through human rights. you can't not look at texas. it's just too important. elizabeth, your book is really about the strategy of the religious right and the anti-abortion movement, specifically, which you call a coordinated sniper like strategy to take down roe. it's also about the failure of their opponents to really recognize that that strategy is is underway. i'm curious to know, in your years of reporting, at what point the shape of that strategy was apparent to you? mw well, i'd been covering i've covered religion and politic for about 15 years and always the anti-abortion movement, which i think it's probably at the very beginning when i started reporting, i thought about it a bit more as a grassroots movement that had a lot of power in local community. use in something.

and i was you know, there's always an anti-abortion pregnancy center in a church basement. there's always local state efforts to overturn abortion rights and thinking kind of long term. but it was probably in the last once once i started also covering the rise of the trump movement and his at the time, 2016, largely unexpected win in the white house that the that movement that i had seen as a bit more grassroots had, it was starting to radicalize along with the republican party and trying to take advantage of what new political and legal opportunities might come about because they had power unlike they'd ever had before. i mean, they really attached themselves even to the trump movement early on when many other republicans did not. and that gave them outsized influence, especially at the beginning of his administration. so we once and once we started doing this investigation and for

the book, we lisa and i looked back at like, here's what we saw at the surface. but we had been noticing these connections both, you know, between legal efforts at the states and at the national level and how this fit with the changes in state legislatures and the rising national power in the court, with the courts that the conservative christian movement began to have. and our investigation really uncovered the far more coordinated efforts to strategically go after roe. and what that would look like in a coordinated way from state legislatures, local conservative, christian family policy councils and local judges all the way up, you know, to to the senate and to the white house and the supreme court. and what we found was really the anti-abortion movement had been trying for so long. i mean, you probably all remember the deluge of anti-abortion laws. i mean, hundreds and hundreds of

them starting around ten years ago. there was this big spike and we were able to track, you know, that this was part of a way to test to see what kind of litigated strategies would be effective to overturn roe. so this wasn't something that was organic. this was something that was a discrete political goal. and that a coordinated network that for many people was not something that was on their radar or that they even know to sort of look for. but was building building powers and strategies behind the scenes eventually to find out what kind of law i mean, they were it's basically a reverse engineering strategy when it was what kind of case would need to come before the supreme court in order to undo the precedents that we want to overturn and what kinds of cases do you need to build in advance to get there? so it was really it was really quite coordinated and it's something that that that method of how to use legislation as a

litigator of strategy is something we're seeing now in all kinds of different cultural issues that this similar group of people wants to change. right? it was never only about abortion. what we talk about in in our book is this was really about not just what kind of country do this part of america want america broadly to be, but what does it mean to be a woman in america? right? what should american womanhood be? and that's very tied into all the issues of sex and sexuality that we're seeing today. shefali, you talk to a lot of individual women for this book. i mean, you kind of told the story of the impact of these laws through the stories of individuals. and i'm i'm wondering, what was it like to find these sources and, you know, when speaking with them, gain their trust to be able to share their story, because as you say in your book, a lot of folks, even as they

were going through the process of seeking an abortion, you know, in state out of state, were just considering their options, were very afraid of what the legal repercussions could be. i think there's a real level of mutual vulnerability that we had to bring to the reporting process. and by we i mean the people i spoke to about their abortions and me and i spent a lot of time with them. i really got to know them very well. i could tell you there is there's one young man, a trans man in florida, who gets an abortion. i could tell you all about his favorite legos and his baby's birthday cake. that was strawberry. i could tell you a lot about a young woman from san antonio who really got through a lot of the anxiety after her abortion about the finances. what this would mean for her to have to take on so much debt, essentially to finance a trip to new mexico. she got through it in a lot of ways by playing god of war. we we really learned to know each other on a very intimate level. and i think that was so

essential because so often i heard from people when they told me about their abortions. i haven't told anyone else about this. and there were two reasons for that. one was the real legal risks that you alluded to. right. there is this concern. people don't understand what their rights are any more, whether it is legal to travel out of state for an abortion, whether they will be at risk if they order pills through a mail order service. and i could be the one to tell them the laws do not target you as a patient, because that is the truth. but that confusion has an impact. it makes people very afraid to access health care, even if they are legally entitled to it. but there's something beyond the legal ambiguity and legal fear. there's a cultural one, which is that abortion has been very stigmatized for a very long time in our society. it was really silo ed out of the medical system, largely performed in these outpatient clinics because a lot of doctors and other health care providers and hospitals were nervous about

being associated with abortion. even though, as we've learned repeatedly in the past few years, especially it's an integral part of pregnancy related health care, it comes up so often in all kinds of pregnancies, unwanted ones and unwanted ones. but what i think about the most in terms of what it meant to hear these stories from these people and gain their trust and really tell the story of losing roe through their eyes is they felt this real sense of duty and mission to talk about this in a way that i don't think existed before roe was overturned. and there were two reasons for that. one was that people really hoped that if they shared their stories about why they got an abortion and what it meant to them, whether it was for an anomaly and they wanted pregnancy that was no longer viable or whether it was because they already had a child and could not afford another one and knew that this was the only way to keep their family on track. they wanted people to understand that this is not something they took lightly. it was a very important, thoughtful decision, and they

hope that sharing their experience might begin to change the public narrative around abortion and the other reason that i have was just so, so moved by it and so in all of was they didn't want other people to feel as alone as they did. many of them had been so isolated by our society, by the medical system, when they sought their abortions, often in very fraught circumstances. and they hope that if someone else read about them, heard what they had gone through and went through the same thing, they would know there are other people like me out there. this is actually a very common this is not this rare niche thing that we have made it out to be. it is something that truly affects so many of us. one of the individual stories in your book that really stuck with me and i thought was really interesting was from a woman named darlene who traveled from texas to california to see a doctor because she had a condition that made her pregnancy very complicated. and she really couldn't get firm

answers from her local doctors about what her medical options were. and in the end, she ends up not choosing to have an abortion. and but that decision is really informed by the more comprehensive medical advice she gets in another state. so i felt like that kind of illustrated this this ripple effect. you haven't you show in your book about how the restriction of abortion care affects access to other elements of health care. could you speak to that? i think that is just something that we are only beginning to really understand. and the story of darlene is a really interesting one because of those levels of nuance that you just referenced. she got pregnant, was not expecting it, and she really wanted this pregnancy. but because of this medical condition that she had her doctors genuinely did not know if it was safe for her to stay pregnant. but they were so afraid to even talk about abortion that it didn't seem worth talking through either way, whether it was safe, she couldn't get firm answers about whether she should, in fact, have this second daughter. she really wanted.

and so the only way to learn that her pregnancy could, in fact be safe was to travel to california, to go to a place where abortion was on the table and then talk through, well, this is what we would need to know. these are the different tradeoffs. this is, you know, what my uterine lining should look like to know that this is safe enough to stay pregnant and having that level of information, that kind of conversation. and that was only informed by being able to talk about the full array of options, actually then led her to keep her pregnancy and to have these two beautiful children that she really, really loved so much. and one thing that i have just been really, really intrigued by, and i think we need to spend a lot more time about thinking through as we continue to discuss the ever long, ever growing fallout of abortion restrictions. is there are going to be very, very vast implications for medical care in texas. like many states, we are actually seeing doctors leave. some of them are moving away because of the combination of restrictions on abortion and on

gender affirming care. there are reasons for that that are not wanting to provide health care that is medically fraught or that is legally fraught excuse me, but also a lot of doctors are women and women of reproductive age, and many of them want to live in places where they know if they get pregnant and maybe have complications and want the full array of medical options that will be available to them. i actually read a study relatively recently about oncologists also reconsidering where they want practice because cancer treatment is complicated when abortion is outlawed because in some cases if you are pregnant, you cannot stay pregnant and continue chemo therapy. and so the fallout is to be continuing as we see medical providers self-select, reconsider their where they want to live, where they want to practice, where health care will be available. we will continue to see people's access to medical care of all forms, no matter their gender, be changed, potentially be constricted or become increasingly unequal. and we'll see the fallout for

years. if not decades. so so obviously, a lot has happened since you published your books. we're heading into a second trump administration. elizabeth, what can you say about it? where are the anti-abortion movement's strategy as now compared to when trump's first administration began? that's such a huge question. at the beginning, roe had not been overturned several or several points about that. the anti-abortion movement until until trump won the period from roe being overturned two years ago until this election, was one of the lowest points. so many in this movement. i mean, they're moment of greatest victory by this political feat that they had been working toward for half a century was suddenly facing this backlash that pushed democrats into congress in the midterms

and had it had a huge downward effect. and the republican party, led by soon to be president trump again, basically rejected them and saw the political danger that they were bringing to not just his reelection, but the republican ticket more broadly. and really boxed them out. so the whole dynamic had shifted, right, with this is the first presidential election we've had in half a century where roe was not a foundation, some capacity, and how politics operated, how campaigns were run, how constituencies were won. and so you have this very mixed dynamic where you've got the people that president trump had put in power in his first administration who were running efforts behind the scenes in anticipation of this one like project 2025 to make plans for should he be elected.

many of them were pushing innovative ways in their minds to further restrict abortion, potentially introduce some sort of what would be a functional abortion national abortion ban, looking at how to restrict the fda approval of the pill, potentially. i mean, we've we've we've crossed into the legality of ivf in many places and looking the movement looking long term at what kinds of steps would they need to put in place, potentially in in like health and human services department, different regulations to lay a similar long term strategy to limit in this like they did with roe. so all that's going on. but then you've also got someone at the top of the ticket who knew that those things were very unpopular and would not help him win. now he has one, and i'm watching very closely to see what appointments he's making to the cabinet, but also not just that all of the the lower level positions throughout the baroque

or see the the deep state, if you will, and his first administration, it was the anti-abortion movement who was really prepared in a way that many others in the republican party were not. now, the that has come together in a very different way because all different segments of the republican party that president trump remade have been laying steps. we're seeing this with immigration. obviously, in very intense ways. so i have my eye on the power struggles that will go into effect there. but one of the things we documented that ended up making the anti-abortion movement so effective has first administration was this started what what became a functional strategy of chaos, right? when everything is chaotic, when there's a deluge of information. so much is happening at once. it actually becomes very difficult to track what's going on and to come up for for their opposition to come up with

strategies to figure out how to push back, what can they do? and so i imagine that part will be quite similar. but there's a lot journalists were very averse to making predictions, especially in such a volatile and new environment. but it's absolutely true that many in the anti-abortion movement see see this new opportunity, you know, in ways that many of them were not expecting. even six months ago. and they weren't sure that they'd be able to have power again. and i should just add that it's not just the anti-abortion movement, right? there's so much overlap with the broader conservative christian movement that has increasingly radicalized since his first term that this does not look like the social conservative party of george w bush, for example. it's really merged with the trump movement across all things with science. right. there's a broad overlap about opposition vaccines, for

example. so all of the the reason i think we saw so one of the reasons we saw so much discussion during the campaign ads by republicans opposing transgender rights, you know, that, quote, let girls be girls rhetoric that was happening. that was targeted to the similar base. it's a similar christian base that wasn't feeling as like it wasn't as effective for them to talk about their opposition to abortion, given that the majority of americans very clearly want access to abortion. so they were able to use this other strategy to leverage the same kind of kind of voters. right. but it's this other other related field that they are definitely poised to make changes in very early. a lot of the regulations in your book, towards the end of your book, we see the supreme court justices kind of wrestling with how public perception of that institution has changed since

the dobbs leak. what do you the significance of that is as the court still plays this important in not just abortion access, but, you know, so many other issues, including others related to the right to privacy, trust in government, institute unions and branches of government has been on the decline such a long time. right. with the what we thought very clearly with the white house, with congress. but i think really until this most recent few years of the supreme court, many americans were not paying as much attention to the to that branch of government and the impact that it would have and the question of how had it become how independent actually is the american judiciary. and what we have see seen, especially since the fall of roe, is more scrutiny of the supreme court, of the justices themselves. so we have, you know, many of my of our colleagues have uncovered

and done significant investigations uncovering ethics concerns with various justices. those remain ongoing. the court you know, now we're wondering, will will, will there be an opportunity to have any new justices? will the makeup change? what efforts will be done, continue to lock this in? but, you know, i've definitely been tracking the more explicit nature of certain justices like justice alito, justice thomas, to talk about their their christianity and weight and to see to start to explore how that is or is not manifest in their decisions. i there's a lot more scrutiny about that, but i it's a reason, you know, democrats are talking so much more about court reform. and i think the judiciary in the way americans think about it, is poised for, you know, a lot

change going forward. so for now, abortion is it's a states issue. shafali from what you've learned in your reporting for the book and the reporting that you were still doing, what what seems to be next for the abortion rights movement? what are the approaches where there have been traction and what hasn't worked? the abortion rights movement has been really focused on a state by state effort to try and win back abortion protections through individual state constitutions. and they've had a fair amount of success about around this until past election. they had one abortion protections in every state. they had tried post jobs. that perfect track record ended this month. they lost out in three states. they lost in south dakota, in nebraska, and in florida, where they had 57% of voters in favor of abortion rights. and that wasn't enough. by florida, 60% rule. but another issue is that they

are now running out of states where they can actually use those ballot strategy. a lot of states don't allow popular vote to amend the constitution. texas being one of them. and so instead, what they are now thinking about more is also how are they going to be playing defense? the anti-abortion movement is very energized as elizabeth mentioned, on a national level and also on a state level, because many of them, especially in texas, have been very frustrated by the ways in which people have around abortion bans. the number of abortions hasn't fallen in this country, even though some people are still going without care. what's happened is a lot of people are traveling out of state or ordering medicine into their homes and taking it privately, using something like a shield law in which the doctor in new york or california is protected from out of state prosecution as long as they stay in their home state. and so anti-abortion activists really want to find ways to get around this. they want to find ways to stop providers from sending pills here. they want to stop people from

getting them here. but it's a tricky legal conundrum because. you eventually have states coming up against different states laws. and so they're actively exploring whether they can introduce new legislation even this coming year, to make it harder for people to get around state abortion laws. we are also seeing efforts on individual municipality levels to try and deter people from traveling out of state for helping people get out of state to get care. and so i think the most important thing i will be watching and that many of us who cover this will be keeping an eye out for is what happens on the national level. what do we see from the different agencies ways to deter people from providing or seeking abortions, even if there is no explicit national ban? what do abortion rights supporters do to try and fight back against those measures while knowing that the judiciary is much more conservative, but also what happens in these states where abortion opponents have stayed in power despite? the popular backlash against these abortion bans, texas being one of them. florida, i think being another one. and the impact that especially

those states could have because they are so popular is i really think could radiate through about a lot of the country. and i would just also add that the anti-abortion movement and republicans in general are in this in this in this on these issues have been very effective at developing decades long strategies or i think they really think in generations, not just at political cycles. and that investment is to finally in their you know, their their judges, their state legislatures, their entire movement. i mean, when you think about what kind of result do i want in 15 years, in 25 years, that's how they're thinking and democrats have really struggled to build something similar. and i'm we're i'm very curious to see what kind of reckoning this past election brings. i'd like to open it up to a few audience questions, if we have any. i think there's a microphone

here in the middle. please do keep it to questions and not commentary. yes, a lot of. i'm sorry, i'm getting dizzy. so a lot of the around. see if i can say this. so there's a lot of arguments that say in places like texas, when women die or suffer extreme really negative side effects, that it's malpractice. now, we all know it's not malpractice, but how do you push back against that when people claim it's the fault of the doctors, not the laws? i have been really struck by hearing that line of argumentation, because it is one that comes up very often. it has come up in texas. it's come up in other states as where we have seen people file suit against their state abortion bans. i mean, i think the only way to provide people with accurate

information is to get all the information you can. and so i think the really good example is when you look at the examples of what happens to people when they can't access abortion care, you of course, you talk to the medical providers involved, but you also review this with people who are outside of that case. what perspective do they bring? what do they view as possible? you talk to medical providers and experts who do not have a personal vested interest in this and can bring some outside expertise and very often they say the exact same thing, which is the incentives here are simply too skewed. it is it is not workable to operate under the medical exceptions that exist. i do think continuing to provide that broad based context of just bringing in as many voices and for my expertise as possible is essential because this is a talking point that has been very successful and is one that will continue seeing. thank you. next. i was wondering if, you folks could comment on the recent vote in amarillo where the pro-choice community won and whether local

organizing, local initiatives, because we do get to vote on local initiatives in many parts of the state could build a pro-choice movement from the ground up. it was this, this which ordinance was this? there were a few that i was like this, just like the abortion free zone, right? a sanctuary. that sanctuary city and the the reproductive rights side. right. yeah. so there has been over the last two years, almost three years of strategy by led largely by anti-abortion activists to create what they call sanctuary cities and using scare quotes. if you can't see for for the unborn and they're try to get the local like a city or a potentially a county to their own law that they're trying to enforce that would say like if you're a resident of this place, you cannot have an abortion here, or that there can be no abortion providers within our.

that is a good example of this reverse litigate of strategy that i was referring to. and the set of lawyers that was behind that is has also was very effective in sb eight here. and it's a way that they are looking to find different legal strategies that may be unconventional to try to figure out how to advance their agenda and many of these, especially in new mexico, i'm trying to think there's been a lot of them, but they have into a lot of court challenges. but the it's interesting that they were able to be defeated right by by the people of the of the city, especially because amarillo was such a large it was one of their largest cities. and they were really hoping that if that won, they would be able to advance it. i think there are particularly notable all because it's again something that in the devolution, i mean, they're doing so many of these, it's hard it can be it forces the level of local organizing that is new for folks in the

opposition. and it can be really hard to track when there's just so much of it. but whenever there is something like that that's sort of this is different than what we've seen. i look at it and think, okay, what like what are the dominoes that they're hoping to put in place? and like, what would the next be like if this were to go in their favor? what are they hoping to learn in order to advance? and where would that go? if i can add one thing to that as well, one thing i was thinking about as you were speaking is the local measures are really interesting to me because state measures, as they discussed, have largely had a successful record. they've also been very expensive. the florida measure cost millions of dollars that whole campaign. and at a certain point, the money becomes harder and harder to find when there are diminishing returns, when there are few options. and i think i don't the answer to this, but it's an interesting question of journalism. do the resources and return look different when you organize on a local level? but also, what does that mean

when you come up against potentially a state legislature that might try to for instance, if you passed local ordinances with abortion rights protections, would those come up against state lawmakers and how would that come out in practice? so i think you are raising really interesting questions, but we are going to have to continue to see what that actually means. so you were talking a lot about, obviously, in your books or go into this about the long term movement and strategies that against abortion and i'm wondering what. well, so then we we saw all of this movement. right, with the elections and everything as far as the democratic or pro abortion side. but what are people doing? what are these organizations such as planned parenthood doing to try to mobilize people now? and you talked a little bit about this. and actually, you know, the previous question talked about

that. but i'll tell you, i have a white female friend. she's, you know, my age 50 ish, who has attempted repeatedly to volunteer for planned parenthood here locally and they'll take her money, which she has. but they'll take your money. but they basically told her that they are looking for younger, more diverse people to be volunteering and that's great. and i'm not against that. but at the same time, it takes everybody. so when she told me that, i was really super disappointed and not i, i mean, i still support them. i still donate to them on a monthly basis with my monthly subscription. but like, it just makes no sense to me. i mean, this is a fight that we fight. but you know what? i'm saying? that we should have been having our lunch. so what are these organizations doing to actually bring everybody together? i mean, why would you try to exclude people who want to help

you? it just makes no sense to me. i can't speak for planned parenthood on why now i know i hear you and i've heard similar things. i don't think that this is not an isolated example. one of the challenges is that the abortion rights movement, broader reproductive rights movement faces right now is that there are competing factions within it about how to proceed, particularly after, you know, what's been viewed by many people as a failure of planned parenthood. i mean, which is it's quite complicated because planned parenthood and and we kind of we outline a bit about this in in our book that the the competing factions for what happens when you are a health provider and also needing to be a political force and. what you know the state. planned parenthood's right their affiliates they're not with the national it's it's a complicated legal structure as an

organization that they're set up and many people may think when they're donating to planned parenthood it's going to health care or to the local clinic. it's actually likely going to the national organizing, to the political efforts. so there's a lot of internal talk turmoil there organizationally and is it most i think it's most of abortions in america actually provided not by planned parenthood, but by independent clinics, which have you know, they're they're not affiliated in the same way. how are they? you know, they're i mean, i remember talking with with one woman and she just asked me what she ran like the the last clinic in alabama, i think. and she just wanted, i think, $5,000 to be able to put up a fence around her facility. and the the national groups like planned parenthood were getting millions of dollars in it didn't help her at all. so i, i mean, then there's also the new reproductive news reproduce of justice segment of

the movement that's led by often local people around the country, women who are black, hispanic, i know, and who have often felt for years that their work has not found and their has not found amplification in in the broader movement. so there's there i'm hearing a lot about a rethinking of what does it mean to fight for this going forward, like how do we integrate brought on maternal, broader maternal and, you know, fetal health care outcome goals into this movement? like how this obviously like you're saying, has not been effective. so there is a rethinking of strategy. and i'm not sure that it's landed somewhere. do you have anything you learned? the other thing that i think is perhaps really striking is like the is really figuring out what it wants moving forward because the end of roe, it's in some ways an open slate and one of the really interesting divides is actually a lot of abortion rights activist supporters were not satisfied with the platform

that vice president harris advocated. she talked about codifying ruby based protections many people don't want that. they want something that is, in fact, more expansive because roe did allow for states to ban abortion after a certain period after viability thanks to the planned parenthood v casey modification. and there also were a lot of allowances for different kinds of restrictions. the lead up to that period, as long as they didn't create this quote unquote undue burden. and we do see a lot of activists, they actually we should be protecting abortions throughout pregnancy. that's politically in some cases, a harder sell. and so what you are seeing is many factions emerging in what is trying to be a very broad movement because abortion rights are broadly popular. but there are fissures that i think are still being ironed out next. and please try and speak directly into the mic. can you hear me? okay? okay, great. thanks. so i just wanna point out a couple of facts here and then ask my question. i'm a man, so i try to stay out of this, but with the i often

get the finger pointed at me saying that we are the problem, particularly among liberal women, are very fond of saying men this men that. but when you look at the stats. 61% of americans, men favor abortion be legal in all cases, and only 38% oppose it. it should be illegal. women are only three percentage points higher, 64%. women 30 say it should be legal, 30 say it should be legal. 33% say it should be illegal. it's almost a 2 to 1. almost twice as many men in favor of abortion rights as opposed to it. yeah, we get this finger pointed at us when you look at the stats that really matter, i apologize for making people squeamish, but this is kind of my point. we're afraid, say the quiet part out loud. you guys have dwelled on it, but we're talking about one group religiously unaffiliated people, 86% say abortion should be legal, 13% oppose catholics.

