booktv on twitter, instagram and facebook. the good morning. my name is sam abrams. i'm a a senior fellow at the american enterprise institute and a professor politics and social science at sarah lawrence college here in new york. i would like to welcome you to the american enterprise institute and another edward and helen hintz book forum event. simply put, american journalism today is under attack in this age of intense polarization many major news outlets face pressure to push so-called politically correct narratives under the guise of objective unbiased reporting. the question for today is has the so-called fourth estate,

dissertation that's largely responsible for checking the government providing information to the citizenry and so on fallen prey to a rising pressure from the woke or the pressure to be woke? today batya ungar-sargon the deputy opinion editor news work says yes. she has a forthcoming book. it's a great cover. i know we're not supposed to -- this is a great cover called "bad news: how woke media is undermining democracy" she chronicles the radical shifts in american journalism over the last few years and what it means for democracy as a whole. i'm looking forward to exploring this with everyone today, and not reduce that, a number of guests. first batya is a deputy editor of "newsweek." if or that she was the opinion editor of the largest jewish media outlet in america and she's written for places like the "new york times", "washington post", foreign

policy to name a few. she also holds a phd from the university of california at berkeley and when a book comes out in about a week go get it. it's fantastic. we're also joined by virginia heffernan who is currently contributor at wired. she is author of magic and loss, the internet is art. she's been around the tech world for years. i look forward to talking to her off-line more at tech. i was rountree web 1.0 in 2.0 out in palo alto, amazing times and so much julie written about that. before joining the staff at wired she worked for the "new york times" editorial op-ed columnist for the "l.a. times." she also, like batya, has a phd in this phd is from harvard. she likes to say that she stumbled onto the internet in 1979 in the back office then for pervasive and i can't wait to hear views on this. and finally thomas chatterton williams who's also a a fellow

with me at the american enterprise institute, a columnist for harpers magazine and a contributing writer for the "new york times" magazine. he has influenced quite a bit of my thinking and my students thinking. his memoir, self-portrait in black and white, i'm learning race, , created i would say at least three, to our seminars of exchange exchanges my students and i thank you for that. it's such a provocative a wonderful of work. his essays can be found all over the place including the best american essays anthology. he has his ma in cultural reporting criticism from nyu and his ba in philosophy from georgetown. i just want to step back and say for a minute, thank you, batya, for joining us here at aei. i notice a lot of chatter of late on social media about aei and universities or do we care about viewpoint diversity. i would bring in people we you disagree with. is there enough diversity? i want to say i consider batya a

friend with known each other for number of years now and i think not to put words in your mouth but her to refer to yourself as a lefty and a socialist many times. i'm none of those things. i much more conservative than that. we are both probably jewish but socialist no way. i think it's wrong. but whether i i agree with yor not, your book and your ideas are so important. your insights are so important, and at aei inches like i think what university should be and just like promises wonderful letters that you spearhead for harpers which unfortunately was slant, i'd like to talk more about that later, this is what this course is about. this is not bring people together, have different views, different ways of seeing the world and great, we disagree, but i still respect the heck out of batya, , admire her, considea friend and want to have, you know, you at a table when it safe to hear your views. we can respect each other and

disagree with each other. this is something that's been lost in the academy. talk about this all the time in my own writing and something i've seen aei be accused of recently and i would say that's just the opposite. at aei we value ideas and opinions. we want more speech, or opinions, more debate, more dialogue and thank you for being a socialist and for joining us and being willing to join us at an institution where our focus is on re-enterprise and market, as elevating the world. it's kind of amusing but i think this is exactly what i think tanks higher ed and basically what we should be doing with public discourse and the think this is a virtue. that being said i'm not 100% today a little under the weather so we do brief introduction and throw it to a really thoughtful and interesting guests. so this book makes the argument that today's left has by large abandoned the working class to fight the culture war about issues of identity.

instead of building an agenda around the needs of actual working-class americans of all races who can be more conservative but left today is pushing highly niche issues rooted in ivy league universities, catholic culture and at the zionism open borders. is utterly alien to most working-class americans no matter who they vote for. and batya basically in this book says there's an institution known as the media and they taken on the following view, quote, it is the belief that america is an unrepentant white supremacist state that confers power and privilege on white people, which is systematically denies to people of color. those who hold this view believe an interconnected network of racist institutions, infects every level of society, culture and politics, imprisoning us all and a power binary -- hate binaries firstly, based on race regardless of our economic circumstances as a solution according to those who hold this view is not to reform

institutions that still struggle with racism but to transform the consciousness of everyday americans into we prioritize race over everything else. if you look what i've written, i obviously think this is a flawed view, but batya takes this u.n. as dominating the newsrooms today and we had shifted from the world of blue-collar tradesmen if you will, or tradespeople, to not an elite profession where these individuals making this view and that is why we see a woke new system that we have today. i'd like to pause and ask batya, how did you get there? why did you write this book now? walk us through if you don't mind how this book came together and how this view, you put this you together. >> first of all thank you so much to aei for having me. thank you for organizing this event, and sam thank you so much for your thought leadership and commitment to intellectual diversity. i'm so honored to be of your i also really, really have to

thank virginia and thomas. my book it's at times skating but i tried very hard to maintain the sort of generous reading of why people are pushing the woke narrative. people do this from a place of really, really wanted to see a better world, and virginia is often my model for that. i picture virginia because it is impossible to picture doing anything recent except the best reason. and thomas, you, site from the intellectual leadership you show, you have brought a moral leadership to a very, very difficult time and difficult space. everyday you show up on twitter which is the most horrible place and you are kind to the people who are the most cruel to you, and so i feel so deeply honored to be in both of your company right now and to be here talking about my book, so thank you both so, so much. how come my book exists? so i would say there are sort of three primal scenes of heart of

this book. the first is when i found out about a 2018 yale study and the study found that there was a difference between how white liberals and white conservatives spoke to people of color, and it found that white liberals dumbed down the vocabulary when talking to black and working people, and i conservatives do not. i remember thinking to myself there is a sickness in the worldview that produces that behavior, and again that behavior clearly councilmen misguided place of wanting to help, right, want to be good, wanting not to embarrass somebody by using like six syllable words or whatever but it's sick. it's a sickness and i remember having this moment of clarity that it didn't like blossom into my full-blown worldview yet but it was definitely a moment for me like what are we doing here, that that is happen to us, and then we are calling the conservatives racist when they are the ones who don't do this.

that was sort of the first primal scene i would say. the second was learning about the death of despair and the downward mobility among the working class in america, particularly the working-class that is being lost by democrats and lost by the liberals. the idea that people feel so helpless that they are literally killing themselves with alcoholism, with drug, opioid overdoses and were suicides, and of those of the people again who are being shown the most contempt by the liberals, these people who clearly are losing out of the american dream and yet who somehow, our side, my site, the lefty side has become okay with that because of what their political views are. i would say the third primal scene is one that sam you are therefore which was i tried to write a different book actually and i couldn't sell it, and that book was about american unity. the polling had shown seismic change on the right around a host of issues that are really

at the beating heart of the liberal worldview, issues like sexism and racism and lgbtq rights. we just are not divided among this issues anymore. the left really want a lot of those cultural battles and yet nobody knows it and nobody talks about it and so wanted to write a book called a more perfect union about how united we are as americans around the most important issues at stake in american life, the values of this nation was founded on. finally we united around this issue sunday couldn't sell it book. nobody would buy. editors kept thinking who was the ideas? finally a very kind and are set me and said look, nobody's going to buy a book telling us something that seems implausible. if we are so united why do you think were subdivided? write that book and that is the book i did write. >> so virginia, if you want to jump in on that. i mean, by all means please, or i can start some problems,

whatever. >> first off, well, batya is my constant interlocutor. i refined lots of my thinking and conversation with her. public and otherwise. i heartily agree and i think before you what this book we agreed about this hypothesis of yours that we have a more perfect union. i'll give you one example. in spite of books best-selling books, best selling books called polarized, i don't know if you're following anyone is following the vaccination rates in this country, but for 65 and over it is 96% have had at least one shot. we've talked a lot in the so-called media about anti-vaxxers and people willing to die for the libertarian politics. that seems come if we define anti-vaxxers as people who wouldn't have a one shot of the

vaccine, that represent 4% and shrinking among people over 65. so look where all getting the vaccine. we have discovered in spite of some hustling over these new bills that people were willing to vote for, all of representatives am willing to vote for an enormous bailout bill during social services, social programs bill in the form of the two relief bills during covid. things that richard used to say some of these things are decided under our feet. you can have a huge debate about something like racism writ large or you can have a huge debate about the welfare state but the debate goes on and then the tectonic plates move without us even thinking about it. i will say that on the subject of racism, and who really knows exactly what that designates now, but i was listening to

clarence thomas now, what, now 30 years ago, almost 30 years ago, 25 years ago, his defense of himself against the charges leveled by anita hill, and they were, we remember that he said high-tech lynching but he worked out that metaphor so powerfully using rope as an analogy, analogously to the cameras that he felt he was under the pressure of, and at that time even people like jeff sessions were really taking pains to guard themselves against charges of racism. incidentally, no one criticize clarence thomas for using this medium to talk about what was very much not a lynching ending and the death black man. but it was very powerful and i think his defense partly worked because there was a shared idea

that racism had been destroyed, especially virulent extermination of racism like we saw during jim crow and slavery, was a touchstone for pain and a touchstone for pain that we all could agree was pain. and i think that as slipped away somewhat. there's a certain amount of doubt that has prepped in around even certifications of like 20th century suffering that we used to all agree on. the holocaust is a great example, which is a touchstone of meaning most of us interest in history of europe in the 20th century, and somehow of all things, instead have of being indifferent to the suffering, there's been an element of doubt about the suffering. i reminded of this great line from a lance gary that i can't, i can't get, i can can't get out

of my head. i hope you'll spend a minute thinking about this. she has in the body and paint in a book the body and paint, she has, lays out an epistemology around pain and suffering, and her argument is you have pain, you have certainty to her about pain is to have doubt. that even in a small way if someone says i have a headache, there's a little bit of skepticism that creeps in, where if you yourself have migraine use of our lyme disease syndrome, you yourself encounter, you know, have a fearsome allostatic load as jason johnson calls it because of the racism you suffered, that seems plain as day to you, but the pain of other people including those with life syndrome or with, who are suffering from diseases of despair or addiction as i i

suffered from for a long time, you are absently sure that your pain is not only be on unimpeachably unimpeachable is true, but that it takes precedence over the pain of others. i think there is a willingness when both, both sam and batya talked to say a a certain kinf pain, let's say religious discrimination and bigotry is real, or classism is real. that's a kind of suffering that feels palpable to you, where other kinds of suffering say this allostatic load that what you might call, what the two of you might call woke late jason johnson says they suffer from is somehow less real. or the suffering of the followers of jordan peterson, the sort of right-wing folklore expert who's become here to young men, he has i think some people on the right for you

quote in your book including connor -- is it -- sorry, reminded of his lasting? batya i don't think identifies as on the right. >> i think he identifies as liberal. >> all right. centerleft. >> libertarian. >> okay. well, who knows what these names mean anymore? but certainly objects to some kind of identity politics maybe calls himself my least favorite thing, a classical liberal, that's my least favorite. i prefer the romantic or jazz liberals, but in any case he has said very interesting thing about jordan peterson who also i think a signatory to the harpers letter at least a sympathizer with the harpers letter? know, okay. jordan peterson incidentally also a pill addict says that possibly the followers of men

like him feel that their suffering lies in their fear of death, their fear of not needing their reproductive potential -- meeting the reproductive potential, , these kind of existential fears that belong to white men, if hamlet, if winston churchill or something is our paradigm, his suffering is real. his suffering is real and the rest of our suffrage is of little bit of skepticism well, the jordan peterson followers see themselves as plenty troubled, plenty upset, and this like the suffering of black people or say women or other marginalized groups, jews, is less important, is somehow less important or less real than that suffering. so i get that the suffering,, that i suffering is real. class race and gender were the three ways you sliced and diced