there's a group that gets blamed frequently for this political opinion on this. i've heard this. you know, what's the question? the question is, why are people so squeamish to point out, especially here in texas, where this is a big population, white evangelical protestants, 25% believe it should be legalized, 73% it should be legal. it is just because i know we're short on time. the question is, why are liberal white women so squeamish about pointing out that white evangelical protestants are divided? yeah, let me. question. well, do you want to. yeah, no, i like i'd like to answer. thank you. one, i don't think it's true that people have not been pointing out that conservative christians, especially white, white christians, evangelicals and catholic, have been leading the push on this for a long time. i mean, i've been covering that for years. my colleagues have we've been quiet, can give examples, but i don't want to think. yeah, yeah, but the it's this

these are all questions of power that's not correlated to numbers. part of what happened with roe being overturned is it's an example of minority power, right? that is much harder thing to reckon with. how how is it that you know, it's only ten years ago it was 16% of american adults wanted no abortion at all period. and no exemptions. that's down under ten right now. and yet there's all of this power. and i think with the question about men, it's also about that. sure, you can have a majority of men who say they support something, but what is the that's the power differential that i hear when women are talking about what what we're done. so i would just i would just look into power and your power. thank you, elizabeth. thank you for your questions. her answers are going to be signing books and the book people tonight. thank you.

we'll have more live coverage of the 2024 texas food festival after a short break. and it's a particular honor, if i may say, to come today to hillsdale and cpi to to talk about my fourth book, which is just out stumbling towards utopia and in my role, that focus on the family i travel about a third of the time i spend a lot of time on airplanes, 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 audiences that people here would say are 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 particularly worried about the country. the culture or the civilization that i'm leaving to the next generation. and so about two years ago, after hearing this common, you know iteration, after 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 anymore. but this mess this incredibly polarized, uneven time that we find ourselves in. and i love to delve into empirical research and data. i love to read. and the more that i researched, the more that i read the conclusion, the pointers kept coming back to the 1960s. and i began to ask myself, did it really all begin in 1967, 68, earlier, with the great society? and i found that the answer was no. i found the answer and made it

the thesis of my book, which is that if you want to understand and the moral and social revolution of america in the 1960s and the seventies, you really have to go back to the turn of the 20th century and frankly, it was at the turn of the 20th century, relatively speaking, a handful of very influential men and women who were dealing greatly uncomfortable with the american way of life. they were uncomfortable at the declaration of independence and the constitution. they were uncomfortable with the natural nuclear family. they were uncouth, comfortable with churches and seminaries. they were uncomfortable with entertainment. they were uncomfortable overwhelmingly with the american

experience. and if you trace a line from the 19 teens and twenties 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 distinguished sitting circuit court judges in, the united states, harvey wilkinson. he wrote a fabulous memoir of his growing up. and i particularly loved the the parts of his memoir on the 1960s. and he said to overcome the sixties, we must first

understand them. one must go back in time in order to move forward. i thought that was a kind of a beautiful thesis sentence for the research that i was to undertake. i talk about a a small coterie of people at, the beginning of stumbling toward utopia and i and i could talk at greater length. 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 constitution, all 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, conscience rights, basic magnanimity and civility in the public square. education, both higher education and the classroom and elementary

middle school and and high schools. and just for today, at hillsdale, i've picked out a kind of four examples, beginning with john dewey. if you really want to understand the radicalism of what happened to education action, culminating in the 1960s and seventies, generally look no further than john dewey. very uncomfortable with the judaic christian tradition. very. and very uncomfortable with objective standards of reading, writing, arithmetic as the principal, you know, with the formation of character as the primary role of of public or government schools. and frankly, in private schools as well. he he was also i think it's important to say, particularly

unimportant with expression of faith and religion, which he felt really was out side overwhelmingly outside the role of american education. next is margaret's sanger, the founder of planned parenthood, a woman who, early in the american experience, was particularly uncomfortable with large sectors of the american people. she was a eugenicist on steroids. she was very uncomfortable denominational lay with with with those in our american faith broadly. speaking outside of what you and i would say were denominational, i.e., white anglo-saxon protestants and american, you know, kind of what became progressive protestantism. she had a very big role in shifting american. too, to a very progressive way

of of an expression of a worldview that as a law professor and a libertarian, do you answer the question why, should we 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 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 the 14th amendment dates back to 1868. my last book was was called the original meaning of the 14th amendment. its letter spirit, published by harvard university press. and that was all about what 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 party, 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 extreme, deeply smart, and they were extremely knowledgeable and well-educated political theory. and that's the reason why they actually devised a system of government that was unique in its time. it reached 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 society, we would we would function better if we could bring all the parts of the constitution and activate them all. and that's part of 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 federalist 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 federalist who wrote bill of rights, what the anti-federalists wanted were a bunch of amendments that would limit the federal government. but the federalist said we just set up this stronger federal government. that's what we need. so how can we satisfy the concern of the and remember, at the time they were writing this, there were two states that had refused to join the union. north carolina had joined and rhode island had not done so when the first congress met to consider whatever they were doing, set up the government. they only had 11 states, not 13. and what james madison is, we know these people don't trust us. we promised them. we give them a bill of rights when in order to the constitution. and so we need to honor our promise. but the way they honored their promise was not to affect and madison explains, this is not to

call to pull back our powers, but to protect the individual rights 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 critics by giving them a bill of rights without weakening the structures of government that they established. and that's the reason why the anti-federalists 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 have expanded beyond the original meaning of the constitution, we become more and more dependent 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 minority in legal education or even in undergraduate education, you

must be put upon all the time. but if you're 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 my students, not really on my colleagues, my job. there is to be a resource for them, to be a voice for them, and they get into trouble and i've been able to successfully do that and i get nothing but appreciation expressed by my colleagues. book tv's live coverage of the texas book festival continues

now. right here. hello. hello. hello, everyone. thank you for joining us. welcome to the 29th annual texas book festival. my name is amanda moore and going to be the moderator for today's discussion. and at this time, please, your cell phones. after this conversation, the authors will sign books and the book people signing it, which is not located right over there, is located at 11th street in congress avenue.

books are for sale throughout festival weekend courtesy of book people. so you can help our authors. the texas book festival and the largest independent bookstore, texas, by purchasing books by our incredible festival authors in the book, people sells ten a portion of every book sale help support texas book festival's mission, which includes expanding literacy initiatives and access to literature across the state. so let's get started. like to please welcome bria baker and rebecca nagle as our authors today. starting on my far left, bria baker is the author of rooted the american legacy of land theft and the modern movement for black land ownership. bria has been working on the front lines more than a decade. she believes deeply in nuanced storytelling and in black cultures ability to drive change. and she has commented on race, gender and sexuality elle

harper's bazaar, refinery29 them and more. her writing has been featured in the anthologies our history has always been contraband and no justice, no peace. a yale alumna, baker has been recognized as a 1015 glamor woman of the year, a 2019 i-d magazine, up and rising and a 2023 creative capital award. she has spoken at the united nations girl up initiative yale law school, the youth to use summit in hong kong and the museum of the city of new. welcome. thank you so much. immediately to my left, we have rebecca nagle. she is the author of by the fire we carry the generations long fight for justice on native land. rebecca is an award journalist and a citizen of the cherokee nation. she is the writer and host of the podcast this land her writing on native representation, federal indian law and tribal has been featured

in the atlantic, the washington post, the guardian, usa today, indian country today more. she is the recipient of the american mosaic journalism prize, the women's media center exceptional journalism award and numerous awards, and a native american journalist association. and she is peabody award nominee. welcome back to. so we're going to start with asking questions to both of you. you both wrote books that explore the importance of land to culture. for bria, you discuss the importance it in black wealth, opportunity and independence. and you, rebecca, you mentioned how land was at the heart of the cherokee experiment in nationhood. can you tell what inspired you both to write about these subjects? well, family was definitely the spark for me. we were actually having this conversation a little bit before, but my family has been in this conversation around what our land means to us and what it

means to protect it. my grandfather passed away in 2019 and he was our patriarch. he was the one who really shepherded the that we have in north carolina. so passing was this immediate, but time passing as well. and it was this recognition that if the land was going to remain in our family, it would be because we as the children and grandson children, had decided that it would be because we are one of the less than 1% of black rural landowners in this country. and so to hold on to that land, especially when elders are passing on, is a really hard feat. and we'll talk later about why exactly that's so difficult. it was really important to me both a expression of my grief and love my grandfather that something he had so hard to make sure we had didn't leave the family because he had passed away so that was really my spark for all of the research was doing about our land and land reclamation and generally and, and then getting to really understand that black and indigenous people need to be in conversation together.

and so that was like another push that this shouldn't just stay in my family, but that we need to understand one another and how we relate to. so i'm just so, so grateful to be doing this in this way. i feel so like cosmic awesome. rebecca yeah. well, i just want to say i'm really excited to be in conversation with you again. now, our first panel together, and i really have enjoyed the ways that i feel like our books are in conversation with each other. i would say that my impetus was actually family to, so my book is about 2020 supreme court decision that resulted in the largest restoration of tribal land in u.s. history. as a result of that case, i'm sure we'll get into more. eight reservations were affirmed in eastern oklahoma, including my tribe's reservation, cherokee nation. and for me, the possibility and our reservation hadn't been acknowledged by the state or the federal government for over 100

years. so had been denied for over a century. and for me, when i first learned about this case, the possibility that our land would be recognized as cherokee land for me was this visceral sense of justice that was connected to ancestors because direct ancestors made rather controversial decision for they were actually assassinated but they signed cherokee nations removal treaty because at the time they thought that the tribe, in order to survive as a nation and as a people, had had to leave our ancestors homelands in the southeast and move to land that would later become oklahoma. and so that land that was at stake in this case is, the land that they literally died for. and so that visceral sense of connection and i think in general too, when it comes to tribal sovereignty in indigenous nations, we often think of what indigenous people lost as less

owned. but that's just what white gained and what our tribes by losing land is. so much more because you can't exchange land from culture, from language, and from sovereignty and our rights to self-determine nation. and whenever we lost land, all of those other things were threatened. and conversely, in the places where we've managed to hold on to our land, it's the places where you will see language is still spoken, culture still and sovereignty still exercised. and so land more than mere real estate or acreage. it's really part of the underpinning of self-determination for our tribes. yeah. thank you. and rebecca, in your book, you wrote the quote i'm going to quote you now most the histories of indigenous dispossession and enslavement in the united states taught separately. but these two systems of oppression needed each other. what we think of as the

antebellum of deep south was built on the land southern lawmakers fought for and in the indian removal act. so question is for both of you. do either believe that both of these stories, your books should be taught together to show the interconnection? or do you think they have to be viewed independently, fully understand what happened? absolutely. i that we need to have these conversations together. so just to an example, and there are a lot examples. so in the 1830 southern states, coveted indigenous land and the muskogee the cherokee, the chickasaw and the choctaw still held significant chunks of land in louisiana, mississippi alabama and georgia and southern lawmakers decided that they were going to those indigenous nations and force them to leave. they got an ally in andrew jackson and they pushed this bill called the indian removal act. and bill was really controversial, was popular in the south. there was large opposition it in

the north, and it never would have passed except the south had a disproportionate amount of representation in the house of representatives because of the 3/5 clause. and without that clause, the indian removal act, have never passed. what you saw after our tribes were removed from the south was the expansion of slavery. so the the image of slavery that we have in our mind in this country of the antebellum south or the deep south, those cotton lands were literally built on the five tribes land. and so cotton production increased tenfold in mississippi. and if people have ever heard the second middle passage when enslaved families were moved from sort of like the eastern seaboard into the deep south and. so what followed the removal of 80,000 indigenous people from that area was the removal of enslaved people from the eastern seaboard down into the deep south.

and so and i i'm saying this right, but i think a third of enslaved families were separated at this time. so it really redrew the map of the slave economy. and so and again, i think we always talk about these things as existing separately. but i think the institution sense of indigenous dispossession, enslavement and anti-black functioned to in our history more than we are taught. and i believe that we are not taught those things because we it doesn't benefit white supremacy for us to really understand that. yes, 1 million. 1 million. yeah. yeah. but that struck me. well, it's not just you, because i very much feel like everyone here, you were like, very much like embry. i'll go ahead. well, yeah, i very much agree. and i think that i mean, they have be taught in tandem because, as you said, the demand one fed the demand for the other, but also the solutions

for one were thwarted by this investment. both, you know, even failed reconstruction when slavery was over, there was a period i talk about this as well in the book, and it was like one of the first and only times where the federal government has actually stood up black victims of white supremacy was when the federal government and the department of justice began to prosecute the ku klux klan. and there were literally going into the south, arresting white ku klux klan leaders and like bringing charges against bringing cases against them, calling witnesses. and the it was like the first time in u.s. history that white people were being held accountable for things they'd done to black people, not things that had, you know tangentially related black people like the only crime you did was killing this black person or sexually violating this black person. and this government is going to hold you accountable. and it was so beautiful and it was so short lived, though, because the attorney general who was leading that charge was also

someone who was not liked by railroad tycoons who were taking indigenous land to expand railroads. and so, long story short, the railroad lobbyists and tycoons team up with the southern who don't want their way of to be taken away. and they come together and they decide, let's get this attorney general out. they put the pressure on ulysses grant and he does fire that attorney general. the ku klan cases also die with him, as does the fight for tribal land. that railroad were buying up. and so it's always this like, let's take land so that black people can work it. but the moment that black are trying to find any way to profit from their own labor, let's also dispossess them. and so to see that always go hand in hand, it feels frustrating that we are having those conversations in silos. but to the last part of your question, i do think there is space for acknowledging nuance

between the two. i think they need to be taught together and i think the nuance needs to be acknowledged because like you said, indigenous land dispossession also was tied to the erasure of language and artifacts. and so many other aspects. boarding schools has a specific history that needs to be talked about. and on the black land dispossession, we also need to talk heirs, property laws, eminent domain being disproportionately used against us throughout 20th century. i mean, even while rights laws were being passed to allow black people to vote, they're destroying black middle class communities with highways and parks flooding our communities to make lakes that are now haunted like these stories go hand in hand. and there is specificity that also needs to be acknowledged. i think oklahoma is a great example of because it's a state that black and indigenous alike. worse, we're as maybe a haven from white supremacy, and then that lead led to its own tensions. so i think we to talk about them together, but we also to acknowledge that i want land for you and your community in a very

specific way that might look different than what the land that i'm looking back for. my community looks like. and they shouldn't be in contention. and i think if i honor your specificity, then that that happens. actually. absolutely. now rebecca, you tackle two different subjects in your book, the history of the taking of native american land and its restoration, and also the court case that you just mentioned before, which is the location of a crime, was a factor in the type of punishment a man would receive for the crime of the murder. is there a reason why you wanted to highlight the murphy case? yes. so the book focuses on a supreme court case. first it was murphy, and then it became mcgirt. and like i said it resulted in the largest restoration of tribal land u.s. history. so in 2020, the supreme court ruled that muskogee nation still had a reservation. oklahoma argued that since statehood in 1907, the

reservation been abolished. it was absurd to acknowledge and recognize that now. but the way the law works is for a reservation to no longer exist. congress has put it in writing. congress has to get rid of the reservation and congress never did that. and so the real question of the case was whether or not the supreme court would follow the law or the supreme court would sort of been to the will of a non-native city and non-native constituents and happened that was radical, though it shouldn't be. but very often happen when it comes to the rights of tribes. with that, the supreme court held the land and follow the law. and then what happened after muskogee nation's reservation was recognized. was that lower courts interpreted that decision to uphold eight other reservations in the state, including my own cherokee nation. and it's pretty you know, that area of all those reservations is covers 19 million acres, about half the land in oklahoma.

it's an area larger than west virginia and, nine other u.s. states. and the case started in a surprising place. it actually started as a murder in 1999. so a muskogee citizen named patrick murphy murdered a fellow muskogee citizen named george jacob. i was a pretty brutal and patrick was sentenced death. he was on death row, actually a total 20 years while the case was under appeal. and a few years into his time there, a public defender got her hands on the case and she along with a team of lawyers, came up with this novel legal theory that oklahoma hadn't had the jurisdiction prosecute patrick and didn't have the jurisdiction to execute him because the crime happened on a reservation and it would take, you know, 20 years. but that question got all the way to the supreme court. and so the book sort traces the

cases surprising origin and sort of all the twists and turns and one of the reasons i really wanted to get into that is because, you know, this case has this historic status. but i wanted to document the story of it, you know, because of the way that federal indictment work, is it actually is hard often for tribes to bring our own cases on our own behalf. and so when you look at the and when you look at really important cases about tribal law, a lot of them start with crimes and a lot of them start in surprising places like these. and so it's it's part of the story of how federal indian law has been shaped in the united. okay. now, bria, i'm going to quote your work to you as well. so in your book you wrote, quote, this country has always been happy to have black people the land, but never owning it. the relationship between labor ownership in is an intentionally severed one. we cannot discuss homelessness.

racial wealth gaps are chronic poverty in black communities, putting white america's calculated on black land under a magnifying glass. how do you think we can address this issue both now and in the future? yeah. thank you for choosing that specific quote, because that was also something that really drove like i knew my family's recent with land ownership and the first person in my family to own land was my great great, great grandfather there. so i'm a sixth generation black landowner. he bought land ten years after the emancipation proclamation was signed. so land ownership goes pretty far back in our family. but thinking that my family has been enslaved in this country as long as we've had the rights to own property and even within that, that's such a myth because you think of i think people think that tulsa massacres aren't anomalies and they're not. so to really understand what it means for black people who historically in this country

treated as property, who were treated as 3/5, who were not human beings, to finally be in a position to get land, to spend your whole life working, likely minimum wage or for a wage that under what it should have been being exploited, being taken advantage of, still buying property with your life savings and having a mob burn your home to the ground and push you and your family out of it. having a government that you've been paying taxes to tell you we need your land for a highway, for a park, for a leak. it's of public interest to white citizens in this community, not to the black community that we're pushing out. but it's a public interest enough for us to do this. that level of grief. i people have not really grasped. so even when we're in a time like this, think that the average non-black person doesn't understand and how angry the average black person is and how that anger is. i was on the book tour in detroit and as i was talking

about this history in older black women stood up and said, that happened here, that my my owned three properties in a specific area in detroit. it was destroyed the creation of a highway that they never built. the first time they built something on the vacant land that they had destroyed people's homes and property on was five years ago, she said and they put one federal building there. nothing else exists there. it's a blighted area that previously housed hundreds of black people. that level of grief that you walk, you have to walk past that community going about your life and you're not allowed to be. and when you are mad, it's like painted as nonsensical. so as far as solutions for that, i we absolutely need to have reparations. the families who have had this theft, i think there needs to be institutional investments as well. but i think people have to understand that families can trace what was taken from them. the idea that it's too hard to put your finger on it. families deeds from decades ago

with the hope that maybe they can return land that they once had. my family still has 92 acres in north carolina, but a century ago, it was a 600 acre farm. i didn't know that because i wasn't alive. of but because my father was a kid and he didn't fully understand how much of land had been lost. so that, like i just firmly believe that any conversations around racial wealth gaps that start at pay equity is like you can't work and earn a salad that will undo theft. you need the return of what was stolen. so i'm a big, big proponent of reparations in traditional is in in nontraditional sense is i think that there are a lot of black families, communities that just need the return of lands that meant so much us and that that grief kind of won't go away until that happens. but also realizing that black people make up 14% of this population and we own less than percent of land. it's not like i think when i talk about reparations there's

this idea that, well, what are you going to do with all the people who have homes? was like, so land that no one's living on that is urban, but like no one is living on. there's so much land that can be returned and it doesn't have to be in competition with land back, in my opinion. i'm a big proponent of land back well, and i don't think that you can address. the legacy of slavery and anti-blackness without also addressing that. okay i, i think it's great. and i what i really gather from reading your book was there are things that i never like about central park in new york. can you tell us a little bit about central park? where though, has anyone ever new york city, all of the people who just raise your hands, how many of you knew that central park was a predominately and indigenous community? first? all right. there's some good hands up. if you've read clint smith's how the word passed, you've heard the story there. i talk about it a bit here. if you've ever visited central park, there is tiny sliver of

the park with a tiny plaque in the grass. and you have to go to that specific entrance to see it. but they do honor what was once called seneca village. seneca was not a predominantly black community, was actually a very multiracial community of black people, indigenous people, germany immigrants, a lot of a lot of european immigrants. and it was almost like equally like a third black, a third indigenous and a third white american. and then around the time that new york is being, you know, settled in a bigger way and they're making it this urban, there's this, hey, why do they get this prime real estate in the middle of the city and the new york times was a big part of it at the time. i'm forgetting what the new york times went under. but did have a different name at the time. but the new york times started to publishing a lot of inflammatory insinuate that residents of seneca village were threats to white women in other

parts of new york, that they were raping white women, that they were robbing white women, etc. and so it became this big. we have to defend white womanhood and the seneca village gets dismantled, parceled out and most of it is sold back to the city to use for this park. but of the seneca. but like when these things happen, it's not that the government says we're going to take your land, but here you move into this house and will pay for it like people who previously had homes and property and where congregations of churches that were in this community and school, you know, their children going to schools in this community are made unhoused, homeless just there is no option. and you become a and you find something else and you do something else and senate you know seneca village is now central park and that's one of the more like visceral examples to me because central park is so expansive. and to think that it was once this haven for people like you and i is is really sad but it's it's not an anomaly and if you've heard of lake lanier in

georgia, that's not far from where i live. there is constant law about lake lanier being haunted. but the black residents of georgia will tell you that's because lake lanier used to be a predominantly black community called oscar bill. and the community was told we to create a lake. so you have x amount of days to move before. we create the lake and they literally flooded it. so when the lake levels get really low, sometimes the structures are visible. you can see like, like the wooden structures that are underwater that would have been there are cemeteries that are under that water that black people were buried in. and so when people keep going missing on the lake. and it's like, well, you're jet skiing on what was a home for black people was a burial ground for us. and why do you think your leisure would be? i don't know. i just i'm just like shocked that people don't think these sites would be haunted. and there's this phrase that like everywhere in the u.s. is desecrated land. it was once sacred indigenous

land, and then it became sacred to other communities. and if you see pavement and skyscrapers and whatever, it's desecrated. it once was beautiful. and it's not anymore. okay? and. and so, rebecca, i know in your book, like many struggles regarding an injustice, the muskogee might say that muskogee had to resort to the court system when the state and federal legislators failed to support their claims. from what you've researched and reviewed and all the things that you've covered, is the court system the only that the nation could have thought injustice? yeah. i mean, i think this perception is shifting. but i think for a while we thought courts were a way where people in the united states or vulnerable groups in the united states, that their rights were being violated or the law was being violated them, that they could go and assert their

rights, you know, through our court system. that hasn't been true for tribes and it hasn't been true for tribes for a lot longer than the supreme court has been in the headlines. so since the 1950s. sw tribes have lost a majority of cases, tribes or tribal interests have lost a majority of cases that went before the supreme court and the nineties tribes have lost two thirds of all cases that have gone before the supreme court. and, you know indigenous rights in this country are kind of like a pendulum swing. so we have these big swings and in the fifties there was this era called the termination era where congress was literally writing tribes out of existence. what came after that era was the self-determination era and tribes lobbied congress and we started getting a lot better legislation. so we finally got protections to practice our ceremonies and

religious freedoms. you know, the indian child welfare act came out of this time protections for families. at the same time, really big and critical setbacks to tribal sovereignty started to come from the supreme court. and i'm going to just talk about two examples. so in 1978, the court that tribes can't prosecute non-native people, commit crimes on our land. and so that means you can go onto a reservation and you can somebody you can steal a pack of gum, you can break the speed limit and the tribe can't prosecute you. what was an explosion? again, a violent crime to where now native women are more likely than any other racial or ethnic group to experience violence in our lifetimes. and four out of five native women will experience violence in their lifetime. now, there are some exceptions to this jurisdictional loophole with the violence against women act, but it's still a really big problem. the supreme court followed that

up and came and did something similar in the eighties with civil jurisdiction. so if you're a non-native business on tribal lands, say maybe you're polluting that tribal land. there's very that the tribe can do to hold you accountable. they can't even regulate what you're putting into the ground or into the air. and so and so when muskogee nation said, okay, there's case that's already way because it's being brought by this man, death row, we're going to throw our hat in the ring. the challenge that they had was a federal judiciary and not just the supreme court, but the appellate and the courts below the supreme court. that's really predisposition against tribes and against sovereignty. and so had to not just make a case to say, okay, courts like here's law and this is what the law says and expect the courts to follow it.

they also had to say, don't be afraid of upholding the reservations. like if you uphold the reservation, that won't be scary. it'll be okay. you know, they also had to say, hey, we're we're a functioning government. you know, we have land men, we have courts. you know, you didn't see oklahoma having to, like, convince the courts. and so, yeah, i mean, i think that the courts continue to be i mean, we'll see. you know, what version of the supreme court will be like. but courts continue to be a really big barrier for tribes asserting our sovereignty. you know, sometimes when the law is on our side and we take issues to the court we win, but more often than not, we see the courts sort of depart from the law and precedent at well, yeah, okay. and you wrote i'm just calling you all day today, both of you. i'm just tony, you wrote that black people who prioritize

property ownership and understood it critical to both their success and safety. can you talk more about that aspect of how ownership of land factor into safety success. yeah. so the first thing that is super, super important for people to understand because now america looks very different, but there was a time not very long ago when agriculture was, the economy, like there was no way to make money and be financially independent if you were not in some way a part of the economy. even the northern factories were very dependent on the prices that they got their cotton that to make textiles or that they got, you know, to make food products. so everything was tied to the agriculture happening in the south. so when black people are freed and the country is essentially just like, yeah, sorry, you were like previously 3/5 of a person not allowed to not allowed to write, but now be a full citizen and human being that is supposed to do those things and pull yourself up by your bootstraps, essentially. right. but that looks like participating in the agricultural economy now that is

not that was not new for black people because been working in the agricultural economy. we had just not been ever able to negotiate the wages for our work, the conditions for our work, etc. so actually what you see in the earliest 20th century is a lot of the black liberation movement being very tied to the labor movement because it was very much like, well all i know how to do because you've kept me in this very subjugated position is to grow things. so just let me do that for myself and be paid for it. you know, i want to continue to be a part of agriculture, and i think that's important to know because sometimes in effort to be anti people of all races are just anti agriculture in general and. i see that in black communities where it's this idea of like, i don't want anything to do with agriculture because it feels too reminiscent of slavery. but what i remind people is that agriculture was also the way that we fed ourselves. so when i think of i'll use a very explicit example, when my great great great grandfather baker, bought that land, he bought land for his wife and two

sons. and at that time just thinking that he could give something to his kids, the federal government was not making sure they had, which was an insulated tract land where they could run around freely, laugh and play, pick fresh food. no one selling it to you twice as much for organic, like just like being able to provide good food, clean air, clean water to your children, and the insulation that comes with. this is our land. and let's like, you know, essentially like live out of the sight of white supremacy at, this earlier stage, a lot of black people did not want to be in cities because that required living closely to people who you didn't know liked, who you didn't know wanted you to exist and be a human being. but if i'm in a rural area where, my neighbors are also other black landowners, which is often what black people did. it was like, hey, i'm going to oklahoma. come with me. like, let's all build this little it always like, let's do strength in numbers and let's grow food together and let's barter. it was always very communal, which is why i keep turning to

the idea that land can fix a lot of the problems we're dealing with now, not just around racial wealth gaps and anti-blackness, also around the food system that we have. i think people, the first time they realize how vulnerable our food systems are, was the beginning of the covid 19 pandemic realizing, oh my gosh, the grocery stores are out of food. what do how i feed my family? if the grocery store is don't get handle on the -- situation, like what do we do? and more people realize that they were very dependent on these systems and they thought, anyway, i'm getting sidetracked. you're fine. i think everyone's nodding with you that they were trying to say that they would be. but yeah, like, i just i just think that it was really important to honor that. as you said, land was so much more than the dollar amount, and that was even something that i had to unlearn and figure out in the book process. can i interview my grandmother about the land? and i'd say, you know, how much do you think the land is worth? and i'm getting at like a dollar figure and she's just like,

well, i wouldn't know because i'm not yet. and like, why would how would i know that number? and i'm like, oh, well, you can get you know, surveyors will come out here and tell you and just like, for what? i'm not selling it. and i'd be like, well, you know, grandma, you could sell hunting licenses to people who want to hunt on your land. she's like, i own the deer. like, what do you like? she was just like, this is crazy. what are you talking about? like, i have a house, i have a home, and it's beautiful. and why do i need more than that? and i think she was getting at the like, you are being conditioned to think of in that capitalistic way. and that's not what it was for us. my grandmother was born a sharecropper. she married into black blended family, so it never was a dollar amount. it was owning your own land was being free, sexual violence was being free from exploitation from your employer, who is also your landowner, who is also feels entitled to everything you own because it's actually what they own. and just like getting to live on land that was hers that she could walk around and say, i don't to build anything else on it like that. it's wooded it's nice to walk around on this is like that feeling is so priceless.

and so even now, my grandmother passed away last year and we've been in a lot of conversations and getting tons of text messages from developers who are okay. thank you. yes the text messages are getting they're actually getting more out of control. and there is a reason that which is that typically the largest land transfers happen, older people die because older people hoard that land and they pass it on when they die to their children. but black people both because we value communal land, but also because we've been taken advantage of. typically our asset control ends at wills versus other families have trusts. an llc is an all sorts of things. and long story short, since my grandmother died last year, i have gotten no short like five or six text messages from different developer is offering me. hey, i'll give you 18,000 for five acres. i'll give you. it's just crumbs. i'm like, i mean, you can't get that anywhere one acre so but

hoping that i don't know enough about the land i'm just like, did you do your research? you happened to text the one granddaughter who wrote a book, black land theft. it's like, this is insane. jane. i literally i'm texting my cousins. like, if any of you had gotten a text like this, they're like, no, i haven't gotten it. oh, my great family meeting at thanksgiving. i'm like, they really messed up. like, if they had, because that's how they do it. that's how heirs, property works. they hope that they text a family member who's not living on the land, who doesn't care about it, who's up north in chicago or saint louis, and they get a text that says, hey, i'll give you 18,000, $18,000 randomly is incredible when you don't know what the land is worth. and so they sell off land that other people are depending on and value more than that, because they were taken advantage of through this text message and literally through the text, they're like, you don't even have to do nothing. we'll send you what you signed through email like, don't even

have to get on a phone and talk to you. you'll let me sign virtually and take all of my family's life earnings like as and make it seem easy for me. so if you or your if you have land if a black person in the audience and your family has land and you have not gotten a text, someone in your family has talked to them, texture group chats. if you don't got a group chat because family, be complicated. but that but it is what is create a group chat hey has anyone heard from anybody about our land in here? if you have like have a rule, if you hear from someone, you have to contact every other family member before you even respond to them. because we have to be on one accord and they take advantage this unity. they take advantage of grief. they take advantage of. i hope people are too busy burying someone to be on one accord. and i'm so glad our family is not doing that. but that's how we get to a place where less than 1% of land is owned by black families. okay, thank you. we'll talk more at the other ten. so now we have a few minutes for

any questions we have a mic up here in the front. if you have any questions for our authors. well, what i want to know is i give someone a minute or i'm going to ask questions. is she making her way? awesome? yeah, great deal. so i just wanted to ask the cherokee nation didn't recognize freedmen that had come from, you know, the same trail of tears. and with the cherokee nation now living in oklahoma and you this century or last like or five years, they recognized the freedmen. i know this isn't specifically about land, but i wondered what your thoughts were about that. yeah, yeah. thank you for. thank you for asking that question. so folks who don't know my tribe, cherokee nation, along with four other tribes in the

southeast muskogee, the chickasaw, the choctaw and the seminoles adopt chattel slavery from the u.s. south. so we enslaved people of african descent, and we've been codified into law. there was a period of time where black cherokees, who a clan by adoption or by birth, were considered full citizens. but in the 1820s we updated our constitu ution and basically adopted blacks, slavery, anti-black racism and it into law. our five tribes fought on the side of the confederacy during the civil war in indian territory, and at the end of that war in 1866, we signed peace treaties with the union and for my tribe, cherokee nation, for the seminoles and for the muskogee is. one of the things in that treaty was that the people we had formerly enslaved and their descent would be guaranteed citizenship in our tribes.

that happened for a period of and then in the early 1900s, our tribe went through this process called allotment, where communally owned land was divided up. and when the federal government came in to do allotment, they made they segregated the rolls. and so they put black tribal citizens one roll and they put other tribal citizens on another roll. and our governments were suppressed for about seven years. we weren't allowed to practice democracy. our basically we had like a puppet government controlled by the united states and then in the seventies, we reconstituted our governments. and then there was a lot of anti racism in those new government. so for cherokee nation originally in the seventies, freedmen descendants could enroll. but then in the eighties, we started just enrolling them. we had a really big, embarrassing, honest and shameful fight over freedmen, freedmen, enrollment and

eventually it ended in a court case that was very recent. in 2017, in which a federal court said based on the 1866 treaty, freedmen descendants have full citizenship rights are. tribe acknowledged that case and has since updated our constitution and where i come down on it is you know and i write this in the book is that i think that if we believe in tribal sovereignty, if our tribes are truly, then we are responsible for our mistakes. we are responsible for the harm that we are. we have caused and we are accountable for that harm, just like any other government would be accountable. and so we cannot ask the united states, to be held accountable for the wrongs of history against us and not take account ourselves for the wrongs of chattel slavery.

in. and i just want to say a couple more things, which is, you know, the people that we enslaved, they didn't ask to be cherokee or ask to become muskogee. we made that choice for them and their ancestors endured both slavery and the trail of tears, both allotment and segregation and and the other point i want to make is just that on on the law path to repair citizens ship is only the first step. that's that's the flaw. and we have a lot more work to do. i just so appreciate you and this is why i love being in conversation with you, because i think there are so many times in both ways what what black people have done to indigenous people, what indigenous people have done to black people. it's like we let the federal government be a wedge and b use it as a reason why we can't have solidarity and accountability will be needed in all ways like there's no future world where we get the justice we need, but

then we don't also have to remain accountable to people. and for our actions. and i, i think that that goes both ways. and so the only thing that i will add to this, because it was beautiful and perfect, is that the five tribes that she named are only five of hundreds of tribes in what we now call the united states of america. and so when i sometimes in the black community, when i fight for black indigenous solidarity is, well, they enslaved us. and not every indigenous person is a descendant of an indigenous tribe that enslaved black people. there are so many more, like you name five tribes that adopted slavery. there are dozens of tribes that were actually absolutely abolitionist, were like doing raids on white churches that, were trying to force them to enslave because it was something that the white federal government was bringing to them to make them complicit in something. so that it was harder to make it a a moral question if everyone in the country is a part of this in some way, then everyone in the country is okay with it. and when black and indigenous

people are building maroon societies and and trying to dismantle the plantation economy, the government says we have to make more indigenous people complicit so that it's harder to say who is the bad guy, who is the good guy? same thing on the black side, my ancestors, some of them were buffalo soldiers, which is means that they were part of indigenous removal in areas like kentucky. and i have to take ownership for that. and it goes hand in hand in the same way that i hope that you and the indigenous communities will be accountable to us. i also model that same thing and so it's never a one end and it's always a both and to me, okay. what it looks like we are just out of time. so i'm so sorry for any one of the extra questions, i guess join us at the book signing tent and thank you so much for joining us today. thank you. thank you, rebecca.

book tv's live of the texas book festival in austin continues after this break. a bit of a you know, a little bit of a frustrated soliloquy there you know, i asked again, we specialize in unconventional warfare, unconventional thinking. i once asked the senior official at the air force who was coming to the committee for more stealth bomber, said, look, i

absolutely support pre-positioning more in guam or other locations back to the indo-pacific. i said, but what gets inside beiji thinking more, what gets inside their decision more? a few more stealth bombers or another hong kong, or even the potential of a weaker uprising. or, you know, it started kind of going that list because the thing, whether it's the ayatollah was in iran or in beijing, the thing they fear the most of their own people. and if we have them looking internally or even considering it, i'm not for, you know, everybody watching calling for regime change or anything along, those lines. but when you have people like mussa amini, the little the girl who was murdered by ayat. a virtue police for not wearing a hijab, a head covering and it

sparked a national uprising. and these people begging for even some type rhetorical support from the united states, much less like encrypted apps. star or other things. iran has a lot less energy to muck around abroad if they're looking internally at their own folks and. we from a moral standpoint should be supporting these people. we did it in the cold war those dissident arts whether it's the solidarity movement or inside the soviet union, were household that we absolutely supported. and why aren't we taking that more approach now? i also tell a story about an afghan elder that i have been working with the better part of a year like my teeth were brown from drinking so much tea. what man? and he kept going on and on. he commanded a pretty large militia i was trying to win over to our. about his secret weapons. oh, commander mike, my secret

weapons. this is how we're going to defeat extremists. this is how we're going to win this war. this is the long term approach. and eventually i kind of had to call him to the carpet because i didn't know if he had stinger missiles or what and he said he says, okay, okay, commander mike, i'll bring out my secret weapons. and he sent somebody the back and i hear a bunch of rustling. i know what he's going to bring out. you know it walked out. his two daughters and one of the most conservative taliban run parts of afghanistan. i never seen a woman outside of a burka completely uncovered in their late teens early twenties. he was smuggling over back and forth to india to get educated as doctors and lawyers and, you know, he said, i'll take up battalion of them. this guy was completely illiterate by the way i mean, he was a he was a boss. he said that, this is how you undermine al qaida and icis in the town. and then when women like them

are running this country, when they're marching in in islamabad and in tehran and in kabul, that's how you know when the extremists are defeated. and it just it's that war of ideas right that thought was so powerful. but, you know, that our default in washington is to throw more money, more tanks, planes and ships or divisions at a problem. and that's the kind of thinking i, i try to get to and hard truths they can lead like a green beret to think about these problems differently. and so thinking about these problems i mean obviously the election and you're on the short list of names for for of defense if if i almost everyone i'm talking to. and so at least i mean, you know you're you've close to the former president. you spoke at the rnc. you know, obviously in the book you that you had multiple meetings with them and you shared your advice with them. you took some of your advice and listened to you. so under trump administration,

if you're in the administration now, what would you say? what would be the some of the major that you do? you don't go all the way around world. but what would be some of the big things that you would suggest or push for that could get at some of this move? public diplomacy, as you said, like starlink's in iran, things like that. what could should the united states do in the near term? well, number one, i'll just tell you, in the engagement with him, you know, there's this narrative out there that, you know, he's he's and obstinate and, you know, always knows kind of that the right answer his way or the highway it's all of my experiences would have been complete opposite constantly asking questions, constantly seeking input. what do you think about this what do you think about that? the frustration? and you talk to some in his administration, they think he's made up his mind and then he talks to somebody else again and and and and changes it. so he really does kind of espouse one of the attributes i talk about that bottoms up leadership and constantly seeking input and ideas and and

but then, you know in terms of what difference i think you'll see accountability again which we've seen far too little of, particularly with such debacles as the afghanistan withdrawal. not a single person fired, not even like laterally transferred. in fact, some being promoted that were in charge. and i tell the story, you know, his instincts are often so. right. and then he leaves to others for the details and his instinct was, hey, we can't be number one on earth if we're number two in space. and once he was really briefed on what the chinese and russians are doing up there to militarize space and to be able to take out our entire economy, which is dependent on space, much less the military's ability to operate around the world. gps, global communications and what have you, he said well, we need our own force to defend it. the space force, everybody made fun. everybody mocked it. you remember the netflix series with adam carell and and what have you.