experience at least when i was in graduate school, was constant conversation which one came first. it is a tedious conversation and if the grounded in this epistemology that is pointed out can sometimes be referred to see oppression olympics. who has it worse? what am i come down to is, it might come down to is i think that the media, and i still am confused about what counts as the woke media, i think i'm the only one here who is worked in a newsroom and it was very hard to see evidence of, that somehow, or the work of getting the story about a hurricane in houston was somehow inflected with, you know, something like wokeness which still again a part-time getting a definition on. i i mean, i really didn't know w people voted at the near times

when i was there. sorry, lost my way a little bit. i guess the point is that we are supposed to accept that possibly by sam, someone with sam's politics, a kind of pro-capless, free markets person, the suffrage comes in way the fountainhead suffers, that there are too many critics who have restrained his awesome freedoms and something like peter teel, another critic of the woke who says there are certain kinds of imaginations are inhibited by this kind of we, idea of we. and yet sam, your reference, i think is germane, your reference that you and batya share religious commitments, religious commitments i also have, is another way of saying that is not an entirely individualist project for you, or an entirely

individuals project for really any of us. and yet we have individual suffering. and that nobody takes seriously. i mean, or at least nobody fully except as powerful as their suffering. so i guess what i resist is the argument is some idea that complaints of the woke as i say is allostatic load is one of them but the idea that racism causes some wear and tear on the body that your regular confronted with racism and that actually hurts your body. you could certainly say victims of me too incident come sexual assault and so forth have actual suffering in the body. you don't have to imagine it if they been hurt or bruised. now we're being asked to imagine that the suffering, like let's take the argument that the

newspapers or the media is anti-zionist, the suffering of jews in europe they gave rise in part to the jewish state is somehow more important, needs more ink spilled on it than the suffering of indigenous people in the u.s., or indigenous people in israel. i don't know whether or not they are indigenous. i don't want to get you into the weeds but i think this conversation about suffering, i wish for frankly been your time still had its neediest cases the patient part because we do need some touchdown to imagine what a group of suffering looks like. and i think currently if it's ascendant to imagine that the allostatic load is for some people from systemic racism or during jodi kantor is reporting on harvey weinstein thing, that there's some kind of unique suffering because of gender bias

and assault, gender-based assault in the workplace. we go through periods like this and i think that the kind of certainty of our politics lies in the certainty of what we see as pain and being asked to imagine religion-based suffering, and it is more important somehow our class-based suffering is more important than other kinds of suffering is just another way of slicing and dicing the polity, and i'm not sure represents more or less progress, or even a very robust critique. >> thomas, any thoughts and response? that was a lot to take on. >> first i want is a thank you for such a wonderful introduction, and thank you also. i'm just going, i guess that my hand to identify as a liberal but i have very strong interest

in kind of dialogue and exchange and mutual understanding and the attempt to forge new alliances with people from other camps who share similar values or are trying to achieve a similar world. even if you don't agree on everything. i should also say i just really thought batya's book it really persuasive and thrilled to have blurred in it. but you know i think what i'm hearing is some of what virginia was saying i disagree with just because i think i start from a very different premise as a descendent of slaves of american slaves whose father is old enough to be a grandfather and you grew up in the segregated south under jim crow. i don't actually think that my suffering is most real. i have always profoundly been aware that actually in contrast, direct contrast to my fathers like my suffering isn't so

significant and actually think there's a lot of that i tend to hear i guess i would call my elite peers, top-tier media platforms and really nice universes that you'll pay off for decades, what hear from them as a kind of complaint and a kind of catastrophe station that seems unreal to me because i compared to something better think it's been much more real than what i find myself for those i encounter in dealing with. i just want to flip that and i think what batya is getting at in a book and takes a lot of courage to write a book called "bad news" and to go against that kind of three of triumphant moralism that is everywhere found that top-tier media platforms now, i mean i wish you could write a book called good news because i think that would

be true to what we are expecting that were not allowed to admit. so that's kind of i guess how i would start off and would love to bring batya back in. >> yeah. well, i think to me the thing they came up for me while you were speaking, virginia, and again thank you so much both of you, this is just thrilling, is that i don't know that my book is about suffering. i think to me the problem with today is i really think that the rubric of using something emotional or personal like suffering to measure what should be political is a huge part of the problem. and to me is very much part of this kind of like meritocratic elite, you know, used to be called bourgeois, right, like the idea that happen in a person's are a more important

than what happens outside in a real-world in the political realm. we have personalized and privatized politics and to think that is one of the major problems and it's not a reason i think we should move to a class-based model. i think the recent move to class-based model is because so many people working the working-class people are people of , and there being ignored by both parties and the think the woke language, it's a masquerade of social justice that makes affluent people feel like they're doing something when they're actually not doing something. to me the idea of a class-based politics, socialist politics that prioritize the needs of the working class will is about combating the vestiges of racism and the ways in which we have income gaps from a place that would be more real and more political. to me the focus on who was suffering, i take your point. obviously we all feel our own suffering.