well, look, there were people that were resist it. even his own air force. she was fired. a lot of people said that was really mean. but you know what, the generals got on board real fast, got the message and think now, even just a few years and hindsight, we see that actually that was very prescient. how well they're working with the private sector and commercial space and how critical that new space force is, because that absolutely is the future and we can't continue to dominate or be a leader economically or militarily. we don't if we don't control our space assets. so that's the kind of, you know, i think, approach oftentimes is is that is needed, you know, on the 80th 80th anniversary of d-day, i hate to call it an anniversary, but we did a this evening on this and just sheer magnitude of of what happened

that day is it's shocking it's like one of the most humbling things. and we as we were writing this segment, everybody was was very emotional about it. and i think to think that more people died on a single day in normandy than died in the entire iraq war of 20 years. and when you sit back and you think about that, you have 430,000 americans died in world war two, 54 total, 54 million total people died. that day. that's 3% at the time of the world's population and gone in a world war and you can't say it enough. you can't look back and you can't teach history enough that. but unfortunately, it's being stripped out of our culture today. and anything that is not popular, anything that's not politically correct, anything that doesn't fit a progressive narrative, is being pushed further and further and further out of our curriculum. and that's why i wrote this. it's, you know, not it's a hard read in the sense that it's

short stories about pivotal. some you've heard of, some you haven't heard of. and it allow people to whitewash history, you know, and everybody's heard the story of some of the key founding fathers, george ben franklin, places like that they they did did fantastic things. but people behind them also did amazing things to influence these people to make them become the people they are today. have a high school wrestling coach who i dedicated the book to. his name's brad wallace, and i lived my entire by one phrase that he told me he was my coach from junior as sophomore year to senior year and he said never half -- anything whole as, everything. i said, that's a pretty good thing. so i live my entire life by that phrase and probably about two years ago when i started writing this book, i told him, i said, hey, brad, you know, like that phrase stuck me is, what the hell are you talking about? and he had no idea. he told that phrase. so i was like, okay, from the heart, i guess. no, but but those are the people. there's always someone behind, somebody who influences them, and they don't always get the

credit. and in this book, i talk a little bit some of the people behind the big who made all the waves that that change this nation, but also the fun stories that you're not going to hear about like ben franklin, you know, i named son after him. yeah. because ben was a g. he was not here at all during revolutionary war. he was over fornicating with booze and hookers in who, quite frankly him. and hunter biden might get along just fine, but he was over in france. but he was also getting us all the guns to win the revolutionary war. we never we never would have won revolutionary war without ben franklin. and, you know, people know him for the hundred dollar bill on electricity. i mean, who stands in a lightning storm with a key? but whatever george washington, a ulysses s grant, who was obviously during the civil war, i mean, he was the only president to ever get arrested twice, actually, on horseback drinking as president.

so him and trump would get along great these days. but these people really made a mark on on society. and we have have a culture now that is trying to strip everything about history out of our thinking, out of our, i guess, the repertoire of our kids growing up. and, you know, i have three kids. i don't want them to grow up in a world that forgets some of the greatest moments. but i also don't want them to forget the worst, because the worst moments in life are the ones that shape us the best as wrestler in high school and college, i always tell people that the most i learned was from the matches i lost. and if we erase those those stories, we're doomed to repeat it. you know, every country through the history or every i should say, every country, every empire, everything through the history of the world has always had some sort of downfall. you know, is america next? i sure hope not. can we fix it. well, if we learn from history, we will. but every single society, when

they've gotten weaker and weaker and weaker, they've become this problem. there's a saying that, actually, we had a general on this evening who took the words right out of my mouth, and he said, you know, hard, great hard men, hard men create good times, good times, great soft men, soft men, great hard times. and the only way we can stop that cycle is is teaching the history, teaching what made this great. the honestly, the greatest country in the world, and gave us the resolve to to all the things that we to do here. i mean, we have such privileges and such rights here, but most people will never know you know, 50% of the country doesn't have 50% of the world doesn't have clean drinking water. and we decide which starbucks we want to go to every day. and it's an anomaly in piece we enjoy is not the norm. wars the norm. peace is something that is generated through being stronger than everybody else. so how.

is our live coverage of the texas book festival continues now. better.

as the site. hello, everybody. welcome to the texas book festival. my name is dale kennedy. i am very happy and privileged to introduce two authors today. the books are exit by evolution into and the danger imperative by michael sierra arrival and i was taken with these books because they are just so thorough and also so compelling on a story level. they're both in the social sciences sciences. there's a anthropologist and a sociologist here, and they did a really deep dive on these subjects. they went in and did, you know, interviewed people and they tell the stories. they're really fascinating. they also back it up with tons of data and it's they're just really, really books. and i'm really happy to be here

to kick off this discussion. i have some things here to say. please silence your cell phones. after this conversation, the authors will sign books in the book, people signing tents at 11th street and congress avenue books are for 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 ten a portion of every book sale helps support the book festival's mission, which includes literacy initiatives and access to literature across state. so we're going to have 30 minutes of conversation on what these two, and then we'll have 15 minutes of q&a. you know, you can if it's a question, you can get the question upfront so they can if it's a comment that's great. you know, make it short. just because we have 15 minutes.

so, yeah. so i'd like to talk to kick this off, give our ask you tell us a little bit about the process as i know on a previous book you had been a paramedic on the border. so whenever you got the idea to to cover this story, which is the story of guns that are smuggled down across the border into mexico. so how did you approach it? how did you think about i need to get some personal stories. yeah. thank you for that question. so i, i stumbled into this project because i was on on the border in southern arizona in northern sonora, in nogales, and i was writing my previous book about emergency responders and what border militarization does to to their work. when i began and i was also a volunteer emergency responders. so i kind of learned about

firearm is going south. there are these signs if you cross into mexico that guns and ammunition are prohibited and penalty can be prison. i didn't know anything about gun laws. i didn't even know much about guns, only what guns to human bodies as as an emergency responder, i've treated people gunshot injuries, people who died as well. and as an ethnographer. i thought how how if i want to understand this vicious of violence that our guns from the united states are going south and causing the violence in mexico, then so many people are fleeing. how can and as norgrove i do that ethnography is like yes we do interviews. we also have this prolonged time hanging out with people who engage practices we are interested in so this case, these people are, gun traffickers and buyers in mexico and the way i approached it was do a multi cited research or what we call a multi-sided

because there is no unlike a fire where i could just hang out with a fire. community firefighter guns move. so move from stores in texas and arizona across the border and then around texas, around until they are recovered in crime scenes. that's meant me that i, i did some participant observation or looking at gun buyback in mexico where people bring the weapons kind of in exchange of money and from them i from then i also to various and kind of did research with various groups of people who use the guns. so these are members of organized crime groups as. well as civilians who buy, smuggle or smuggle guns for themselves from the united states because they do not feel safe do not feel protected by by

local and local security forces in mexico and as well, because they can better guns from the united states. so it was a lot of interviews. it was going to gun clubs it was reading a lot of legal documents like transcripts as well. very few gun trafficking cases go to trial. the ones that do we have transcripts. so unlike kind of comparatively to my project, this was much more difficult methodologically and took me to two more more places around mexico and the united states. how long were you on this and the field? i began in 2018 and finished most of fieldwork in january 2020. then the started. i began writing the book. i went back to do what i hadn't done. so work with or interview the agents who trying to stop gun

traffickers in arizona. i did that in 2020 to so it's i would say about four or five years, but interrupted the pandemic. yeah. and michael, same question to like how long was your field research on this book and then how did you were your ideas to get into it. sure. so the at the risk of dating the project began about a decade ago. so it began in 2014. i had originally begun studying group violence. so gang violence intervention. and that's the in which i met police officers for the first time. but like a whole generation of researchers now that are at our faculty and they're releasing books, it was the police killing of michael brown that shifted my focus onto the specific topic of policing and police violence. and so if you can put yourself in the shoes of a much younger michael the t for this was a time before the washington post

had a dataset that we now take for granted the counted, which is a number of it's a data set of people who are fatally shot by because they said just didn't exist. and i'm reading op eds like everybody else and a grad student, i'm convinced that surely we must have the answers to these things and. we just don't we don't have the data. and my questions of and why police violence happens way that it does. i grew increasingly that i was going to be able to answer those with surveys or with administrative data from a police department. and so you have appointed to i went to the tried and true tactic of spending time with the people that i wanted to understand. as i told officers between 2014 and 2018, across three different departments spread across the u.s. i them that i hear from police chiefs, i hear from lawyers, i hear from academe and activists. but i never hear from a line level police officer, what is your job? how do you think about your work? what is it like? and so i got in the car i started with elmont on the east coast. eventually i went to west river

on the west coast. i finished in sunshine, the southwest. these are all pseudonyms. i don't name the officers in my book. that was to get and to build trust. and the work progressed from 2014 through 18 and was very much focused trying to understand this puzzle which in 2014 there was the of two nypd officers at end of 2014, wenjian liu and rafael, they were shot the head at point blank range in their car. and this became central to this of the quote unquote war on cops. and so the claim is that egghead academics like myself, politicians, the liberal media are creating environment that is conducive even calls for violence against and there's increasing violence increase in threat. but data simply doesn't support that narrative. the data shows decreasing violence against police over the past 5060 years. and so that was the puzzle in search of an explanation how, do we have the data which says one thing and an entire institution

which says that it's more dangerous than ever to be a police? and that's what i set out to understand the car across 33 cities, how do you go about constructing a version of which is real? because it changes how officers see the world, it changes how they behave, it changes how they interact with people. and so that was the that was the origin of the work. and now we are about years later. so follow up question to you on that. so both of you actually have characters that like inside the institution in which i'm thinking of early on. you have the officer who's training people in the academy and then you also have out in the field see the repercussions and same with you. you have people like that are victims and then people that actively in the trade. so michael, if you could just speak to the officer that is that is training that is a part of the getting the danger as being a part of culture.

sure. so i should probably define what the danger imperative is. and so the danger imperative is what we sociologists call a cultural frame. but more simply, it's a filter so we all have various filters. you wear a filter when you're at work, which is ideally the same one that you use when you're with your friends, your family. if you're a banker, a firefighter, you have a filter which some things hides, others because you have to restrict your focus to get your job done. there's so much stuff you can pay attention to out in the world. police officers are no different. but that filter that i focus on, i call the danger imperative and that filter is focused on the preoccupation with violence and the need to ensure officers at all times and. that's something that officers are very explicitly taught in that formal training that socialization process begins. the police academy 6 to 8 months in the u.s. and the officer that's being referred i call him officer cisneros in the book. and so if you can sort of like imagine in your head.

cisneros the sharp jawline, it's like rippling muscles in his forearm arms, wears tactical pants. he's got the hat with the cross swords in the helmet. he's a very tactical guy. and anybody that's in law enforcement or the military will recognize that language very high speed. and i, i asked him about, you know, sort of how thought about training and how he thought about his role as sort of the head use of force training at the police academy and he essentially paraphrased adolf hitler to me to that i think it was hitler that said that if i control the if i control the youth, i can have an effect on the future. so like and that's how i think about police training. i can get more officers to be of a similar mindset to me. i can help them get into mindset about being prepared. and i think what's really important about cisneros is that he is in some a almost a caricature here of the danger imperative. they're not like cisneros, but cisneros was the head of use of force training, not in spite of

those beliefs, but because of them. that is a useful way of seeing the world. if your job is to train officers to believe and, to understand and to behave in a way that they believe is necessary to go home alive. and so while that might seem odd for us civilians here in the world, cisneros and his role are crucial to recreating this assumption, your job, first and foremost, at all times, is ensuring that you go home regardless of the empirical, measurable, probable ease of encountering somebody with a firearm on some random traffic stop or a ringing alarm or an argument over trash cans or whatever else is much more common for police officers to respond to than, say, active shooters. yeah, and and yeah. and yours and your book you cover a lot of the zetas as a cartel that also has training and you have a supercom telling

story in there of a young woman that was taken she was essentially abducted and then forced into their military style training. do you want to speak a little bit about story and then how that shaped your thesis in your your so the her name, at least in my book this is not her real name is samara. and she is one of the main character was in the book her story put puts everything together in what we kind of don't maybe understand when we think about the border and we think about mexico and we think about migration and guns. so samarra, samarra, is she her parents migrated to texas when she was little she grew up with her grandparents in monterrey in waverly on she when she was 13 years old, living in the

neighborhood without her parents. and there was that which was then the most violent and powerful organized crime group in the area. she was abducted forced into the car. she was taken a training camp. she was giving a nine millimeter handgun. she was taught to be as that a soldier. very few women have done that. women are engaged in crime, but very few actively in killing. torturing, bribing police and so she by the time i met her, she had served some time in in prison in mexico in, juvenile prison. if you are caught as a as a she was she was arrested when she was 15 years old. they usually spend only several years in prison. then they can let go. and she was trying to rebuild life. so through her, i in the book, i

tell the story of kind of a victim who a perpetrator and who because i it was important for me, both because of gender, because whenever we are thinking about guns, it's usually both, at least in mexico, who pull the trigger a and people who are victims of violence, although there is a big problem of femicide, many of them are men. so it was interesting for me to tell a female story or to tell the story for a female perspective. and it was also important to muddy these bounds between what what do we think is is a good victim and what do we think who do we think is is a perpetrator. so yeah, that that story still kind of sits with me. you know. and michael, there's a story towards the end of your book

where an officer ah, whose constantly kind of thinking about survival has a gun that he that he takes out and it's a it's an innocent stop. i mean it's he stops innocent people and there could have been like a fatal accident that happened. and you saw that firsthand. could you tell that story just to kind of see the victims of both from both sides, both his the officer's psychology and the the boy's that could have been shot. yeah. so in the in the first three quarters of the book, i tell i make the argument but the real question is does the training does the day to day routine and of the department these threat bulletins that officers get the commemoration their fallen officers not only on walls but t shirts and their skin with tattoos does it actually change behavior that's kind the real question. and as i as i argue in chapter four, it does and one example where i think it's very clear it's i'm with officer irani.

he's i think 28 or 29 when i meet him, he is patrolling an area of city that i call the heights. so it's 90% black and latino, poor, working poor neighborhood in elmont and he's driving down a street. it's already dark the winter time, but it's a friday night. we pass a group of young latino boys. i think that they can't be older than 13, 14 years old. he drives past them and then stops cold on the street on this one way. and he's looking in side view mirror and he's muttering to himself like, look at this little, shitheads. and so i ask him, do you know who they are? he says, no, but i should. and puts the car in reverse. and he's still staring in the view you can't see out the back because there's a catch the back. so we still staring in the side view. and as he's reversing down the street, he on holsters his pistol and he puts it in his lap. so his indexed along the frame and it's sitting with the barrel pointed through the door, the panel of the door. and so the boys, they know what time it is. they they the cop went by.

they know that he stopped so they know what's going to happen. so they just stop. and officer irani down the window and then immediately just launches into questions, sets. you guys how are you guys doing tonight? you know, okay, there's this jumble of yeah, we're doing okay. it's fine is okay. you guys doing good in school? one of them jokes. yeah, i'm getting straight a's and the other one from behind. like, actually, i got got d's, though, for real. and that's the end of the interaction. the whole lasts less than a minute. he tells them. all right, guys, have a good night. and then he just drives and it leaves them standing in the night as he's driving away. he holsters his pistol and then complete. lee, unprompted, explains to me why he did what he did. and he says, you know, those kids could have shot at us in a split second if they wanted to. so that's why you got to you always have to have a plan of attack. so that's why i had my so i had my pistol down here, finger off the trigger because you just never know. you have to be now for the lawyers in the room or anybody watching, there's this core concept in fourth amendment juries prudence around

reasonable ness. we judge what officers do based on the concept of whether it's reasonable, what argue is that the danger imperative is such that it essentially corrupts the very concept of reasonableness because officers trained to understand that whatever they do as long as they can justify it on the grounds that it is enhancing their safety, even though when i talk to administration, the epd about what officer ronnie did, including training, they're like, that's it's bad tactics. it's clearly unreasonable. that doesn't in the moment when an officer is their decisions about what to do, how to understand them. now outside of the corruption of reasonableness that i think is really important for understanding how and why it happens. it's important to also underscore that nobody got shot. i did not watch a tragedy unfold in front of me, but what did happen was an officer went out of their way to pull a gun hold it in their lap, contact group of kids who they did not suspect

committing a crime, who they did not know and created a set of circumstances where a shadow one kid gets scared and runs a quote unquote, furtive movement. and that situation could have gone a very, very different direction. and the only people that know it happened, it's not even the boys, it's me, an officer. there's no record of that contact, no call for service. there isn't even body cam footage. we're the only ones that know that happened. and that is something that happens far more often than somebody actually shot. and i think it's important to remember that, you know. so i want to kind of well, one thing i learned, okay these books. i have so much information in them and one thing i learned is or maybe i already knew you kind of forget, is that a lot of these issues are non a lot of these things, lot of the are old problems. i mean, things, you know, for instance, the idea of the super

predator came out in the nineties. i mean, whether you're democrat or republican or whatever, like both administrations and american culture writ large has some problems with like militancy and with, you know, our relationship, mexico, our relationship with guns, all of that. and we're, you know, heading into another administration. i you know, you can't say what the future's holding, but at the same i wonder if you each could just talk a little bit solutions like in your minds, like are there are there directions to go? i mean, because sometimes it seems insurmountable i mean, the united states and guns and the united states, our relationship to mexico is it's it's it's and so what does someone do when they don't want to throw up their hands and ever you can um so the reason i wrote this book

is to we we know that united states has a gun violence problem but what we often know is that our gun violence problem is not ours alone. that we are also going exporting this problem to mexico, central america and haiti and other other parts of the world. and i think understanding that there is this between well, let's say texas, texas even if you look at the hard data, 43% of all guns recovered in crime scene in mexico come from texas alone. and then you add arizona, 17%, california, 13% to texas has several thousand licensed gun dealerships where you can go and buy a gun, you can buy many as you want. you can buy ten or 15 guns in mexico.

there two gun stores there are owned by the military. you have to pass very rigorous requirements to get very limited number of like one handgun and several long guns. so when we understand that there is this kind of discrepancy and that the guns from the united states going south are implicated in violence in mexico, are related with a refugee that we have that we are seeing at the border. and again, texas, we are militarizing the border we are putting the barbed wire. what the boys in the river. but we don't make the connection that people fleeing here because our guns going south. so to us into this problem took many years. well yes like where why do these organized groups in mexico need guns from the united states? well, they are engaged in gun traffic, in drug trafficking because we want drugs. there is a big demand for drugs in the united states. so even to begin kind of

unraveling this problem, we think, oh, we're talking about guns. well, no, we also talking about addiction to drugs, kind of treatment programs. but we are also thinking about like, how can we have laws in the united states that are attentive to the use of fire arms in crimes abroad. so things like very simple. we know we no background checks know if had like, you know, to unlock my phone, need a thumb scan. right. or on my face scan. what if we had that on guns there are technological solutions that would make them less appealing to to gun traffickers would also make children less likely pick up their parents guns at the same time. since this is a transnational issue, this is not only on on the u.s. the other question is why is there demand for guns from the united states in mexico? co and yes, so drug trafficking

is part of that but it is also very weak criminal justice system. the fact that people can't call the police, people can't expect the crimes, property crimes, kidnaping, extortion, even murder to be ever investigated. so there is work to in mexico, there is work to do in the states. it might it will take time. but every single every little thing we do make to increase gun safety in the united states would also a huge difference in regarding gun violence in mexico. yeah and michael, there's a know the big debate here and there's extremes on the side like you know defund the police or, raise the budgets. and so and you say in your book, you know, can't let perfection be the of the good i mean like you still have to make in a way that that if it's incremental, it's still working going in the

right direction. what are some ideas that you've come away with? sure. i mean, if i had a really simple answer, i would have tweeted it already. but i thinkstep is recognizing i think we have already said it took us a long time to get here. the problems that we deal with in contemporary policing are problems as old as the institution, and that transcends even u.s. the police have always been a body that was designed to protect propertied interests, insulate power, to preserve power the police are not social change makers. they hold the state, they enforce law. they don't law. they enforce whatever the law is. and one of the takeaways from the book that i hope people do walk away with is that, you know, we see shootings and we see these false arrests. we see even, you know, gross brutality. and i think often people want to understand those things because they shock the conscience, they want to understand those things as as aberrant and unexpected. and the violence is point. the institution policing does

not function. if do not have the ability to use violence. that's why you do what an officer tells you. because if you don't, they have the legal authority, the tools and legal protections to make you do it. and suddenly, if we just accept that the police as an institution, i'm not saying they're always walking around beating everybody. that's not what i'm saying. but the institution itself is designed to be. and if you just accept that and we stop throwing money at cultural sensitivity training and this training and that training, moving along the edges, suddenly we might be open to other possibilities. we might be open to other things that actually get us toward the same direction we want to go. is less violence, less crime and this might surprise you. we actually know a whole of things that can reduce crime and reduce that do not rely on armed agents of the state to be going to things like door knocks and traffic stops and they're really simple things. it's things like improving lighting, it's things greening vacant lots and fixing the

facades, broken down buildings. it's things like increasing the number of mental health treatment at the county level. interestingly enough, that reduces assaults specific against police officers. there are two sides to this coin. i think we often talk about officer safety. what officers are really concerned about and public safety like are two separate things and really, if i can reduce violence at the community level, do you know who else spends time on streets, communities that are plagued by violence and crime? it's police officers. and so what i would like to see in the future, particularly at a moment where law enforcement writ large is continuing to talk about staffing crisis, they're continuing to talk how they can't get the calls fast enough and the workload. i would love for the fraternal order of police, police benevolent association, the international chiefs of police, the police executive research forum. and i can go on to be at the front of the line calling for initiatives calling for investment in interventions that can reduce violence to keep their officers and keep citizens

safe. all without me to deal with this very problem of changing police culture or addressing 400 million firearms or addressing qualified immunity. i don't have to do any of that. i can do simple local level interventions that actually keep everyone safe, but they're not calling for those things. i'd like to know why am. thank you at this point i'd like to open it up to. i just have to say that like these two professors here are like a wealth of information on all kinds of different topics. so if you have a specific question that can you know that would be great to to ask that right up front and yeah how the was a microphone over there we can maybe shoot okay go ahead this is gun smuggling in south

we know gun lobby is huge controls a lot of politicians getting elected. but i mean, even on the the the liberal side, how come no one is standing at the podium and saying you, know, we've got to stop these guns being smuggled south over the border? how come no one is saying that and how come no one's saying and we have to do something about drug addiction in this country and that will help the immigration problem. i mean, no one is approaching that angle anywhere that i hear. you know who. and my other question, who are the people smuggling the guns south? thank you. are they to the south or they people here that are just doing it to make money? and of course, the gun is behind making money off the sale. guns would go with that. those are really questions. so the people who are the first

chain and the gun smuggling, i usually use, or at least permanent residents because they are the only ones who can buy guns and pass background. people who smuggled guns across, the border or transport them are often binational citizens or people who are more connected and knowledgeable to the criminal groups in mexico. the reason why nobody? well, my point in writing this book was trying to change our conversation, but it's a it's a bipartisan thing like we in the united states, we have laws that don't that prohibit us from even no ing what our guns are doing in mexico. so the tiahrt amendment, for example, it doesn't allow the atf, the bureau of alcohol, firearms and explosives to gun tracing data with a with a public only with prosecutor us

and the police. the politicians don't want to touch the subject because they know it will kind of antagonize even further the nra and the gun lobby so it loses elections. it's an issue nobody wants to talk about. migration is also not an issue that anyone has clear solutions. we saw what happens when kind of democrats didn't have a good plan, what to how to talk and what to do with migration and with asylum issues if we at the big federal agencies that focus on the border, customs, border protection example, they advertise is the number of people they capture or apprehend crossing the border. the number of drugs, what kind coming into the united states. but they do not advertise there. the numbers are there. you can find them. they are not very proud of stopping young guns going south against any anything that puts guns in the conversation actually cuts budgets of atf.

so it's just the way our political system works is that yeah, there's lots of details in the book. i mean, you can see how it all operates there's gun stores along the border and people shipping ammunition and yeah it's happening right now and like she says it's it's americans it's by nationals it's mexicans it's it's all elseworlds together and creates this okay and in a lot of places in texas the sheriffs is our only law enforcement. so i had was curious if you had any thoughts when you were discussing the training of the rise of the constitution sheriffs movement and how that impacts or doesn't the positions that you were talking about today. sure. it's a great question. and this is where i start plugging other people's because i didn't study sheriffs. there's a great new book called highest law in the land, and specifically about sheriffs and sheriffs and that movement for

those not familiar the constitutional sheriffs movement, a nutshell is a belief, because it's not real, but it's a belief among some sheriffs that they essentially have legal powers that supersede everybody else's and they have the ordained ability to decide what is constitutional and what is not. and they can decide what laws they want to enforce or not enforce. this saw a sharp in its prominence, as you might imagine, during covid mask mandates. some sheriffs came out on record saying this is unconstitutional. there are statements made around firearms and red laws or various legislation that's passed to restrict, use, access, etc., around firearms. they say that's unconstitutional. i will not enforce it. the action for doing when it comes to policing is going to be local, state federalism is a reality in the u.s. the federal government cannot just drop into austin, texas, and the police

chief do something. but their fiefdoms, whether it be a sheriff or whether it be a police chief, they are essentially kings of that little fiefdom. so if we were to have law enforcement executives with, the moral courage to decide that we are going to do business differently, they could simply implement. they can actually just do that as long as it's within the bounds of law. i have some reforms in the book. i have things for the reformers i have things for people that are a little less convinced. reforming police is the solution. one thing you can do is stop using our taxpayer funded dollars to pay people like one lieutenant colonel dave grossman, the self-professed founder of kill ology, who says things like we must become the predator to catch the predator stop, giving him my money. stop giving him your money. stop putting that stuff in our police training at the state level. you could things like have post or police officer standards and training or peace officer standards and training take a closer look at who they've approved. be law enforcement trainers in their state, vet them a little bit more closely that argue will

only dull the sharpest edges. but the action be local. the action will be state. do believe that policing criminal justice continues to be one of these spaces where citizens you have an outsized ability to potentially have an effect because policing is local policing, not national. your police department, your sheriffs department is what shapes the lives of people in your community. and through that, citizens can have an impact. i first of all, my question is to michael. okay the turn data the turn of darren is sovereign nation bedford-stuyvesant. i haven't dallas texas dallas texas all oakland, california. sabrina asian people have killed cops just walk by and kill cops, okay? i mean, these people in sovereign nation who believe

they are above them all, we have seen them as far as the boogaloo about mexico. yes. is a problem. and i would say that i did have a gun in my vehicle that was stolen. that was a year a half ago here in austin, texas. and the cops still have not recovered them and they never even responded to it. so that's where your guns are going. the police are not doing. but the police in this country are under attack. oakland, california, they shot a federal officer. we know what happened in dallas on mall where this guy decided to do an operation from louisiana, lafayette, louisiana, bedford-stuyvesant, where a guy walks travel from baltimore, maryland to brooklyn and shoots a cop in the head. two cops. and i remember that. i mean, it's just but the police are under attack and we've got to do something we definitely have got to look at concept of sovereign nation and attorney

diaries and people who think that they think the law. thank you. i want to let we're just because of time. i want to let michael respond. thank you so i'm glad that you brought up turner diaries. so for those unfamiliar, i'd be careful with the google, the turner diaries read by. it's less about i think you're referring to sovereign citizens. turner it's a it's a starting point for a lot of white. it's one of the on ramps into, the alt right white supremacists, blatant nazi ideology events like dallas, events like mcveigh, they are catastrophic and exceedingly rare. when says that police are under attack, it is undoubtedly true that police officers, particularly in this country where there are more guns than there people they face a unique threat of being shot in the line of duty compared to the peer nations that usually choose like england, australia, france,

germany, etc. that much is true. it is incorrect. it is empirically untrue to make the argument that police are under greater threat today than ever before. it simply isn't true. and i know because i'm the one that publishes the papers on it, it's untrue that doesn't mean that we shouldn't care about officer safety. that doesn't mean that we shouldn't train officers to care for themselves and ensure their safety. what my book argues and what i think people in this line of work argue is that there are consequences to how we train officers. there are consequences to the series of laws and policies that we constructed over the history, this country's development. there is a consequence to arming more and more and more people every year, and those disproportionately fall on communities that are also the same ones that struggle with crime and, with violence. nobody serious is for violence against police officers. the turner diaries are part of a much bigger problem of white

supremacy, and that is a problem in my humble professional opinion, that we will be grappling more so now than ever in the years to come. so thank you for bringing that up. thank you. hi. the question, this is kind of a side issue, but what do you all think about arming teachers in the classroom? it was just a question. do you want to go first? i don't think. it's a good idea. to. yeah, i'll put it this way way. law enforcement has an incredibly difficult job receive firearms training. they have to qualify at least once a year more. if you're a special unit, give it a google. most officers miss the vast majority of shots. they take teachers are for

teaching, not for shooting. i i. this one more geared for michael. but as someone who's, you know, getting their ph.d. in sociology at u.t., kind of where do you see the future of police research going? do we need hard data more perspectives from police, more perspectives from victims more public health engagement? kind of where do you see that taking off? sure so i, i think i've begun to talk with you a little bit about that. i think that i have reconciled myself as someone in the era of our lord 2024 to trying to plant seeds of trees under whose shade i will never sit. guns are durable goods as you have a talks about in her book in great detail they're going anywhere they're not like drugs

you don't just use them and they're gone. they can last decades even longer. if they're taken, we'll care that they're taking of. i am skeptical of the will to really shift the needle on things like income inequality, things that are driving a lot of what know as social scientists drives and drives these problems that police were sent to address. and so for me, i am really interested in building coalitions that are committed to something else. i'm not saying shutter the police. i'm saying that we have whole bunch of people that care about their communities, care about each other. we have doctors, we have nurses, and we have librarians, and we have and we have social workers and we just have good neighbors that can care for each other if given the support from the state if given the support by their government. and so in the future, all kinds of ideas for things like sending social workers with police officers think that's a great step. it's not going to solve the problem. i think that there's suggestions

for alternative response entirely where you just don't send the police, you send somebody else. i think a great step. none of things are going to happen overnight. there is no magic bullet, no pun intended. it's not going to happen with some policy or some piece of legislation. but piece, piece, if we can show the people that control the purse strings and if we can show the naysayers that there is a different to think about what safety is, to provide that safety for our communities i think that's where we can build power and that's where we can forge a future for ourselves that doesn't so single mindedly rely on armed agents of the state to provide for our safety. and i'd like to real have you addressed that to just the question someone getting into anthropology, sociology like what do you see working on both sides of the border like where we're interesting spaces, interesting things to research. how would a how would a student approach that? i think that we we have had a lot of research focused on on asylum seekers, on organized

nations like shelter movements, organizations provide aid to migrants. what we haven't been doing is studying up or studying these law enforcement agencies customs and border protection and bureau of alcohol, tobacco, firearms and explosives, studying the national guard, the military. it is extremely difficult. the policing agencies are more local. it's difficult to get access to them, get permissions to actually do this kind of embedded and embodied long term research. but i think we really need to study powerful institutions in order to understand, like what they how they operate and what they are doing and how we can reform them. thank you. there's a time for one more question. i thanks for being here today. i have heard that in this country go internationally to do training and i think in specific reference to the lapd and what i've heard is that they go to

israel and they train patrolling in palestinian areas, which i imagine as a context where see every civilian as a potential violent threat. so i'm just wondering what you know of that, if you can, what i've heard and how i could find out. sure. so i can't corroborate the question of lapd, israeli security forces or the idf i do know that there are police departments and also like the dod and special operations units that will collaborate with the idf and frankly, like all sorts of foreign military and not just the idf, that is very much thing. i think that it speaks to a much broader pattern of the i'm going to coin this now being policing influencers across world swat teams used to be just a u.s. phenomenon. give it a couple of decades in. their mom now has swat teams or various tactical units. this is a symptom, a much deeper historical problem. i do think that you could look up georgia state university. they have a department of criminology there. and i think for some time they

were specifically flying in executives from different places. i don't know if israel is one of them, but this is something that goes back a very long time military influencing how policing was developed in a kind of feeds back in onto itself. you soldiers on how to do, quote unquote, policing. but it is an occupying force. there's a long tradition of this and thank you. okay. thank you so much. so we're going to continue we're headed over to the book tent now. i highly recommend picking up these books. it's just awesome with a lot of really great information and compelling stories. thank you. for. book tv's live coverage.

this year's texas book festival continues shortly. sic is he crazy is he rational is he dying? he's not dying. my friend bill burns i think said it best. the problems with putin's health is that he's too healthy. i've him i've been up close with him he looks great the times the i was in his presence which were up to before that right before the start of the of war, after the war started. and by the way, it's a crime to it, a war in russia. it's a special military operation that alone could get you a term in a labor camp to step away. so when you go to write that line, don't call it a war. see the value of this interview. all right. so so he looked great. i mean, for a russian man of his

age, he looked looks fantastic, distressed of the war, i think took a bit of a toll on him in 2022. and example when the preclusion occurred occurred in june of 2023. and he gave out an early morning address to the russian people. he looked pretty tired and and stressed. but i him i, i describe him in the book and then the chapter that did you refer to andrew which is called a title, the chapter that checklist and he just effects this uh this nonchalance about about him that. nothing bothers him. it's it's he's in charge, he's famous for showing up and keeping the pope and american presidents and other world waiting. he's got this attitude about him

that and it's it's carefully that he is every russian knows he's checklist he walks with a swagger he's these get sort of an odd way he walks he's right he swings his left hand when he walks and i write about this in the book, but it's on his left hand when he walks, his right hand doesn't move much and any and he would he loves this that people think that this is his kgb training so that he always keeps his head. this he had close the weapon he would have on his hip when he was a kgb officer. the people i know who know they said that's complete baloney. but he loves that people that way and talk that way him so he's he's gangster now that's good folklore. well look at it he grew up poor kid in leningrad and he's a

tough kid right after? the war too. well his father was was seriously injured during the war, during the siege of leningrad. his older brother died of diphtheria during the war. he had a tough upbringing, and he's a tough guy. and what he grew up to be and he is a gangster and that's sort of he's he wears very expensive, finely tailored suits and effects a more cultivated image. deep down, he's still tough guy from from leningrad and all his friends these really close to such and patricof. what do they have in common from leningrad joined the kgb in the 1970s. those are his friends. they've talked about how putin looks at ukraine and the united states, but it a very long border with china. the other global power. you know, what's the

relationship between those two countries and are they united foes against the united states or are there sharp differences and national interests that provide opportunities for the united states as occurred during cold war, to extent that the issue involves united states, they are both putin and ji as individuals, and the and in the russian putin is is by his own description, trying to reorient russia to look more south and east, which is not what most russians want. there aren't many russians. i in fact none. i heard say the only way i've worked all my life and saved my money is i want to buy a townhouse in beijing. there were a lot of russians i know who own property in london, in west palm beach, beverly

hills and park avenue, not many are moving to shanghai and guangzhou. they're moving to dubai. they're moving to the gulf. and putin is trying to shift the gaze of russian economy south in east. but the natural the natural gaze for the russians was established by the great when established st petersburg looking west to europe and that is still the case for for, you know, european russian, european, russians. james allen, did you confess? yes, i confess to the detectives, but my mom already contacted some lawyers and they. did you say anything blah blah blah. and so it, it took on a whole new oh, you know, it took off from there.

but but once i started. months, turned into a year sitting in the county, the the truth had to come out, you know, i'm not going to sit here. and even though went to trial and the attorney went to trial trying to seek not first degree, but second degree murder. so we was trying to get get away from the penalty and get away from the first degree. so it's been a journey but i tell you, it's been a journey that i can honestly say i believed in something. and it worked. i believe in god. and he showed me that it works because shows we're sitting here today, i mr. sebastian's nice do i deserve a second chance? did i deserve do i deserve. only what i believe in so we?

yes. you know, i can believe in this town. you know, i did 30 years in prison. i can believe in this town for 30 years. and if tell that tell rise, wipe my face. and if it does, i believe in you for 30 years. and you. so i believe even sitting on death row that one day i would be free and i would be able to tell my my story. you're 16 years old. 17 years old at trial. you know, by this time i'm 18. that's right. yeah. i didn't the jury comes back. guilty or not guilty. what do you remember about that? guilty. it took them. i think maybe four. i was not even. yeah. to come back with guilty. and what a circus, you know, soon as the judge i mean, as soon the foreman said guilty. the courtroom erupted. you know, my mom, i've never

heard a well like that mean. that's the sound. yeah, that's. the judge shook his head. but, you know, i was a young man sitting there giving the, you know, your guilty. yeah guilty, guilty of first degree murder, and then turn around in the same jury. me the death sentence. so you deserve death. you don't come in some was old with a weapon at night in their sleep and it makes so much sense today i'm 64 now and it just it's just it just makes so much sense me now today that. after 30 years of being confined and living in some parts of a therapeutic community some parts it was a jungle, you know, but i persevere and. i made it through and there.

some reason there's a purpose for my story to be out here. and there was there's other guys that are out here walking the street and. i saw death row time with they are free now, but they don't want this. you never get them in front of a camera talking about on the days they were on death row crime tht alone. they just want to enjoy their second chance at grace and freedom and say, hey, you know, i it but i'm sorry, i don't want to be seen. no, that's not mr. allen. that's what god has planned for me. i feel i'm going to be a story to talk about for many years, many decades. where were you incarcerated? what was that like for, 30 years? well, sir, i've. i've lodged every facility in

the state of nevada. i've been to every prison in the state in nevada men's facility, starting the old state prison in coral springs. yes. when i was housed for the first six years, i did the four years on death row and i did two years in there. general population. and i was just telling some people on the sideline said it was such an honor to able to go back inside and stand in the cell that i was in when was waiting. execution. yeah. why did you do that? i want to you know, i to they're going to condemn the prison, the it's already condemned and they're going to use it for tourist some type of tourist. so i go before they do that. can i go back on death row and i can i stand in the chamber and i go to the overnight sale and i stand in the cell that i was as a teenager, you know, and they allow me to do that. and we took pictures, you know,

and now it's going to be part of probably my documentary. but because no man wants to go back, i think in the first probably it went back and done it. it was eerie. i mean, the the goose bumps and the feeling just knowing that. i was maybe days away from that chamber right there, you know. what makes my life so valuable? well, the public has spoke and the same, same, same the same community, same society that spoke turned and spoke again and say, let him go. yeah. james allen jr how did that happen? first of all, you were incarcerated on death row for several years, but then incarcerated in general population. as you. yes. for up to 30 years. yes. how how is it that you're

sitting here with us at the las vegas convention seasons? well, and what a beautiful place, jesus, for you know, thought i would never see places like this ever again. but. through grace and mercy and belief, you know, i have nothing but the highest respect for the nevada prison system during my era during my tenure of being incarcerated. we had some directors, governors who care. you know, surely they could have given up and say, hey, there were way to keep you got it right. he's guilty, got the right guy. so a way to but it was something. that administration those governors, they were ex educators, the kids that exists may rest in peace. governor kenny gwynn gave me an

opportunity. yo, i'm going to give you a chance. i see something you say i'm not a law enforcement. you know, i'm not a judge. wasn't a dea. i was an educator. i'm a businessman and i see something in you. i see a well-groomed young man sitting in front of me today. and i'm going to grant you this commutation. i'll you to see the parole board, but it's up to them. let you out. here's a portion of a recent program on booktv. one of the things that i think is really powerful about the air metaphor is it explains the potential that these tools have to lure us into a kind of fascination that turns into a distortion of our reality and a failure to remain connected with the reality of we are and how we

we live in the world. and that's something that happens in the story of narcissus, where narcissus becomes he doesn't just fall in love with his own image in the lake. he's convinced that there's another boy looking back at him in the reflection. he doesn't see himself in the reflection he imagines he sees another boy who is so beautiful that he's obsessed with this boy in the water and calling to him and hearing echoes of his own voice coming back and believing that he's making this connection with this other beautiful soul and i realized when many of you will have heard of the moment when the google researcher, blake lemoine, was testing an early of a generative a.i. tool called lamda at google and, decided that it was conscious, sentient, and that it had human rights and that it was i mean, he imbued it with all of this

per personhood that everyone who knew how that else who knew how the technology worked knew it couldn't have in it because of of the the barrenness of what the technology actually was. but he was convinced and the funny thing about that is that blake lemoine was a seasoned google engineer. this was not a naive who was just ignorant this is a knowledgeable person who was so captivated this illusion that he couldn't separate himself from it. and so it really reminded me of narcissus, right? the power of these things to convince us that there's a mind on the side. and so i like using the mirror metaphor, because you know that when you look in your bedroom mirrors or your bathroom mirrors, you know, there's not a body on the other side right? you know that the image is not a second body, but we're already being told that the images being reflected of, you know, the humans that make up all of the

data that we've collected. we're already being told that the reflections of that that we get on our on our activity apps are another intelligence, another mind, an alien machine presence, right. that fascinating and powerful and mysterious and might kill us or might save us. right. but all of that is an illusion it's as much an illusion as the illusion that captivated in systems. so a lot of the book is about to break ourselves free from that illusion. you can watch the rest of this program and all of our book programs time online at book tv dot org. and now more live coverage of the texas book festival in austin austin. thank you. good afternoon, everyone, and welcome. the 29th annual texas book festival. at this time, please silence your cell phones after this

conversation and the author will books at the book, people signing tents located on 11th street in congress avenue. books are for sale throughout the weekend, courtesy of book people. so if you can support our authors tbf and the largest independent bookstore in texas by purchasing books by our incredible festival authors in the book, people sell tens a portion of every book they'll help support texas book festival's, which includes expanding literacy and access to literature across the state. all right, let's started. do you mind yourself and telling everyone who you are? i'm happy to. and i'm happy to be here. thank you so much, tim. i'm louise story. i am the coauthor of this book, $0.15 on the dollar how americans made black white wealth gap. i did this book in partnership with a phenomenal journalist, ebony reid and. so throughout when i refer to

ebony, i'm referring to my partner and coauthor on this project. we on this for three years, we decided undertake this project when we were colleagues at the wall street journal, where i was the chief news strategy news strategist running all the coverage strategy and. ebony was the community's editor, helping the wall street journal focus on new different audiences. previous to my role at the wall street journal, where i was for three years. i was at the new york times for 12 years, and i did a lot of different investigative reporting, including uncovering the largest kleptocracy case in history, a series of articles that returned $6 billion to malaysia. ebony, my coauthor, worked at the associated press for years. she now works at the marshall project, which is a nonprofit focused on the justice system. so that's a little background we're really happy you're here. and thank you. thank you for that. so in full disclosure, i really fangirl dow on your book. it just fascinating for me because i've done decades of work this industry but the way

you and ebony tell the story is so powerful because it humanizes such enormous amounts of data. can you tell me a little bit more of why you chose to to disseminate the data and narratives, personal journeys of the people in the book? yeah. thank you. so we consider this a book and a public impact project because we've also teaching our racial wealth gaps at yale university. we've held 15 racial wealth gap symposia around the country, shining a light. people working in this space. and so we set out at the very beginning with a set of goals for this and public impact project. and they speak to what you just asked. our number one goal is to make $0.15 on the dollar a nationally recognized statistic. studies show that many americans think the black white wealth gap has gone away. so we saw value as journalist in simply this data out there.