abner smith made that point in "the theory of moral sentiments," right, when you see someone about it somebody you go oh, but the minute they hit the first person cries out you go -- cc crying a little, little bit too much? like human nature. it's a really good point but a thing to me the problem is the focus of suffering as opposed to the focus on solidarity and coalition building, as thomas said, and the idea that there is a political realm, a public realm be on our personal private striving that matters more than what is in each individual person's heart and that is the thing i think we lost in america. we lost a sense of the public, since that there's a place beyond our individual needs and beyond our individual scope that matters that's worth like not insulting someone on twitter because what if you could find something in common with them and actually create a larger coalition that is actually multiracial and just i think thomas has really open our eyes

to what the polling shows, , whh is that a lot of the woke ideology is very foreign to working-class people of all races including the majority of black americans and latino americans who continue to vote for democrats for historical reasons, a lot of them justified, but i guess the point of my book is in a way the liberals have stopped doing anything for them in return. it's kind of a response to thomas frank's book, what's the matter with kansas? when i i wrote the proposal fr this book i called it what's the matter with liberals? i think we do share a lot of commitments about questions as well, what of the biggest problem facing america. it's just a question of how do we achieve those goals. but yeah, i want to hear more from both of you. >> if i could chime in for one second. i actually agree completely. if you go to college classroom at an elite school today it's

all about identity and it's what i call the victimization olympics. when you meet people that are going to tell you a host of factors about themselves that usually intends to transmit some sense of harm. i'm this, , therefore i've been hurt this way. i am that's why they hurt that way. when i first meet students i reject that immediately. that's fine, i don't care about your gender, race, ethnicity, any of that. let's try to find something we can all agree on. who are we as a class, one of you to do collectively as a community? i am troubled by the idea that the entire woke framework demands taking on this sort of mantle of victimization in doing so makes it harder to find unity, makes it hard to miss anything sort of forward, makes it harder for us to recognize our potential. i say elite schools because like with your book and what i liked about is it does show this transformation from the working beats from the small local newspapers to sort of the much

more prestigious jobs come to take a look at who's at the nowadays come people come from elite journalism background or have been -- have the money to do sub stacks would have without having to worry too much about money at this point. researchers over and over and over again, and this is what we do at aei, that those students from more elite backgrounds are fixated on identity politics, fixated on race, ethnicity, culture and victimization and when you go to a less prestigious schools, streets of lower socioeconomic background, they don't care. they do want to talk about. their dinner to learn and get the skills and there to move on. this is sort of the big cleavage where beginning to see and i agree that the democrats don't know how to play it and are pushing harder and harder on this. identity politicking, the republicans have some ground again if you talk about the bigger macro picture of unity. of course the struggle without a little bit as well but to try to point where seeing this play out not just in newsrooms but among

gen z undergrads, just basic population around the country now and it started with the millennials and if this problem with the gen z years today. >> i don't know what your target would talk but elite just as a democrat will retire but we talk about the woke. the elite, i just reviewed a very good biography of peter thiel, and he is designated as elite, like all of us he was from the elite. he was at stanford, so some of might be identified as elite by amy jo, any relative of mine, is usually the person using the word elite to criticize other people. i think the working class in general calls elite the rich, and but okay, so i'm reminded of

when i was first writing about the internet, and just to put all cards on the table, i think it's not wokeness or even any trend in the media with one exception, or even the rise of donald trump, that have changed everything. if i were going to point to one, i think there's like a mad grainy call in about an old academic, , old academics and wt they're like and when he zeroes in on is one says he who controls magnesium controls the earth. it are going to say sort of one thing i would say it's digitization that has enacted a kind of insult to brains, and so we're sort of still grappling with what's been done, fragmented our languages enter a lot of things up in the air for good now. okay, once again i'm losing my

way, this is so immensely interesting. some of the few, the few times i was brought in for real breaking news at the "new york times," one of them was when saddam hussein was executed in iraq, and the "new york times" had reported that his last words were death to the zionists and death to america, the great enemy of the west. and looking back he was met at exactly the same things we thought you would be mad at. this is what iraqis officials told the "new york times." i do not remember this but the video snuck out probably by an iraq he onlooker who had brought a camera and should've had somewhat surprised that can reporting and managed to smuggle it out and it was a first time come for some i ever saw gallows, you know, and at the time i was carefully monitoring

some very unsavory sites on the web, like the leak was one formerly called -- that had like very disturbing video from iraq. this thing leaked to it and what, i called bill keller, , tn the editor to say, this is not what happened. his last words were not death to zionists and death to america. they were mustafa mustafa mustafa, right? why? why was that the last thing on his mind? it was a listing of it because mustafa was his enemy in tikrit where he grew up. i think you might see where i'm going with this, which is the elite scum we wish that we were at war with another class, but in fact, which is at war with each other. we are just curious that like someone in our class at harvard started to complain more about, or at sarah lawrence, complain

more about the fact that she's been date rape within the structure of the free market or other things we think should be determining her life. i mean, i don't know when undergraduates were not completely self obsessed with drawing a connection between the ways they grew up and the things they had endured and great social trends. they just don't have much to call on, right? i just finished, i'm also just finished rereading god in minute yell, william buckley, one of the first anti-woke treatises in 1951, and buckley, and it, has two major complaints. all white all-male student body, so is not complaining but anything we might call political correctness turkeys complaining the second when you're going to like, sam, but the first what is nobody is christian enough, that even many colored members of the

clergy who are his professors are allowing for for a litte agnosticism in a classroom. not just that they're not religious or they are not open to students, jewish students or other historically marginalized jewish populations, but they are not professing that jesus christ was the son of god on a regular basis in economics class. so that's a big thing. the second thing he thinks is it they are shunted got to the site, they have made a got a someone else, sam, ready for this? maynard keynes, maynard keynes, right? that's his of the main objection. i mean, i'm not sure that anyone even in the elite no matter how we define them would remember exactly made keynes was except we are called keynesians now, may have something with collectivism. we agree on way too much of them, but the point is we've

always thought that our classrooms, people were either conservative or to liberal in our classrooms, and then try to make a cause out of that. like saddam hussein still fighting his little like sharks and just about with someone from tikrit. i know i'm doing it. i know i'm constantly thinking that people i dislike must be to the right of me and must be obnoxious in that the world, and supporters to design my ideology so it has certain people in its sights, and certain sentimental people, sentimental vision of people that i don't know, thomas, if you imagine relatives of yours who suffered under segregation the way that i imagine my appellation relatives, but i definitely will take some time to tell you that it's west virginia have been left out of everything at all our resources should go to

senator joe manchin because those are my people and i've like some sentimental attachment to them come some actual attachments. sigh think maybe we can talk about the definition of elite is. it's laughable how the four of us meet the criteria for the professional class and our educations, and i think we're turning on some of our peers that rob is the wrong way and passing them off as political arguments. i completely agree with batya that these things turning to like little skirmishes instead of especially enlightening conversations about what we might do with politics. >> but no, the rosebud idea, what about that from citizen kane, moment in our childhood whether it's called, high school or even -- absently. we're getting a ton of questions come in but before i want as thompson question if you don't mind related to comment that batya wrote, and you'd written about, i like this come.