our number two goal was to help empathy and to make people care. got to know stuff and you have to care. and so we knew that as journalist we could bring the facts, we've in a completely apolitical way, this is a book that does not make policy recommendations, but we could bring the facts and the data, but we could bring the human stories that would help people understand and care. so we invested and enormous amount of time and work effort and spending time with the seven individuals whose families chronicle and in tracing back their ancestors to tell the history, actual people and really hope it helps you keep the pages turning while you're reading about this important subject. yes, i often say that most of us inherited systems. we're not. we didn't create them, but we're collectively responsible for this man telling them. so the way our humanizing it again is just so powerful and helpful. so let's talk about that.

a little bit more. what do you the wealth gap actually is so so the title, the book, $0.15 on the dollar is the black wealth gap, and that's what we made in our title. so people who do see the book on the shelf and don't read it are learning something. and central here and since our number one goal is to make this a nationally recognized, if you don't mind, i just want to explain the basics of what it is because then you'll leave knowing what the black white wealth gap is right now. so this data comes from the federal reserve. it's a survey that comes out once every three years. the survey of consumer finance. and this is the data through 2022. there be a new data set for three years. $0.50 is the amount of money that the typical black family has compared to $1 in wealth held by the typical family. and in this latest data release, that's true for the middle in black family compared to the median white family. and it also happens to be $0.15 in the dollar when you compare

average levels of wealth between them. sometimes those are present or two away from me to the right. now, $0.15 on the dollar is for both. and so if someone asks you about this gap, you can explain that. well, the black family has $0.15 in wealth compared to $1 in wealth held by the typical white family. as we keep talking, we could talk a bit more about historical data, but that's like that's the basics of what it is. one more thing i just want to say is i want to tell you a couple of common misperceptions about wealth. so because when you start talking to people about that, you're going to say, i'm reading this great book on the black wealth. here's some things they might say to you. they might say, well, you know, there are some people who sit next to me at work of a different race, and they're making the same pay that other people make. so what's the problem. that is one of the most common misperception is people confuse income and and they're different. so even when people make the same level of income, wealth is everything you own minus what

you own. it's like a state, a stock income is your flow and you can build it to wealth. but remember, income, see people making the same income. one person, let's say they're in the same job. one person may have to pay more. student debt off. statistically speaking, latino black families have more student debt and so therefore fewer wealth building opportunities. the one other misperception i want to flag for you is that people forget about debt. debt is kind of invisible. so they say, well, i see someone has a nice i see they have a nice car. there must be wealthy, but you don't know how much know much debt is behind it. so wealth is not very well understood even among family members. people don't often know where someone really understands on wealth. and so we're trying spur more conversation on that. so thank you for that. so while you are explaining the enormous wealth gap through personal narratives and data spanning a huge amount of time, like use, you all start from almost the very beginning. and so are many instances where.

you reference public policy from america's original sin of the royal charter of 1518 and from jim crow to the 3/5 law on red, the new deal. like i could keep because you guys did such a great job of telling the narrative and the story of like, how did we really here? do you think that can the wealth gap be closed by policy and will it take centuries to do so. thank you. heavy question. have you questioned so much there so yes, it's true that the book is like peeling back an onion. there's so many layers and when you read it, you'll really revisit all of american history. and when you read it, you'll also no your race, your politics your economic level. i think your starts your own family's journey in a different

and so many people who've read it of all backgrounds have told like gee i just one asked, you know, my grandmother something about what was happening with my family in the 1940s or what was happening and so one thing that we really demonstrated in the book is it's not just one thing that caused the black white wealth gap. it's been contributed to over and over again and held in place over and over again through human action. and so that's one thing you'll see in terms of can policy fix it and how long it would take as i said before, we don't make policy recommendations. so we don't, you know, take a stand on reparations and we don't take a stand on baby bonds and we but we do include these things as things people are talking about. we show you some of the research them and they'll be food for thought and for your debates at home. but what we do do is we look at if things continue the way they've continue. we do have a calculation in book around how long would it be

until the gap closes. so to answer your question on well, close, we show the data in the book. we show you right after the civil war, it was 1.6 cents in the dollar. we you how that changes and it comes down in the late 1800s. in the 1900s. it's the gap is closing a bit in the 1950s it's $0.15 in the dollar in the early 1990s it's $0.22 in the dollar and it's down since the early 1990. so where it was at $0.15 the dollar where we were in the 1950s, we calculated a very simplistic calculation looking at this reserve data, if the black white wealth gap closes the rate it's been closing. since 1989, we said, how many years would it be till it closed at? and that's 181 years. and we don't include that to be negative, but we just think

people need to be realistic. we also calculated there were some ups and downs in there. so we say, well, what if there's no what if doesn't get wider? what if it just keeps converging and getting getting smaller? and we looked at that from 2013 to the present, it's been getting smaller and at that rate it'd be 120 years. and so we think it's important for people to know this is how embedded it is into so many things, that it's not something that in under current types of efforts very likely to be gone. you know by the time your kids are grown up. yeah, that's that's staggering. there are who believe that america's true meritocracy people should just kind of pull themselves up by the bootstraps and economic conditions are of your own free will and your if you work a little harder, you'll get there. so hearing that number in that year is, staggering. should eradicating the wealth

gap matter to everyone and if it should, what the economic consequences of a persistent race based wealth gap. so one thing i think people will get out of the book in terms of the meritocracy, as you'll see the people in our book who have different education, one of the seven main people in the book, for example did not go to college. and so there's really a variety of experiences. you're going to see they're all working hard. yeah. and they're all, you know, successful different ways, but they're all facing a lot of hurdles and hurdles that have racial contours. and so i think that's one of the values of reading these stories, because you'll come to understand how complex and how many hurdles pop up and hurdles pop up in places that are surprising people. so, for example, we have chapter on the bankruptcy system.

so bankruptcy is a relief in the united states, right? because it says if you really have reached a point where you have so much debt that you can't get out of debt, you can file for bankruptcy and have your debt either reorganized or, even released. and remember wealth is everything you own minus, what you owe. so if you can get rid of what you owe, you're wealthier, right? so bankruptcy is a wealth creating system in the united states. but in this chapter, we show how black americans file for bankruptcy only in to their level in the population. black americans are not filing at any greater rate than white americans. but yet, when black americans and white americans enter the bankruptcy system, black americans are statistically likely to have their debts discharged or, reorganized than white americans. and so they're right there. this is something people might not realize, but they're right there. that is the gap because it's a

relief program that, white and black people, statistically speaking, not as likely to be able to go through. and we explore the reasons why they're but as an answer to question of kind of meritocracy, if you just work hard, can you we show these things in the book that you people working in good faith to do? things are still based on their race, encountering some of the policies in our country and practices and institutions with different experiences and show that thank you. so are there any current policies that you can speak to the audience about that you wrote about that exacerbate this gap? like anything that we're doing that maybe we should revisit and think differently? well, there's there's things all around us. so in addition, for example, bankruptcy, we also cover.

so in 2008, i was the new york times and i was covering the wall street financial crisis and ebony reed, my coauthor and partner of this project, was at the detroit news. she was an editor running a lot of their local. and so we came this project also both remembering and covering the 2008 financial crisis. so one of the things we do in the book, which i don't think has really been done in any book, is we reexamine what happened since the in the 2008 crisis really understanding how the foreclosures and those different practice after the crisis coming out of it have since affected people of different racial groups and we do that because it's an important chapter in history and it's in a chapter that, you know, think everyone in this tent was alive for. so when you talk about this gap and you say, well, is this just caused by ancient history? you know, you see in the chapter we do about the 28 financial crises, that there's things happening very recently. so that's another one. we we cover season eight financial crisis and you know

there's there's many different things and it's even comes to we cover the experience that people currently have when they go in to get loans and there is a experience. we also write about the challenges for entrepreneurs getting started and whether they have a network to tap into and we write about the student loan situation quite a lot. so it's all in there and i think you see very clearly the book that there's things today that are affecting people differently and there are racial patterns. good. thank. what are the factors that most surprised you when writing book in the end? i have to go back. you in ebony spent hours interviewing take taking this data and making it personal. so what surprised the most? yes. so if it's okay with you, i'll even pause for a moment a little bit more about the process that ebony and i did, because i think this give you an understanding

of what it takes to make a 460 page book like this. that's hefty but also personal stories. so we did over 400 interviews, many of these interviews were multiple hours and. we knew that it was really important that not only were the seven main people that we would focus on through the story in the book, interesting and illustrative of different american experiences, but also we could find the storylines of their ancestors that we could cover the american history contributed this through their ancestors. and as i mentioned before. ebony, i've been teaching at yale and we have examined and looked at from the mid 1800s, the present some of key moments that contribute to the gap most or contributed to business today. so, for example, we cover freedman's bank, many of you may know about freedman's after the civil. it was a bank that was established by the government and formally enslaved people

were encouraged to put their savings in freedman's bank. and you know and what i think was one of the worst financial scandals all time. and i tell you this as someone who's covered wall street a long time, the money was lost. it was siphoned off to pay for bad debts. another bank that one of the board members was involved in. and this created a lasting in the financial system among black americans. so we wanted to cover, but it was important to us that one of the people you would be with in the present day, the seven people that they had an ancestor who had been traceable, that we could trace, had been among the people who lost the money in that. so the amount work in getting to that was humungous because. we of our first seven people, there were dozens of other people we spent a lot of time with. you talking to people about money. you have to gain their trust they believed in our project and then we would start asking, well who is your grandmother who is a great grandmother and many people don't really know their whole stories going back. they don't know if their family no one said to us, oh yeah, my my ancestors and freedman's bank. so then we get the names.

we would do the genealogy research and then we go look in the freedman's bank's files and this example to see if there was a hint, and it would be like, no, no, no, no. and then i'll never forget the day that we were going through. andrew young, who is one of the prominent people in our book and, you know him. he's the former mayor of atlanta he knows history. he's interested in history. he spoke public about freedman's bank. he didn't know about his ancestors of freedman's. banks were sitting there going through and we found five of his ancestors and freeman's banks were like, okay, that's going to. but that was the work kind of looking at things now in the past and with the stories with, the history and we did all that. i'll tell you also never forget when we said to andrew young, okay, we found you had these five people in freeman's. we were really interested. we had known for few months and we didn't tell them right away.

we'd found. we're like, what is his reaction going to be? is he going to be angry? is he going to be sad? it we didn't know how he was going to feel. and it was really interesting. he just of smiled and said, oh, i knew my ancestors smart and they were smart to be putting money in a bank. and so he wasn't really hung up on the laws. it just interesting to him that his were ancestors were among the black americans who had wanted to save so on. and so that was something that was amazing. this book is you can never assume how someone's going to feel about something and the discussions we got to have with the people trusted us and who are featured in the book as, we discover things along with them. it was really moving and i think you get a taste that in the book and you mention, andrew young, he was one of the founders of greenwood bank in atlanta. can you talk a little bit more about their project and and and how they're doing? yes. yes. so greenwood bank, maybe some of you have heard of it is a

fintech company, which a technology company that is not technically a bank, but is partnering with banks to banking services and young partnered in 2020 with the rapper killer, whose real name is michael render and a tv executive ryan glover. and they partnered to set this bank in the summer of 2020 and ebony and i were just starting out in the project and looked around and were like, what would be some interesting things to follow? and we realized they started with, you know, very noble intentions but a big goal. they said the goal greenwood bank was to close the black wealth gap. now, given what mentioned to you all about, you know, 181 years, like that's a big goal. but they started out with that. that was very inspiring to the public. so many, many people signed up for greenwood bank and we chronicle through the book. how difficult it is even for people as well. i mean, killer mike is a grammy winning musician. these are well connected people.

but even for them, it's challenging to start something. it's challenging. it tracks and challenging to bank a break into the banking system, which is, you know, the system is tied to historical wealth and, you know, the banking system has more white leaders than black leaders. and it's challenging to break in. and so we chronicle in the book how greenwood bank go is and i think see, it's very nuanced. it's very complicated. some of their customers ended disappointed i would say the storyline for greenwood bank is not over they're still at it but that's that's what we follow and i think you i think you'll find that interesting yeah i absolutely did. and even now them acquire these startups and so and it's fascinating i can't wait to see them five years from now, ten years from now. and i hope you guys are able to to come back. yeah well i mean and and for you the asset you didn't i didn't i lost in black business chamber you know we explore the nature of black owned businesses but if

you want to have a good on i didn't introduce myself my name is tam hawkins and i am the current ceo of that greater austin black chamber chamber commerce. so i have a vested interest in understanding all of this data i've been working on it for at least a decade, probably longer. so i understand the challenges that black entrepreneurs and and black folks face in terms of wealth gaps and how hard it is and and when i read this book, i was so happy that. you and i can't underscore how louise and ebony were to write this book in a way that's not alienating. and that is very difficult. ladies and gentlemen, because once people mentioned race and money was go out preconceived notions and they tell it in a way that makes you want to explore and want to do something about, it no matter what color you are, no matter your economic journey and i know this, i've

talked to other people, do not look like me about this book and. they have mentioned different things and referenced it. people who are staunch certainly way more conservative than i ever can be. so i am so grateful to both of you for that. and i didn't mean to talk about myself. i really wanted to focus on what's relevant. and this is a book. thank you. and this is a book about the lives of people. these stories of people, but it's also an of the business system. so it really, if you're a general reader, if you like history or if you're a business reader, it's got both. yeah, exactly. exactly. okay. i got off a little. thank you so in chapter 13, which happens to be of my favorite chapters in the book, it's entitled the two atlanta. so if you've been to atlanta, there is and not just atlanta, there's of i think all cities in the u.s. could tell a tale. two different cities, right. and you explore wealth within the black race and other factors

as location of the city and how people got there and why they got there and their ancestors. and you talk about killer mike and his family and his their first home and all of that. but in the local taxes and how wealthy are neighborhoods i'm trying not to say the neighborhood but i'm going to say because you're mentioning but buckhead wanted to secede from the city of atlanta because of different things and that their citizens were facing and they were having to spend a huge amount of their taxes going to areas outside of they lived. and so you really get to the heart of this issue, you and ebony. and how did you to make the bold decision to acknowledge that succession of buckhead from atlanta would be a display of wealth disparity in action. thank you so this is something can't read early enough and maybe you can even feel the kind of emotion on the stage to this

is something as emotional for people we are interviewing and actually see not all of buckhead of six succeed. some people, buckhead, want to succeed, but would say as strongly as those people felt and succeed means they wanted to split off and not be part of atlanta anymore. and we chronicle that in this chapter. and it all played out over the past few years is something that for now seems like it's a closed matter. they're not succeeding, but it may come back again. but it played 20, 20, 20, 21, 2022 into 2023 was like kind of the end of current one. the people want to succeed. felt very strongly. they did not want buckhead to be part of atlanta, but actually the people who didn't want to succeed and i'm not to tell you white and black people, there were plenty of white people in atlanta, in buckhead, who said it's not the atlanta way for us as white people to split off from the rest of the city. and actually we have it in the book.

a white person in buckhead who we interviewed his family is pretty well-known in atlanta history. mims cook family as. we were talking to him about the buckhead succession and you know, why want him to leave or do they want to lead? he started crying to us and. he was crying and he said, this is not the atlanta way. i don't know what's happening here. so some of the divisions we're seeing in society where some people sometimes have different economic levels or different races want to pull away, there are many people who are upset that's happening and the emotion strong on both sides. but buckhead, you know, when you just look at the statistics about atlanta, you know, buckhead is far more white, you know, than the rest of atlanta, historically more white area. it is wealthier. there are black individuals in buckhead and. that kind of whole debate about whether leave or not was playing out in these years of racial reckoning of our country. you know, in the years after floyd was murdered, you had this

pocket trying to succeed. and in fact, there's some other places in the country, in other states where they're parts of cities, parts, counties that are trying to secede. and it raises broader question of are we all in together? you know, when people talk about, you know, being concerned about their money being used for other people, for example, you know, here in austin, i'm sure if you live here, you know that part of the education, the public education system, there's money levied and some goes to local schools, some is redistributed in the state. and this is controversial and in many parts of our country, people feel very strongly on both sides about who the money they pay should be used for. and i think that's a really active issue in our society. and we wrestle with it in that chapter of the book. i think you okay. thank you. well, we have time for one more question, and we're going to open it up to the audience in your meritocracy, c is a function of privilege combined

by hard work. that's a direct quote from your book. can you speak more about suggestions and the segment? i love that you give people action plan because i think this topic is so heavy in just in my years of experience, people just they don't know what to do and you give them some suggestions and more specifically, can you talk about the report idea and you think we should generate that and i've got a line. i got one more question on top of that and. then the black woman best. okay. yeah, i think that yes. so as i said, there's no policy recommendations, but we get personal recommendations at the of the book, things that we think that people did in their own lives and in their communities would add up to society more focused this issue and one of the things we talk about is that there should be more transparency into wealth distribution as i said this study from the fed only comes out every three years. this study, by the way, from the

fed does not break it down by geography. so you can't look by geography. there's not that much government resources put into understanding wealth distribution. there's far more resources put into the unemployment report, the gdp report, even income gaps. and so we suggest more transparency don't mean like, oh, everyone's wealth is public, but you know, more data that can be and anonymized. so we can just underscore stand this. and it's something that many scholars, the black woman best framework you mention, which is a brilliant interesting framework from janelle jones, who's an economist, is about just into the conversation about government programs, how programs specifically would affect black women. and we spell this out in the book and. it's just an interesting, different way to look at things. the one personal recommendation i really want to highlight as we head to questions is we have a few that you'll see in there, but one of our recommendations is that people should find a meeting for place and time in life where you can partner, with

someone very different yourself. and ebony and i did this in this project. we worked as partners in the partnership. we had this project on along the whole way was actually also part of the point of the project for us, and we had to grapple with things like, well, here's an expense have to pay. but if our budget, if our household budgets are different from each other, does it make sense for us to each put a dollar in? but that affects us differently. and so we had to grapple with things being equal versus things being equitable. and we learned a lot. we've written about this. you can go to our website, $0.15 dot info and go to some of our blog. we've written about this and we think if more people took on a project where you time money your reputation at stake with, someone very different and you tried really be fair and as equal as possible that you'll learn a change your perspective louise thank you so much and i wanted to mention that you just congratulate us because you just

made oprah's list of best books to read this. thank you. yeah. all right. keep. hi, i'm an economist and i grew up in the san francisco bay area. i was shocked. realize that the house that i grew up in the it was a heavily redlined area. my dad was able to buy the house for $13,000. when we sold it, it was $600,000 b more than that. and blacks were not allowed to live in the area by and that just me as a good place for reparations because you can't go back to ancient history for reparations. but this is this is current events. and do you talk about this at all? i know you didn't you said you didn't do much in the way of policy, but this this be calculated. the the benefit the black people were not allowed to have by

public but by government policy. thank you. we cover redlining extensively and we do cover the reparations from the reparations movement. we just don't ourselves take a stance on it. but a couple of notes on that that are interesting i mean, you all know probably that the state of california as well as the city of san francisco, very large reparations initiative and proposals. and the thing that's really interesting, there's been a federal bill since the late 1980s, hasn't really, you know, it hasn't come that close to fruition. and what's interesting is that the federal reparations has proposed reparations. and based on economist calculations and of this gap and would you award to to essentially close the gap by giving families who have the money so a very top down approach what's. very interesting that we're seeing on the local level. there are i mean, so reparations task force around this country this has got to be the most local movement of reparations ever. i mean it's it's so many and

what's is that most of the local movement are coming at it not from this top down economists. okay. we'll just evenly spread the money out. they're coming at it more like in from like a taught way a legal way of looking at they're saying where was the damage? and can we pay for the damage? and that tends to be looking at more recent things like redlining is more traceable. and so, for example in fulton county, where atlanta is, we cover what doing. they specifically have been looking at case studies of eminent domain and then how to compensate that and case studies of forced labor around a brick facility. and and so i think, you know it's it's going to be interesting to watch these local movements and watch as they are going coming it in the way you're suggesting, which to find the actual things that have happened. they're going to be more recent things then find the people involved. so this is just a very live area. and i would just say watch local communities and see see what happens here. thank you.

hi. one of the big events of the last 30 years in center city, black and brown neighborhoods, was the abandonment of neighborhoods by both commercial and savings and loan banks. and when those banks departed, they left behind a mortgage mills check cashing places, payday loan places often owned by the same banks, pulled their branches out of those neighborhoods. the community reinvestment act, to a degree, kept banking in those neighborhoods and the banking industry hated that. and there pals on capitol hill helped relieve some of that regulatory burden. is that a. in effect, offering people inferior economic services or in

effect, you know, is it something that a banker would say, look, there's just less money in those neighborhoods. it makes less sense for to be there or actually having an impact by forcing people less useful, less economically advantageous, just forms of daily. that's such a great nuanced question. thank you and ebony and i for a while debated which things were causes in which things are facts. and we realize so many things circular. and one thing we cover in the book also credit scores, and we talk about risk based pricing throughout history and how risk based pricing is having racialized effects today. and yes, there's many things you could say, well, you know, it's a cause, but then you see that and then then when you do that thing to someone that has the effect and so totally agree on the community reinvestment act, i'll just say we cover that in the book and i'll say that one thing that was really interesting to learn is, you

know, though, the very open intent, when you look at the statements in congress around that act, were to relieve racial disparities. the actual legislation didn't make a racial. mandi right. you know, when you look at the implementation in in communities, it's about economic of people. it's not it doesn't actually have them have the banks like you know so the the the effect hasn't people in this community don't feel that the effect has been as strong as it could have been. and then the other thing i'll say, which is interesting as we highlight in the book, which i don't think people really in on yet, is that the spread of fintechs. these technology companies like greenwood, but there's tons of them have the banking system with a bit of a around the community reinvestment act because you have a different party. you have this financial technology company taking the deposits from people and then those deposits are being held by another bank, often like in the state of washington, for example. and then there's a lot of

murkiness about which communities that bank the state of washington really needs to serve by lending to with that money. and it we found it kind of jarring and even a little painful to think it sometimes when we heard from so many people who were putting their money in into fintechs that promised to help their community. when we realized that, like, well, in fact, there's not really checks and balances to make sure the money is being lend it loaned out there. and so you'll see it to the book there's echoes through history on this and a good, important question. thank you. thanks a lot. thank you. do we have any other questions? thank you. so excuse me i'm interested in consumer debt in particular student. and i know you had mentioned it earlier, but can you elaborate a little bit more.

in particular about parent loan plus loans for students? because that is an area where people can go into tremendous debt here regardless of what their financial ability to repay loans. can you talk a little bit about how that makes that even worse for? people concerned with equity. sure. thank you. there's so much there on student loans. so one thing i'll just say is when you say, how can we be at $0.15 on the dollar when we're at $0.15 in the dollar? the 1950s, like this is really shocked people because they say since the 1950s, we've had this civil movement. we've made housing more accessible. colleges have been more opened up. and in fact, some colleges have practiced action. so it's very confusing to people. and there's a lot of reasons why we're still at that level because it went out but went down part of. it is the stock market. a big part of it is the capital investments versus of people and

the way people have allocated their their savings. but of it would be that there have been these programs, for example, like the expansion of education without really thinking about how to pay for them. and so know more access without thoughts on how to pay for them, you know it means that for example to people with a college degree sitting next to each even if income equalizes which by the way has not happened in lower incomes incomes. another picture if they're paying through their twenties into their thirties and their forties, different debt loads, they can't build wealth. and so this piece has been a barrier to closing the black white wealth gap. you know, we've had a number of companies actually out people reading our book saying, can companies do something, the black white wealth gap. and again, we're not giving policy. but one thing we've pointed out to you of these different corporate leaders is, you know, companies have focused a on the income gap. there's a lot of efforts on pay disparity. they're not all perfect, but there are a lot of efforts.

but have company really focused enough on wealth and what what they could do around wealth building and not just necessarily financial education, but what else. and student loans is a big thing. if you think about potentially if companies could think about the student debt loads of their employees and they could be helpful on those across all racial groups, the fact of the matter is hispanic and black americans do statistically have more student loan debt, so they would benefit more from those programs, though it could benefit people, all races. and so just a really big area and something that could be an area that, you know, people work on it more could be something that helps address some of the gap. thank you. thank you very much. tam, you asked the question about how does it affect people of all races this, weight this gap and i don't think, louise, you got around to answering

that. sorry about that. there so much in the question. so you're right. how it affect people of all races does it that that is a complicated that is a complicated question but in the most simple simplistic statistic circle way. well the black family has less money than white family. i'll just tell you on a personal level, as a white american myself, it is profoundly improved my life to have partnered with an amazing talented black american, a project at the public impact project, but also an economic project. there were a lot of cost involved in doing this project. and so i think one of the ways that this gap affects is just socially. if you're not doing project and working with partnering with people of different economic levels, generally in our country, people live near people

of the same economic level. so that could mean that means these wealth gaps are not living with people and working with people as equals of different it's different to employ someone versus, a partner. so, you know, to me my answer is like, what this gap does is it keeps people apart and what we can do is try to come together and work together. and that can that can help things. i that response idea, i think it's great. i'd like to add that it creates economic instability when we keep going this trajectory. so once you close this gap, you have better stability. and i know it's hard for us to imagine because we have so many privileges americans, but it shouldn't matter to all of us because when raise the least of these, you raise all of the the boats so thank you. i'd like to take this opportunity to thank you so much for joining us today and. louise will be in the tent

signing books and thank you so much for coming. thank you. we'll have more live coverage of the 2024 texas food festival after short break. this is not the america my brothers and sisters and i who wear the risk our lives to defend these people have so completely 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 lives to ensure the safety, security and freedom of the american people. it is not only heartbreak, it's maddening to see these people in the highest positions of power in our country. so completely disrespecting 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 liberties come from god and no one else. and so no in government. our founders put these words into that declaration because they wanted to remind anybody got into power who had a crazy idea of thinking they could take away freedoms. this was a reminder that these are inalienable rights, endowed upon us by our creator, among them, life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. you'll see in my book, dedicate a chapter to this situation mindset. it's a chapter about god. it's a chapter about where we

gain our fundamental inalienable rights from how dangerous it is when we have people power who ultimately believe that they are the ultimate authority. they believe that they are higher authority than god, and that have the power to these rights away. you can look at examples, history examples in the present of leaders who believe this and the dangerous actions that derive from those who believe they are more powerful than god. all of the outrage, all of the sadness, all of the fear that i feel. it's natural for us to feel americans who love our country should motivate to take action. i don't want you going home

tonight depressed. you're too late. but you won't go home feeling depressed. under why the democrat are doing what they are doing. it's because deep down inside they know that they are weak. when we take action based on the power that is to us in our constitution, when they know that when we stand united as americans who may have different views, different issues, who may have different ideas on how we solve the great problems of our time but who stand together on the foundation of freedom and our ability to in a peaceful and prosperous society, are the greatest threat to their power.

and that's that is the call action that we have. we just observe memorial day on monday, a day to pause for those of us who have served. those of us who have lost brothers and sisters who paid that ultimate. 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 nights in the field miserable bowl. and yet somehow enjoying our bond and our time together. and we have this opportunity to reflect upon their sacrifice. and even with the sad news in the sense of loss that we feel and celebrate who they are and ask, how do we honor them?

they sacrificed their lives service to a country to defend freedom. how can we that freedom? how can we best honor their legacy its by not sight of what we can accomplish when we, the people stand together. it's not losing sight of the fact that our founders placed 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 under attack. we have to protect the free speech of all americans. we to stand up and exercise voices use our of speech to defend others. freedom of speech may be attacked. we have to stand up for the freedom religion in our country

and. make sure that our government protects that right. not only the freedom to 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 fragility of of this system of democracy and how those in power, unfortunately, are too often tempted to 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 speech to serve as that on that abuse of power. we have to elect leaders who understand these facts, who are committed to truly upholding

that oath of office that. they take who, who understand that vision that our founders had for country. on january 27th, in 1838, president lincoln delivered a speech that was powerful but is very prescient to the moment that we are facing this country. he to the young men's lyceum of springfield, illinois, and said, quote at what point then is the approach of danger to be expected. i answer if it ever reach us? it must spring up amongst us. it cannot come from. if this struction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher as a nation free men. we live through all time. or die by suicide.

so why it that we have one private company determining the medical school curricula and education of every medical school in the united. they have a monopoly because they write the exams and they accredit schools. so if every college had a curriculum and standardized exams written by private company, what would that look like? you wouldn't innovative advance and sports in education. and guess what? medical education is joke. it's a joke. we are in dinosaur level practices writing on stone tablets, memorizing 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-tech 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 these highly creative altruist young people with this memorize and regurgitate culture. you memorize all these drugs, you regurgitate it you come out with a reflex. you put your head down, you see things just are bizarre. they make no sense. they violate every piece of intellectual curiosity in 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 a half a centimeter margin if it's on the face and nobody asks why wait, imagine 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 when pancreatic rates doubled in the last 20 years, is anyone asking why? when the first day of anatomy

class and i'm curious what your experiences were in the first day of anatomy. i remember saw the lung the first time i saw the actual lung, and it was black. and, you know, i was appalled. all of us and the instructor saw our reaction and said, oh, that's because this cadaver that we're dissecting was someone who lived in a city and, people who live in a city, their lungs are black. but don't worry, it doesn't hurt you. and i just thought it's amazing how the dismissive we are on these big topics string glasses of cows milk a day for every adult. that's a recommendation that still on to this day, still is anyone questioning the deeply held assumption we students didn't. but the fact that there's i would argue the fact that the the medical organized medical basically arena seems 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. that's right. now you have david you had you had the advantage of both getting an m.d. where you got to regurgitate, memorize, and then a jd where it was take both the best argument on each side of an issue. and so that was an interesting. did you have like whiplash, that professional socialization is very powerful but don't assume law doesn't its share of memorization regurgitation often is the building to then trying to sort out a problem of medical education and 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, you know, the the latest iteration of people parachuted in to try and medical education tried to make us more ethical. and there had been previous iterations and there have been

sub6 and iterations. 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 getting to teach the same class next year that they taught the preceding year. and they look that way because the people who are making those decisions are convinced that that is what someone needs to learn in, order to be a good doctor, whether they're correct or not. is a dif different question than whether they have the ability to veto any entrance book tv's coverage of the texas food festival continues now. conagra continue to rise again. hello, everyone everyone. my name is ben philpott. i'm from the local npr station here. kutv really.

happy to be here with everyone this afternoon. let's go ahead and kick off. of course, we'll start with what we have to say for all hello and to the 29th annual texas book festival. there you go. and here's the big woo at this time. please silence your phones. woo! all right. after conversation, the authors will be signing books and the book people tent. those are located at 11th street and congress avenue. books are for sale throughout the festival weekend of book people so you can help support our authors. the texas book festival and the largest independent bookstore in texas by purchasing books by our incredible festival authors. the book people sales tent. yes, book people. that's another group. a portion of every book sale help support texas book festival's mission, which includes expanding literacy initiatives and access to literature across the state.

so have that out of the way. so welcome to. how infrastructure supports and separates us. i'm here with frank and megan kimball. frank's book is, the stadium an american of politics, protest, and play. and then megan kimball is. her book is city limits infrastructure inequity and the future of america's highways. so both fascinating topics. great books. if you haven't read them, please go buy today. but i wanted to start just with both of you, just a little of what brought you to these topics the first place. and frank, if you want to start, please. sure. thank you all for coming today. so this this project really originates with a longstanding interest, understanding the role of sport in american society. you know, it's out. it's out. it's outside. it's impact in our world. and certainly that's been the case since the second world war

when the united the wind is blowing. my sign around. there it goes became a sports crazy nation, right? i did the cool front come in. i think we just got this. we could use the breeze. it's typically humid here, so i really want stand the impact of sport in our world. whether or not we're sports fans. it's major industry. it's a major preoccupation certainly in this state of texas. and i about that in my last book, the sports revolution. and in that book i wrote about the houston astrodome and its impact on the evolution of houston and its impact on stadium architecture. but the story of the astrodome that jumped out to me the most, which i talked about in that book was the role it had in facilitating desegregate of houston, right? it's built the middle of the civil rights movement. it gets support from black voters and, white voters, and it helped catalyze houston and transform houston society in the 1960s and seventies. and so the question i asked myself was, well, it's not just a houston story. was that a national story or was this something bigger? clearly, i decided there

something bigger to tell about the american stadium. and so basically what this book is about and what you know, what brought me to it is try to understand its impact beyond the fact that it's a place that we typically, with sport sporting events, concerts, right place for recreation and, leisure only. right. but as i started doing research, starting that houston work, but then the stadiums all across the country, it became clear to me there was a bigger story to tell, that in fact, the stadium has operated as america's public square. it's a place where we come together for all sorts of purposes, not just to see the astros or the longhorns but also to go to the democratic or the national republican conventions to stage protests to come together and mourn, to go for religious events. and so, you know, having experience that in my own life as a spectator and as a researcher, i thought there was a bigger story to tell. and that's the story i tried to tell in this book. thank you. and we're definitely going to get back to the idea of politics at play with or playing in these stadiums in a little bit. yeah. yeah. everyone, thank so much for

coming. so i am a journalist here in austin, and in 2019 i was working as a housing and wrote a story about austin's effort to update its land development code, which basically dictates what can be built and it can go. and so, like most american, most of the land in austin zoned for single family housing, you can't build anything dense there than like a townhome or apartment buildings. and so as a result, as austin has boomed, most of that growth has happened on the fringes. we've just sprawled out into undeveloped hill country. and so i wrote a story about this sort of ten year long fight to update the zoning, publish that story and a few months later, the texas department of transportation, or rather the texas transportation, which oversees texas, got voted to allocate $4 billion to widen i-35 through the heart of austin, less than a mile from where i live. and i thought that seems like the same story to me, that this our housing has pushed people to the fringes you know, it's become so unaffordable to live in austin that middle income and low income families been forced to move to round rock up north

or kyle down south and they are siphoned back onto this highway to get to their school or job and as a result are state yachty has chosen to spend is choosing to spend $4 billion to widen that highway. and i started kind of looking into the i-35 expansion and very quickly learned about an expansion in houston called the northeastern highway improvement project local there called the i-45 project. it's a currently an $11 billion project to widen about 28 miles of highway, and it will displace 1200 households, most of them, according to texas own analysis, are low income and minority households, which is exactly what we did when the interstate highway program began. as we were mostly displaced households, color black households, mostly. and i started researching highway expansion in houston, and it seemed to me like we had not learned any of the lessons the 1960s that we had been. we are continuing to displace communities, color and importantly in doing that, we actually weren't the problem

that we set out to solve, which is solving traffic all these highway expansions are sold to the public in name of making your commute easier, solving traffic, getting you where you're going faster, getting you home on i-35 faster. we're going to save you 7 minutes in traffic. but actually, all of the evidence shows that doesn't work because of a phenomenon known as induced demand. that phenomenon has been well understood since the 1960s. so i had this very fundamental question if a widening highway does not fix traffic, why are we still spending billions dollars to widen highways? and it sounds like a very simple question. it basically took me four years of reporting and a whole book to try to figure out. you know, four years for that book, considering it takes like 15 to do some of these highways. that's good. actually. it's a picture. well, you know, let stay with you, megan, and you're talking about construction of highways. but the thing that struck the most in your book, and maybe it's just from living in texas

for the last 22 years, i had no idea some parts of the country have actually considered removing highways and actually done it. and you talk about this idea about how when the ideas are proposed that, you know, gets positive feedback from people in the community and then when it's done in other parts of the country, it has not led not led to traffic armageddon. so what's the reception been here in texas? and there's one highway that you talk about in the book that is, you know, that's a possibility floated, right? yeah. so people have been talking about tearing down highways since. these highways were built. highway revolts began in the 1960s in san francisco when people saw what highways did to cities. and they said, no, we don't want any more of these. and in fact, we like you to tear down the ones that you are building. so this has a very long precedent. but more recently, you know, cities have as they've tried to revitalize downtowns or bring people back to a waterfront and have looked at highways and said maybe we could do something else with that. so san francisco most famously in 1989, there was an earthquake there that damaged a highway

called the embarcadero and it was damaged beyond repair. so people couldn't drive on it. and so the city was like, what we do with this highway. you know, should we rebuild it which will be very expensive or should we tear it down? and a lot of the discussion was about like carmageddon, you know, we're going to have this cataclysmic traffic. people aren't going to go shop at these businesses. people aren't going to get to work. you know, it's just going to shut down our city if we don't have this highway. well, as city leaders had this conversation, you know, people made other choices, took the bus more so transit ridership increased 15%. people changed travel behavior so that, in fact, there was not crushing traffic congestion. and that has been seen in city after city where when for some reason, a highway is shut down, either because leaders choose to shut down or there's some kind of natural disaster traffic measurably decreases. that is the corollary to what i just mentioned, which is induce demand, which is when you add capacity a highway, people change their behavior. travel is a good like any other, operates according to the laws

of supply and demand. so when you make the supply easy and abundant and cheap for to access, more people will access, more people will drive. when you make it harder for people to drive either in cost or in time people, fewer people will drive. they will take fewer discretionary trips. they will change where they live. if they are able to, they will change where they work. they will take different modes or walk or they'll take the bus. and so you actually see this evaporation of traffic, traffic in city after city across the country, across the world. and so are really there are modern examples. rochester new york is in the back of a city that has turned on its highway. and in dallas there's been a conversation there for a while over a decade, a campaign remove a stretch of highway called i3 45. and it's currently kind of stuck. that same conversation. if we tear down this highway, we will have cataclysmic traffic congestion. the city still kind of stuck in that mindset. but when you look outward to cities, even booming cities, san francisco, like portland, what all the historical evidence

shows is that when you remove a road, people, other choices, they just drive less. frank, i want to get back to one of the points you made about, you know, the stadiums are not just for games, they're for politics. i you know, we saw in this presidential election, one candidate, you know, made a point of going to a very high profile college football game. and for many people, those who did not support that candidate, you it felt like a violation of the stadium and of the game. it felt like it was taking away from it. but your book make it very clear that in stadiums have been a thing almost from the beginning or the beginning. so, you know what makes stadiums and arenas so important for that? yeah, the stadium and when i say the stadium, i mean, regardless its structure, whether it's a baseball stadium, an indoor arena or whatever it may be a soccer stadium, their institutions. that's where they are. right. and they say their institute fans and their political institutions because one they usually contingent on some to

make them possible to build them even those that are supposedly privately financed. then after world war two, the stadium became, a public institution, the vast majority stadiums starting in that period up the present are manager owned by municipalities, state or federal governments. right. so they are political because owned by the state, they're owned by the public. right. they look like corporate billboards today. they look like things that are not owned, the public. but for the most part, most sports franchises lease their venues from the public, from the local or state government. right. so that makes them political by definition. they're also political because, you know, the united states government has used the stadium space further. its message to the american public, whether that's the ad, the regular spangled banner tradition that we had every sporting event and many concerts, whether it's being venues for conventions like we saw this summer with both democratic and national republican conventions, and also because it became an important place for the kind of furthering the the the campaign for wars in

afghanistan and iraq in the years after 911 when the you know, when the stadium became a de facto sort of pep rally place the military and for law enforcement right. it's a deep political space for the perspective of the state, but also because america's marginalized classes have used state of space to further their desires. discontents. right. so in the civil rights era, many of the rallies held by martin luther king christian leadership conference were held in stadiums, arenas, the antiwar movement during, the vietnam era. how many rallies in stadiums, arenas, the gay games movement, the lgbtq met in san francisco, in new york, also staged many events at, stadiums and arena, often in public venues. public stadiums. right. so. so really, in a lot of ways, if we think of the stadium as much more than a sports facility we see, it's the place where we fight what it means to be an american right? and we usually do that in a public and way. i think what's happened the last 30 years or so is that the stadium has become corporatized, gentrified and securitized. we it to be a place where athletes would just shut up and dribble right where we don't have any politics.

but in many ways, these venues are political, whether we realize it or not in the way that i just described. and we're going to get to the moody center later. don't you worry about. sure we will. yeah. you know, so my first two questions on. highways, i think, have both been about way ways that we're trying to make things better without just putting lanes everywhere. so maybe i'm showing my bias a little bit but you've got a section your book on dallas clybourne park and how it's this little oasis in the highway for people who don't know. it's a it's a cap. is that right it's a cap. park on top i'll boy i can't remember which i ran when i i-75, i-5. all right and it's it's it's beautiful park our transportation nathan bernier actually went to it about a month ago and did a story because what they want to do in austin is create several of these caps and stitches across i-35 to kind of stitch the

downtown area back together. but okay. now, i've lost my question here. it is. austin's hopeful about doing this to cover some of i-35. so is it is it unrealistic to think that this can make a real difference, mean it is being pushed as and and the park there in dallas, people really seem to enjoy it but is it are people being unrealistic when they point to it and say see don't worry about the i-35 expansion? yes. okay. there go. yeah. so next question period. so deck parks, which is what clyde warren park is. it's a park over highway, a really beautiful conjuring of public space, a place that just used to be concrete and pollution. but deck parks are increasingly being used to sell highway expansions. so the i-35 project is in. it is. we'll take the the interstate from 12 lanes, which is it is currently including frontage roads to 22 lanes. it is a massive expansion of

this road in, the middle of our city. and what's important to note induced demand and all those extra lanes is those will bring extra cars which will pollute, they will exhaust and they will also importantly pollute with greenhouse gases. it's really hot in the middle of november. all of cars are going to make it hotter. and austin, the deck park, does not fix. the deck is also sold as a way to reconnect east and west austin, i-35, built on east avenue, which was the line that segregated austin in the 1928 city plan. it created this six square mile, quote unquote, -- district on the east side of town. so it is much remains a symbol of segregation in this city. and it is being sold. these dead parks are being sold as a way to reconnect our city. meanwhile, that expansion going to displace 100 properties, including a bilingual preschool, including several community clinics, including businesses that cater and serve some of the low income minority populations of austin.