you wrote journalist who dissent from this worldview, i.e. the work done to keep the mouth shut or face massive public humiliation and those jobs are few and far between. that's certainly the case in higher education, in my own while i kept my mouth shut for years. until land tenure and shortly after tenure i said something to the "new york times" and boom, i had death threats a couple days later an office was vandalized and so on. what do we make of this? how are people to speak out? thomas i'm so impressed by your willingness to speak the way you've done it and it seems, and hope i'm right about this, that your career and your writing continues to flourish even though you may not be in line with these newsrooms and some of these outlets. so please keep writing but how do you see this and batya comments on people so different or deviate from the norm. >> you know, it's a complicated

question because i think you have to, if you're going to be a writer or if you are going to think publicly, then you would can only do that because you believe that there are things that are correct or there are ways of describing the world that are true or that other ways, and you would need to do that and need to say that regardless, you can't position -- you can't make your positions fit what you think the industry wants to reward. otherwise, it's not worth doing it. i think it would be an unbearable job and it wouldn't be the most remunerative work. you should go do something in silicon valley with peter thiel or something. what is an elite?

yes, heater teal is certainly one sort of elite but there are multiple elite in a complex society like america is a cultural elite and often times they are very angry and probably internally seething because they are more refined, they are more culture, more education and they are so less well compensated any kind of uncouth voelker elite, and often times these two types of elites self-serve and are binary political system. it's true that there's a culture capital that writers and media people participate in but it's a legend -- >> did we lose him? >> i'm sure he will be back. >> okay, i'm sure he will jump back in. so while he jumps on let me ask one final question to the two of

you -- your back. >> i'm not elite enough to have a stable internet connection. [laughing] i don't know why. >> that's a structural solution. >> it does that have the sl of tech yet. >> or is it the socialist government in france that limits exactly -- [laughing] >> sorry, i had to go there. >> but i have healthcare and daycare. to your question, sam, i don't want to give -- i think that i probably have been penalized in certain ways that matter but i can't prove it. but how can you ever talk about the fellowships that you didn't get, you know, the opportunity you are about to get at princeton or summer and then for some reason didn't happen even though someone told you it was coming your way? these things happen all the time but they happen for reasons i don't have anything do with conspiratorial behind them.

you just don't know. at one point david remnick said to me the cancel culture, you work for me or you been for the place and that's true but first of all their still guarantee that tomorrow i will continue to come and also i think if i'm really honest i have an identity that gives me some amount of cover. it's just enough but i don't -- i mean i'm actually not white. i trace my ancestry to one of the primary oppressed groups so i'm allowed, brig i generally, a lipid of -- be grudgingly, a lipid of latitude to what a city cities that it'll think of the able to say it if i didn't have that kind of standpoint, authority in the way that the conversation works today. >> i do just want to point out that virginia also knows that

she lost many opportunities for writing a piece about her belief in god from the right, , so it's just so interesting always talking to virginia because you have had that experience that it think a lot of people are experiencing now from the other side of the political aisle. >> yeah. actually that was from the left. >> that's right, that's right. >> that's signed his and her what as scientism. and that amount to me going to income zero and job retraining and bargaining. i had to leave journalism site don't know about, i mean, right, you can't calculate the opportunities you have missed but in this case i was at yahoo! news, marissa mayer leslie said she felt humiliated by this piece that had been warmly welcomed by readers on yahoo! news. like i was given a lifetime family past to the creationism museum. [laughing] but the left labeled me hashtag

worse than isis, as that was one of her criticisms. this was in the heyday of, especially robust atheists, including sam harris and the dawkins crowd. that was bruising. on the other hand, and sam, that's terrible that these threats going kinetic that your office was vandalized. i haven't actually had threats go kinetic, although the winds inspired by tucker carlson, you know, the endless stream of death threats that i still get that are just so terrifying, i mean, terrifying sounding. i have called the police and the fbi about those but nothing has ever turned into actual bodily harm to property, , so that's terrible to hear that. but yeah, i mean, the far right

and it think thomas and ande this in common, i don't have a great deal of sympathy for the crime family of the trump's, you know, just not elected by the majority, never a majority president, never speaking, it was hard to see who he was talking to. there's no american who doesn't think -- there's no american who believes that when their relatives in mississippi one something like one in eight people had covid, that really can maintain a belief for very long that the virus was a hoax. it's very hard to imagine that he was really talking to his constituency when he refused to get on for the country on a so-called war footing and treat covid. so if mississippians who voted for trump were well served by him, they worked so well served

-- your protected them from getting sick, and that i think has been a very sad state of affairs. as for trumpites themselves, i'm not sure they seem to misrepresent a million ways but i'll agree, i'll completely agree with you, give you the statistic about 65 and over have had one shot of the vaccine, and we might say well, they know that they are like in a special threat group or maybe they've managed to work around disinformation or something else if the short answer is they all have medicare. these are the only group on the list who were actually usedo having social services. and in my efforts to persuade, and. >> wade people to get the vaccine, two of them said no one has ever showed concern about me before, right?