so i do not believe a park over a highway that is actively dividing the city is going to do anything to remedy the problem. it's all it's creating. okay. so we have to pay for it. we, the city of austin, texas not paying for it. so austin ites are on the hook to pay for this tech start the state agency will not pay for it. two quick pitches. first of all, of course, by the book by megan's book, but also katy's nathan bernier has doing a lot of work on i-35. he's got a web page up called driven out about the places along the expansion that are being forced to move and then coming in december, going to have a massive relaunch. all of that coverage and a new place for you to find it going through from the north to the south of the expansion. everything you need to know about it. i appreciate that as well.

thank you. all right. so another thing you, frank, you were talking about in the beginning was going fly. was the way that stadiums played a role within civil rights. you know the civil rights in the u.s. took of course many different forms. well, you know, fighting for rights. but i you know, it's just dumb me. i'd never really considered, despite the fact that desegregation in sports was a major part i had never considered the way stadiums played a role within that. so if you could just tell us a little bit about and you mentioned, you know, you you started with the astrodome but the one in the book that you really talk about a lot, the sugar bowl in, new orleans. yeah. you know at the same time that delk royal stadium was built tulane was built in new orleans the 1920s is really the period where we see these growth of college football. we see universities across the

country, buildings to accommodate this new popular sport. and so what i do in the book is i talk about the context of that explosion in the having written this topic in texas, i decided to to another location to look at tulane stadium, which was the home of the sugar bowl, new year's day college football classic for many years. from 1934 until 1975, when it was replaced by the louisiana superdome, where it played this day. and what we see happening in that venue, like other venues throughout the and i think tulane stadium was unique in a lot of ways is a celebration of the crow south is a celebration of segregation in the pregame pageantry and the halftime pageantry and, the ways in which black fans were relegated to a very small section of the outer portion of the upper deck of that stadium. right. and tulane stadium hosted by by the time it was reaches maximum capacity. and in the 1950s, 80,000 people. right. it was a celebration of new orleans. it was a place to attract tourists, to new orleans. it was broadcast nationally on radio and then television for many years.

and what we see happening there, you know, it's named after sugar the commodity that was produced by enslaved labor in the region of new orleans, where the birthplace of the sugar industry and slavery really in the late 18th, early 19th century, which are the grounds of tulane today. and so by looking at the history of the sugar bowl, we're actually able to see how the stadium reinforced the social order. right. how it actually creates this notion of a kind of, you know, helps facilitate the notion of the white south, you know, in a segregated context in those years. and as i talk about in the book, it a battleground by which we start to see the civil rights movement pushing slowly desegregate that venue which eventually it does become desegregated really in the 1960s, after a long legal struggle. right. and what i did in the book is i looked at the papers, the sugar bowl committee, a fascinating archive to watch how these boosters and bowl organize were trying to manage the politics of segregation. they were moderate segregationists themselves. think they were sort of fine with desegregation by, the mid-fifties. but it really is into the late sixties and the early seventies where we see that venue

desegregated when they even as they were trying, you had state legislature pushing back and laying down laws that stopped them when they when were trying. that's exactly right. so in 1955, 56, they passed, you know the sugar bowl act, the state legislature, specifically to stop integrated sports because the sugar bowl committee allowed university of pittsburgh to play a black player, the 1955 sugar bowl. right. so you're seeing in that moment of the kind of massive resistance of the white south to desegregation one of the major battlegrounds was the college football stadium. yeah. g the state legislature putting their foot down on a local government. so historical phenomenon. and we don't know anything about that. you know, so that brings me to the next question for you, megan which is there's a section in your where you tell the story of a state highway in san antonio, texas what texas department of transportation basically over gave it over to local officials. they didn't want to deal with it anymore, but the local officials started develop excuse me,

started to plans that were not car centric. and that's when texaco back in and said, no, actually we're going to take it over. so is this basically just an example of just how hard it is, do anything other than adding lanes in texas? yes. all right. next question. yeah, i mean, i think what it showed to me so this is an example of boulevard, the city of san antonio is going to narrow it from 6 to 4 lanes and add bike lanes and pedestrian infrastructure in its place. the voters of san antonio approved a bond to allocate money to do so. it passed or something like 70% of the vote. it was hugely popular. the vote was in 2017 and then in early 2021 or 2022, the texas transportation commission said actually, san antonio are going to take control of broadway. we never saw it. it was a very detail. they hadn't signed control of the street over to the city of san antonio. it was formerly a state highway. they said, actually, we're just

going to we're going to keep it. and what was so revealing that was in the meeting when the chairman, the texas transportation commission, bruce bobb, meet just like right up the street there on 11th. and he said, you know, governor abbot, governor greg abbott has given us one directive as a transportation commission, and that is to solve and traffic in texas cities. and this broadway project runs to that goal. that goal keeping texans moving in their cars. and i thought that was an incredibly statement because it shows one how deeply involved our governor with very local transportation decisions. again, the city, the voters of san antonio approved this bond measure and and the fact that our governor believes that the only way to build in the state and in the cities in state are to allow texans to drive. and there's lots of ways to disprove that. but that is the political of our state is saying our economic prosperity is continuing upon free flowing. and it doesn't matter how many

people are dying on. broadway boulevard, it doesn't happen, no matter how many people are dying on our state highways, any to make them safer. if it reduces car will get vetoed. and that to me is an incredibly -- statement about our transportation priorities. and it and my remembering the stat correctly the the state will only spend 20% on trans it or is that federal am i getting that wrong? sorry. federal that's federal sorry. federal split. so it's you know, you get you basically have a situation where lanes are the thing that are ever being funded right. what is so what do people who are hoping have something other than new lanes? what do they look for as we head into a federal administration and? another legislative session where you know, from what katie's reporting has said, there will just be chances,

maybe try and kill off project, connect again, coming from the legislature. yes, there are two issues on the transportation reauthorization passes about every seven years, and that's how transportation funding gets allocated. and so that was biden's big bipartisan infrastructure bill. most of that was actually just to sort of fund a routine surface transportation reauthorization where we pay for transportation. and since the reagan era, since 1982, there has been this sort of like back room agreement in congress. we are going to spend 80% of federal transportation money on roads and percent of it on transit. and that was agreed upon for a long that's in the book related to an increase in the gas tax. but since that is how we have chosen to allocate federal money. and so that means that a state like textile gets a ton of money from the federal government spend on roads and local agencies like metro or transit agencies across the country get very little federal money, relatively speaking, to provide transit. so like the next congress

considers the surface transportation reauthorization, like there are always introduced saying we should fund transit and highways equally 5050 at the very at the bare minimum. so that's the kind of federal thing. it's a bill no one really pays attention to, but it's hugely consequential to answer the question of like, why does the bus suck? and then the local level and the state legislature, i mean, state lawmakers, our governor, get a lot of money from highway. so that's like something that is skewing the policy that they make. i think there's a pretty fundamental story of like political corruption in terms of how much money highway builders are giving to state lawmakers. but every session there is a bill introduced saying, hey, we should open up our state highway trust to allow at least to allow it to be spent on transit. currently, 97% of the transportation money in the state of texas state money is required to be spent on roads. our state constitution requires that money to be spent roads.

so every session lots of folks say, why don't we at least give ourselves the flexibility to make different choices if the voters that and that bill never makes it out of committee for reasons that might have to do with all of the money that the highway are giving to lawmakers. i've got one more question for frank and then we will be taking questions from the audience. so can see the microphone down here. tickets to see sports is getting back to moody. tickets to see sports in the us appear to be getting more and more expensive. access is access to season tickets are almost totally the domain of the upper class, leaving everyone else to hope for something that they can afford on seatgeek going through the evolution stadiums, you talk about the changes in audience over the decades and it is this

is what we are in right now? is it a moment as part of a cycle or do you feel like you we are moving towards a new normal and i wasn't sure i we talked a little bit before about how much he knew about moody. but, you know, the moody stadium, i don't know if you've tried to go see a basketball game there, but the tickets are, you know, at least $150, if not more for most of the games. so is this you know, you you map cycles within your book, but is this just part of a cycle or is this the new normal. yeah, that's a great question because, i mean, there's been sort of three major periods of stadium in the history of the united states in 1920s, which i mentioned earlier, the 1950s and sixties as a stadium, sports industry grew the professional in particular and then the late nineties into the 2000 as it were, the stadiums were being built all over the country, often multiple facilities in one city. so this what austin is experiencing now with the transit from the erwin center to the moody arena, it's already

been happening over and over again now for decades. i mean, this is sort of austin's turn in some ways, right with respect to a major venue which had been relatively accessible for most of its history, becoming this know, gentrified vip sort of catering sort of venue that we've seen all over the country right. and so i think that's because the sports industry has figured out how to extract profits from, you know, more affluent crowd in american society. right. and we see this in the even the designs of stadiums, right. stadium capacity has gotten smaller larger real estates are taken up by either premium seating sections or luxury suites. there are fewer sections for fans who could afford you know working class fans who might be able to get into these venues. now. i mean, i think there are exceptions. any soccer are a little bit more democratic costs it now. but that's because the soccer industry in the united states is behind right. the nfl and mlb and the other, you know, big sporting leagues that we see today. so i mean.

i want to think because what we see in the history of stadiums in this country are public. right. we've seen that. right. that has resulted in the democratization american society and in certain historical moments. and i suspect the sport industry relies the labor of marginalized people, whether it's a concession workers, the parking workers, the athletes themselves are, affluent, but not all of them, certainly not the college athletes right now, i would imagine there might be some shifting and maybe a kind of reimagining of the stadium space, but i think that's really contingent on us, right, because it's really because voters and because we don't hold our politicians accountable to to actually venues that are more accessible to a wider public where until we do that, i mean, i that this is going to be pretty much the standard formula that we've seen here and that we've seen in other parts of the country. fear. all right. well, before we get to questions, let's give a big round of applause. frank, frank, andre garrity, the state alum megan kimball.

city limits. please make sure you head to the tent after we finish up with questions here to get books, signed and buy books and everything. but you want to go ahead. two points. one minor. that's the woodall rogers freeway in. yeah. number two. and it's local was there any consideration ever given for converting. 130 as the the alternative to i-30 to widening i-35 widening one instead. is there was there any consideration given. so fh 30 it's a great question and it really gets the heart of the issue as each 130 is a toll road that swings way to the east of austin and was originally designed very within the past decade as a bypass to austin. so rather than having interstate traffic go right through the heart of the city, you know, a mile from here. let's have a go around austin. but it's a toll road and.

you can't have interstate highways be tolled. and so there has been a movement. activists, community groups, lawmakers have asked texas to study what would it take to re designate s.h. 130 as interstate 35, which would require buying that facility from the private company that built it and transforming it into interstate. texan has refused to study that so that's in their environmental documentation for the i-35 project saying, you know, we have been asked to look at this and essentially we want on i mean, it's complicated than that, but that's essentially what they say so indeed. that's like i think gets to a fundamental question around highways is the original intention. the program is articulated by president eisenhower was not to send highways right the middle of american cities. the intention to connect our country, to connect austin, houston, not to solve rush hour congestion in the heart of austin. that was not the of the program. the intent was to bypass cities and as h1 30 does that. but our state has refused to to seriously consider the idea.

i'd like to try to a little hope so. i want to ask you, what successful efforts are you around the country, both of you, and in texas, to maybe stem taxpayer costs for stadiums and, then efforts to not have highways and to put more into public transit, frankly, and to go further? yeah. great question. so, i mean, what we also have seen, which i i'll get to the whole part. so certainly in other cities, stadiums are now imagined, as you know centerpieces of massive real estate developments right. because of the undeniable evidence of the fact that cost more, they are costly money pits. right. and so what now? builders are arguing and franchises politicians like, well, if we can make, the stadium part of a larger real estate development, we can have

housing, we can have affordable we have these other things right that stadiums bring. and so so in some ways that development is in response to the critiques of cities that have built stadiums with public funds. and you often see many politicians, sports franchises say, well, this all privately financed. there's a new arena that's trying to be built in philadelphia. it's policy all privately financed. but again, the public part of it is not clear. so i think the place to look actually is, you at college stadiums, right? i mean, i think actually derrick rose, it's the example of a facility that's being used for other purposes aside from staging longhorn football games. as a former u.s. faculty member, i know for sure that are many academic oriented events that happen in that building right departments are housed there academic units right so i think what architects can do is reemerge what the stadium can be for community doesn't just have to be built for franchises because a sports franchise is a tenant, right? we don't as a tenant expect tenants tell landlords, build me a nice house, then you pay for

it. right? but that's in effect, what sports franchises do. right. so i think i think the place to look actually to look at college football stadiums, look at some of the new soccer stands have been built that again, trying to to be more accessible to a broader public. i do think there are other models there. and i think our challenge is to try to to basically ask our politicians to come up with more imaginative ways, to imagine what i think is an institution that does value in the 21st century in this digital age. the stadium is one of those few place of substantive in-person interaction. right. ah, and we saw during the bad pandemic. when stadiums are empty, nobody happy with that at all. the athletes weren't happy. the fans weren't happy. right. so and this is a city knows the community formation and function of stadiums. so i guess i'm just imagining i think we can imagine them in a different way than. i think we typically see from stadium builders today and i have an answer, which i'm going to try to bridge our two bucks. we'll see it goes. but i want to talk about denver, home to bronco stadium. i don't know the actually the corporate name of it now, but the state of colorado coloradans

elected a governor, jared polis, who made climate a top priority of his his and the legislature, a law requiring every state agency make a plan to reduce greenhouse gas emissions 90% by 2050. the state do not you see that looked at their portfolio of projects including a massive expansion of interstate 25 through the heart of denver going right by the stadium and said hey we cannot expand this highway and meet these greenhouse gas targets that are now required by law. so we're going to take money that we had allocated to expand this highway and we are going to spend it on transit. we're to build bus rapid transit lines throughout the city of denver, including one that goes right by bronco stadium. and what is notable about that is that it coincides with an effort by the city of denver to more dense, affordable housing its core. so that stadium used to be surrounded by surface parking lots and a lot of those parking lots are getting developed into housing. and effectively the city of denver is saying, hey, if you want to go to the stadium, if you want to go to destination downtown, we would like you to ride the bus. we are not going to provide free parking for you on this very valuable land. we're going to provide other

modes for you to arrive there. and i think that is like really kind of confluence of state policy directing a state to invest differently. and as a result, you know, the people of denver like that, that downtown is going to be transformed in the next decade. and we'll have to see, you know. austin just did a small push towards limiting not limiting, but reducing the requirements. parking for new developments, although it's a little uncertain how that's affected new as they're being built right now. but but an effort anyway. yes so my question was from megan. i know we like the idea adding lanes when we are stuck in the traffic. but there's like this other thing that's counterintuitive idea is like based paradox where we adding a road can actually increase your commute time even if at the exact same demand. i know you talked about reduce demand, even with same demand, there are some like nash equilibrium mathematics that we can actually that traffic does

increase by dialing roads. so the how can we communicate these complex ideas, especially when we are frustrated and we actually want lanes, how do we communicate much more counterintuitive ideas to people yeah that's a great question. how do you communicate this kind of complicated of induced demand? it's intuitive. you're sitting in traffic and you're like, i wish this road was bigger. i would like to get where i'm going faster and i had an urban planner describe it to me this way, which has been helpful for me, is that a lot of people think of traffic like a liquid the the pipe gets card. the idea is build a bigger pipe but actually traffic functions much more like a gas, which is to say it expands to consume the space allocated to it. so you expand a road traffic also you know the users on that highway measurably increase. and there have been lots of academics who have looked at how much they increase. and it's really 1 to 1. it's directly proportional when you add a lane mile, 1% more cars fill up that lane mile. and so i like that idea of traffic as a liquid versus a gas because i it helps kind of

visualize something that is maybe not entirely intuitive to people. and also lawmakers, when you talked in your book about and i'm going to get the number of wrong, but i think it was somebody said, well, what would happen? we got rid of this 135 and dallas and they said, well, it would add 15,000 travel hours or whatever. but they didn't then explain that meant per individual commuter. and you asked, so wait a minute. but what does that mean for a single person who is on that road? is it is it an extra one minute if we got rid of this highway, it an extra 20, like what is it? and they were like, yeah, we'll get back to you. right. so so yeah, even trying to explain what just having all the facts in front of us so that we can understand what's, what's being talked about. like assumption that like are just going to like automatic get in the same route that they were taking before that highway was there for example, like one of my favorite things that i found

in environmental review for the i-35 project is they're like, if we don't expand this highway, it's an eight mile project. it's going take 229 minutes to get from the south of austin to the north of austin, 229 minutes is three and a half hours. i can walk eight miles and less than three and a half hours. if i pulled out my google map and saw that it was going to take three and a half hours to get here, none of you would be like, it is an irrational assumption, assuming that people are just like machine consumers travel when all of us are rational consumers travel. yeah, yeah. i had a question for frank. i feel like one of the biggest changes in sports over the last five years or so is the legalization of yes, at a state level. so i was curious if you've seen how gambling has affected the position of the stadium in culture or like sports in general and how that relates to what you've written in your book? excellent question. i didn't talk gambling in the book. i stopped in 2020. but but i mean, because a lot of this is is very recent.

as a historian, i get nervous about about the present and i did in this book. i tried to it's just a furthering the commercialization of the stadium that we've seen. you know certainly since the 1990s right i mean stadiums have always been involved in commercialism, right? i mean industry that they were built to housed were commercial enterprises. right. small scale for sure. right. but what the corporate is the stadium space in the 1990s and with the turning of it into a really as a as as a place consumption. right. as much as it is a place recreate or come together as a community. yeah. so the gambling thing is just another iteration of that phenomenon right. i mean and we see this in the architecture, we see this in the, in the creation of, you know, at the college stadium and for example, east lansing. i mean, there's very prominent gambling display there. students gamble there. i mean, it's turning it's furthering the kind corporatization commercialization of the space that we've forgotten. we're also we're also spaces to be thought of as monumental of civic engagement, right? i mean, again, i mean, memorial

stadium is is a great example of that, at least in its earlier history. so i think i think it's it's it's it's continuing a process that we've already seen but but but but i'm sure it's raising a bunch of new questions too, which sounds like you're referring to. and do you think because these public institutions are like more on the hook for the stadiums than they had before, that they're more likely to legalize because they're thinking this might help pay back some of the huge. yes, absolutely. yes. right. i mean, i think that's when we see the advent of naming rights agreements in stadiums in the late eighties and that become standard procedure since all major stadiums are named after a corporation part of the rationale for that was that it'll generate to pay back the construction bill that's that that that municipal were on the hook for right and so so in some ways yes gambling is seen as just another revenue generator but the problem is is that we have to imagine again this venue as a by definition it runs in the red. it runs in red by definition. you have to think of the stadium as a park think of it as a as a public good. i mean, that doesn't that way.

but because there are money pits. there are not they don't by themselves generate revenue right. that outweigh the costs of construction and maintenance. yeah yeah you'll talk about there's all this evidence like change things and not like expansion and all that stuff and that the population doesn't want that. and it seems that despite there's all this evidence the people in power, the politicians like the leader and down the street are, they're not taking all that into account all evidence, all that scientific facts. what can we do if seemingly they don't really care about what's going on. i mean that is the question right? a question of democracy is like, why aren't our elected officials responsive to what we want, what voters say they want. i think thinking about if you live in austin, if you live in a

different state, like the locus power for transportation decisions, is that your legislature? and that was something i didn't before i started reporting the book. i see a lot of activist sometimes going to city council. the city of austin actually has no power over what happens to i-35 or. they have very little power. what happens is decided at the state. so our state legislature is convening january 15th or 14th, like paying attention. what happens there? again, of hitting that point of like i think some accountability of like our state? d.o.t. promises to something with public money. they do that thing. did it happen? did they traffic did they make our commutes easier like and that's the role of journalists right it's just is hold these our public agencies accountable to the public. i think the role of citizens to show up at at committee meetings meet with your elected officials to say, hey, all the evidence shows doesn't work. like, why are you still doing that we definitely have time for one more. we'll see how quickly it goes.

but yes, i try to be quick. then i do show up. and so i just to megan's point, wanted to ask, she noticed in the environmental document for i-30 ef5 as it relates the homeless, there's september 28, 2023. there was actually a slide that actually said mitigation i-35 is to move the homeless over to southeast austin in the industrial area where we already have them. and so i didn't know if she saw, but it's a deal between the governor and our mayor $65 million to warehouse there. so if she can speak to that and to the point about the stadium i just wanted to ask i you said it's privatized frank but i remember there being like for five years that austin fc get it for $1 the rental. so i just wanted to know that's the norm. ah and if you have any examples of real public good, because i don't really see it here in austin. it relates to affordable

housing. thanks. just so you only got about 50 seconds. yeah. so the book talks about the public good that save right? i mean they are again place of interaction when they were managing a civic i argue and we saw that actually recently in the well the 2020 election when they were used as voting centers actually they provided a major public good in a moment when democracy was at stake but was jeopardized by the pandemic. right. so but yeah, i think as we see them more often than not, they're turned engines of of gentrification and profit for sports franchises. now. yeah. yeah. all right. i think we're to wrap it up. the authors are now going to hand over and sign books the but people tend please another round of applause. thank you so much for coming out today.

well, on your screen is thomas woods. he's the author of this book diary of a psychosis how public disgraced itself during mania thomas woods why do you call the covid crisis a