if you're used to getting help from your government, thomas lives with free health and national health insurance, batya and i agitate for it, if you're used to that it doesn't matter if you're a trumpites we believe it's a hoax. all those things come out of being abandoned by your government. you start to find which solutions, and i think the solutions if are going back to politics and away from personal experience, solutions the obvious ones and certainly some of them are social programs that view toward the socialist, in my view. >> let me ask one final quick question to batya and we have to open up since have quite a few gas. that is a think a lot about undergrads. they don't always have the greatest attention span. they mean certainly will. i always encourage people to read as many sources as possible on the way out, we get to

newspapers delivered. my three-year-old said why do with two newspapers are asked for the time i said we had a liberal one and a conservative one, and we just said okay and went on his way. if batya's narrative is correct, and i think there's an awful lot of truth to it, what are we supposed do to with our younr americans? a are not going to take the time to read a hardcopy newspaper. they have gone to read various blogs, follow all the tweets, compare and try to find a clear narrative thread. how do we move forward from this? then i would love to open it up to some of the audience. >> so i think to me a large part of the problem is the class chasm in america that's opened up, this sort of meritocratic squeeze that is pushed meritocratic elite to the top 10% and and push a lot of people sort to the bottom, and that

college divide being both one of culture and one of economics, all those those don't map perfectly onto each other as tom pointed out. i would say i i think the pro, one of the major problems and again of what to take this away from who is suffering more towards the threat to democracy, is that a tiny elite that america now has all of the politicians speaking to them and all of the media created for them and there's nobody speaking to the bottom 90%. to me the problem is we put such a premium on a college education and rob people don't have dignity and we educated the overeducated like every on this call like frequent show our contempt for those without a college degree while winning everything, all the political representation, all the media representation. the first thing we should do is focus, that's what book is so much about the dignity of the working class is usually about

balancing, about creating a countervailing force to the massive power of the elites today, the highly educated elites on the left and economic elites on the right. one of the things we can do is think about what does it mean to start to respect people again who don't have the education, and how can we institutionalize that respect? people don't want more welfare. what they want our jobs to give them dignity that allow them to play an active role in building up this nation. they don't want a universal basic income. they don't want to limit elites. it what the playing an active role in building up this nation by working through the dignity of work. i would say the first thing we should do is like tell our kids when they're going to college like by the way you are not all bad for having this education. it's a different pathway for you could maybe this is where your gifts are shunting you but there is, everybody deserves dignity. everybody needs to play an active role in building up this

nation. and i was a the second thing is people often ask me where can i get good information, what can i get good news? another problem we have is like its it's why get to know all these things? why is it so important to know everything, to know every minute? that's what's going on with the democrats come all this finagling over the infrastructure built and reconciliation bill. what's going to come out of that? it's taken two months of bitter infighting and it will create two with a great deals and passed them both. why threat to be up on every single moment of that? that's culture war issues. you know, the need to know such a culture war thing and it's, white american everything? if something important going to happen we'll find out about it in the month when you're called upon to exercise your civic duty and play an active role, you will know the day before. i think this premium unknowing and knowing the truth and doing the right thing is a lot of what we have ended up that is tied

into that college chasm. >> batya, thank you for selling this brilliant project. a human dignity project is one of our major initiatives and thank you despite being a socialist you laid out an amazingly clear paper come exactly what we're trying to do. >> dignity and jobs are also big word from our centrist president so seems like we point out once again that with central left president that we are all in agreement on everything. ..

who were not interested in these outcomes and especially in your book i come around to think that maybe neoliberalism isn't serving this country but we are in this moment where like tron has been defeated. we can't continue to talk as though it's two years ago. and defeated by a president that even he has some views in common with >> that's certainly not a problem. >> it's mixed, everything is mixed. it's some trouble at times but is also great invirtue which is complicated .it's not a facebook status update. >> i've never heard someone make that, why do you need to know everything? it's a greatpoint .

it's a fiction people are looking for. if you want to adjust culture drink from a stream of a culture that calls itself culture. >> i know we have to attend to some audience questions and just received one for everybody which is how do you define wokeness? many of these ideas are anathema by the political right is it an idea that's before it's time. >> i would love to have you answer that because it'san important question . when i say woke i don't mean advocating for police report reform. idon't mean fighting against mass incarceration . these are important issues . what i mean by woke is this view that you are either antiracist or racist meaning

in every moment you have a choice to be actively talking about and fighting it or to be complicit in it. to me, that more organic because it demands that these views are prioritized meaning we are pushing race before humanity. and what i'm specifically talking about what happens to this when white liberals get their hands on it because then it gets divorced from a class-based analysis that could help people. divorced from things like police reform and it turns into things like defund the police that are in the economic interests of the highly educated liberal elite . so it's about that divorcing fighting racism from the actual work, the actual part of the under on the ground that working-class americans would like to see and putting it into the hands of a very highly mobile narrative

liberal elite in a way that benefits them and takes platform with these working-class americans. it's not about fighting racism, it's not what i mean when i say the media has gotten woke. it's perpetuating a racial binary that is, gives all the power to the quote unquote whitesupremacists and takes all the power away from people of color which is not how people see themselves and i think isdehumanizing and dangerous for democracy . i want to hear both of you define it >> if you could jump in first on that . >> i really like this term that the senator uses. i'm working on a new book that defines the term as for whatever reason it's more of

a language that describes it in a pejorative sense. you have to always state what you know because it might be misunderstood so i find it unfortunate because it's such a perfect word. the way it started it really describes. [inaudible] the way peopleon the right use race guilt . but i think when i talk about some of these i tried to use, i think it's more specific and a constellation of things that run together like what's antiracism which would not be what previous generations thought of the word antiracism means. but it's a binary view of all these ideas and actions . and it also has to encompass

a certain kind of mainstream niche way of thinking about gender. coming out of judith butler and other scholars as a part of what we put under the umbrella of wokeness. so maybe some economic views that people term woke. socialism and things like that, maybe evenrejuvenation of marxism . these things are all, they're not all the same thing but there often times are clustered together and i don't really call them. [inaudible] some people are wokeconservatives . there's a term that's much more specific language if we were actually to get a

conversation that gets to the root of what's driving us all crazy . >> other questions we can turn to. >> on this perspective i say that's not good enough, what does it mean? >> that is a problem and i think they've done a good job trying to define it but it's not a defining term from a social science perspective. i can't measure it and i don't know how i would engage with it . the world is far too complicated to simplify this approach in my view so i completely agree. another question i have which i think we've dealt with is the hysteria over wokeness on the speech police. we exhaust ourselves over this.

one piece of data incidentally that stands out. we've seen is that the idea of cancellation is much more prominent among millennial's then jen z. the slightly younger crowd 24 and under is a lot less interested in cancel culture and their slightly older millennial generation. that's a little bit of optimism i have where slightly older, younger americans realize cancellation is not necessarily a good thing. i published a few pieces that have written about thatso i'm curious to know what everybody thinks . >> i've been working on a project with someone who had was canceled in gq and he is interested in what kind of rehabilitation there might be. and do i think that, i will say systemic but there were maybe 10 women who were

abused by him in a pretty small shop. it seems demonstrably true that they were, there was some quid pro quo to keep it in political terms. there was violations again to keep it in political terms, not aboutindividual suffering but a hostile work environment . so i am interested in forgiveness and redemption as a religious person but i'm not sure that we want a world where that kind of cancellation is somehow no longer allowed. and frankly, i launched lost my contract at yahoo! news because i published something marissa mayer found embarrassing but announced myself as a christian. and she was the boss there. and i have no kind oftenure . it didn't violate anything. she could renew my contract or not. and i'm not sure that cancellation was something

that we want to see disappear. even though it was my own. so people canceled for i don't know. anti-asian slurs on twitter. several years ago. maybe if it's decided that it creates a hostile work environment or there's a lack of hemorrhaging of people who can't work for this person because of a series of tweets i don't know. that seems like the usual firing thing. it's the usual i can't work with someone i'm uncomfortable with. i worked for michael eisner at disney and he happened not to like working with black people and women in high positions of power. it was uncomfortable around them so he didn't hire them or the fire them if they were someone he inherited. do we want to stop that cancellation? that seems like a very free market. you work with the people you're comfortable with and

people are no longer comfortable working with people who have anti-asian slurs in their twitter. it's in the public sphere and also there is some laws regarding this stuff. i don't think any of you would like to see a world where someone who had sexually abused or sexually assaulted 10 people who worked for him wouldn't be canceled. shouldn't priests be canceled? >> that's another turn you have to frame because i don't term that is people being canceled. that's just firing. [inaudible] >> that's why i can's i say he considers himself have been canceled in #metoo but there are people on the fringes who flirted aggressively and feel they should be held responsible . >> i think that's a slip and an example of what is too

much versus too little? i have not assaulted anyone under on the other hand because i suggested identity politics which is a different sort ofnarrative . >> you may have attempted cancellation, was that at eei ? >> they wanted to get rid of it but i wrote an article based on data but they didn't like the questions on certain things . >> there was in the sixth, in the 70s there was my father was in academia and a colleague of his cancer and used it as an explanation for why he should be published and it was a sure paris gave that and it seemed unfair to her that she had to publish this book because it seemed unfair to others, unsympathetic and whether to not give her three more years to work onthe book . these are just additional but

cancel culture are these limit cases everyone can decide if the person was kind of well-intentioned . >> there exacerbated by technological change and i think this type of culture is just really out of opportunity of being held accountable. often times is that somebody inadvertently transgresses some as yet to be established norm so some rapidly shifting norm is called out publicly in the new digital realm that existsthat we all have to navigate about rules or guidelines . is called out and made an example of an often times they are targeted and that institution then has the barrage and is unable to in the heat of the moment have gauge how serious it's going to be. and often do their due

diligence to find out what the proper response should be or if there should be no response as often would be the case and without just terminating the person or turning them into a kind of pariah in which there profession is no longer viable. more often than not it turns out that person didn't even do the thing they're accused of yet it travels faster than the lie and that person is left with their life intact. >> when i had to retrain in marketing after. [inaudible] ... i thought we were not supposed to talk about ouremotional experiences . >> i'm not talking about emotional experiences but it seems i don't think social media should be on the masthead of an institution.

it's as narrow as any proposal i've encountered with the chairman of coin base said people should put in their contracts if there's a cooling off period that has to happen before their company can terminate them through social media. it's a tempest in a teapot. maybe they react too quickly, i think i would follow up. >> coin base, the truth coming from coin base. no, i love this idea. i wantthis in my contract now . >> that's fantastic. i think there's definitely like a thermal medium there. i also for another time i would love to talk about though woke and the sleep as two different ways of woke

and not and also that strange participle shook that i think comes out.does anyone say economicsanymore ? >> i do. i have somehow i was being told by the woke editor that i was using that inappropriate language when i described myself as speaking e bonnets. [inaudible] >> before i run out of time i wanted to take it back just because it's striking in your book and i know everyone has to go in alittle bit . i like this question because it is back to what i'm puzzling which is when these, should these outlets be more selective on what they can and cannot write? i pitched a number of things

and it wasn't what the editor wants even if i'm proud of the piece or if the piece is something i have been years working on it don't always matter . the question is to what extent do we end up with a duality of polarization of only right and left outlets? is there really an objective news anymore? what i loved about it was that what i when i would check into a nice hotel they asked me whatnewspaper i'd like in the morning . and i loved it. i did enough to do that when i visited friends but you know, i like that they're not too objective. there's a point of view before going to go with it and we talk about it being a paper of record but it's hard to be that if it clearly has a particular band and ideology to its. as there ever really beena middle ? will there be a nonpartisan or actually appropriate balance news organization?

is there one left, can we have one or are we just going to see this again? >> thank you for that question. a lot of this goes back to the book. what i talk about is how what looks to us like a partisan divide is actually aclass divide . so people have a difference. i married her so i have on one screen cnn and the other fox news and the difference between them is at static. it comes down to whether they're picturing a class you or if you have a college degree . and of course everybody's following analytics about who's watching and who's reading. i think a lot of it when we think of as partisan or political divide is actually about class. that's kind of how i see the divide in our media. i think partisanship is not a problem so long as everybody is represented.

so long as there's someone who's partisan for every group and the prop problem is what we have now is a conservative media landscape that has abandoned the working-class economic way and a liberal media landscape that has also now abandoned the working-class economic group but there also with their values, fox is keeping their audience but all they have to do is not smear their values to have a captive audience. they don't even have to talk about their economic incentive which i wish that they would . i stuck the book by looking at 19th century american journalism where populist it's is really believed that the point of the media goes to a crusade on the working-class and course there are also newspapers for the elites but it didn't matter that every newspaper was partisan because every subgroup had its paper and you have a situation where there were so many honest newspapers in new york city that you have people have literally for communist newspapers that they would never dream of reading because they have this communist newspaper that they read and everyone else was so

off-base . that's obviously a plethora of riches but the problem is the cause of the digital media and i go into this in my book, all of the mainstream outlets apart from the obviously conservative ones are going for the same ivy educated liberal elite. and because they can track how much money you make and where you live and what you do for a living. they can track all this and they know exactly what to publish in order to get those eyeballs and that attention and i think that's the problem is that it's not just the media is partisan, it's all the media is partisan on behalf of the conservative or liberal ivy educated elite. that's the problem here and the only way i think people can fix that is you readers like people who want to get the news you're not going to be able to change the new york times.the only thing you can change is how you respond to this news and i

think that a point i make repeatedly is that if you're reading something on the internet andyou feel that surge of adrenaline of rage . if you feel like enraged, someone is making money. someone is making a lot of money when you feel that feeling. and i would just urge people do not let your heart become the place where somebody's box is being produced by making you hate your fellow americans. you have control over what happens here and i would urge you to take that back . >> to the final question and i love this one. where can they go for genuinely nonpartisan journalism? where can people go to not have that rage. to use seek out something and then go find your nonpolitical space that you like to talk aboutthis ? >> a democracy is built on having tolerance on having a muscle within you that joys

and encountering the views of people you disagree with. that's really the key is you have to exercise that muscle and a great way to do it is to read outlets that you disagree with. you have ones catering to your views but if you have ones that are catering to other people's views, read those of other people you disagree with . go to a church, go down here. meet people in real life who you disagree with. we're using that muscle without it, we are finished. >>. [inaudible] harpers has a great history of being heterodox in publishing views and stories that can align across a good amount of the political spectrum and upset people on either side. i feel also that they have

quite a lot of writers who disagree with each other and doesn't tell online the way that some other prestigious people tend to. and. [inaudible] >> asking about operatives when it comes to newsweek there are editors on the left and to are conservative on the right and every day you will find you points that will make you angry. please come and read them. >> and look at the accolades. the fact that we have this going on at aei should shock people . we really do thinktry to keep things balanced .still there are places that are trying to do this. we occasionally sell but we're absolutely trying. and i appreciate what newsweek has been doing since

it's reincarnated version . >> let me just put in a word for, and i'm i'm not sure that harpers where i once worked and the atlantic where i am writing a piece for represent news sources. if you're interested in writing for the "l.a. times" and living in brooklyn i've learned a lot that you don't pitch a story on woke media or even the infrastructure built before checking whether how the fires are because that's going to be the front page of a california-based newspaper so if you're interested in the priors that are disproportionately hit thewest coast i think the "l.a. times" is a great source . they are you can i'm a fan of newsletters, not that side but the kinds that organizations put out choose it on the things you need to know . i don't think we need differing views on the california fires. you reallyneed to know what the air quality is .

i'm especially i also love the vaccine newsletter from the new york times to talk about vaccine rates in the country that are so disheartening and you know, rather than reading the atlantic had a story on why are we still wearing cloth masks? i guess that doesn't fit the description of woke but it starts by saying that we used to get our seersucker's in the beginning but now we should know that we need and 95. what are we talking about? i just don't need an essay on that that is meant to make me worry and buy-in. [inaudible] >> maybe it's a woke thing, i don't know. [laughter]

>> i don't have my seersucker tube and i do have an 95. i was inspired to go to amazon and buy in an 95. i think cows recording is generally terrible and tells you mostly about how to be thin or how to work magic on people or tell them things. getting us to thin and to rich seems to be the goal in lots of writing on habits and soft journalism, i hate that stuff but if you wanted to know about the larrynasser affair, the fate ofthe olympic gymnastics . i do one that's now turned into michigan live . which is a website that you can get news from. here's the things you actually want to be informed about . if you want to sit around with people that make you feel part of something and we all do watch a panel show. watch fox and friends or rachel maddow. you don't just want that warm feeling that you have friends that are joint and three. you just need to know some

numbers about hurricanes or about where in new york that are like bike lanes being built and my partner is very interested in banning cars and bikes so he looks to see where the bike lanes are. i would go for newsletters on this and stay away from the places with a big feeling tone. if you're being hit with cortisol, this is more assault than the free press. this is meant to get into your bloodstream and either it feels good or it doesn't but i turned tonetflix for that . >> let's stop there and i want to say thank you to everyone who joined us around the world . thank you thomas for joining us from france. thank you virginia for joining us here in new york and the book comes out next week. again there's the cover on the left. on the other side,

>> we all have a mutual friend who helped design the cover . >> that's the brilliance of alana newhouse . >> great job and this is a great one. >> thank you all so much for this, what a pleasure. >> it's such a good book. congratulations on it. everyone listening, just by. there's the storytelling we didn't get into about the 19th century press especially, it's really compelling. >> feel free to follow all of us on twitter but of course log off and spend some time away from this to get avoid getting too much for result. i thank you all for joining us.t booktv.org.

i'm marcia chaplin class of 2017. i'm an eric and wendy schmidt fellow and the author of franchise the golden arches and black america before we start a few housekeeping notes if you have questions during the event, please submit them to the q&a function at the bottom of your screen and we'll get to them in the second half of the event most importantly copies of seed money are available for purchase through our book selling partner solid state books. you can find a link to buy the book on this page. just click by the book and it's my pleasure to