in a sense, what we expect to see on how are we doing time? we have 5 minutes. thank you. so any other questions? yes, there's a person right there, please. thank you. go. yes. and i apologize if you touched on this earlier. do you have any personal experience with aliens or a story that kind of pointed you in this direction to to be curious about, betty and barney. you know, in some days i will say i wish i did. but other days i say i'm glad don't, which is as i know. i know experience like this drove me to i think what made me interested in them was how representative they seem to be. and i think, frankly, how marginal ized many of these sorts of experiences have generally been in the academy.

mm hmm. what thank you. any other questions. okay well, since we have a little bit more time, i'd like to ask you a question about what. do you think is the long term cultural impact of this story of betty and barney hill? mm hmm. and let me just add as a parenthesis to that, but as jonathan was saying, we are now in a period of time where it appears that there has been a sea change in american attitudes about all this. there seems be a lot of people who say they've had experience with ufos or beings. we even have an incredible congressional inquiry into recovered crashed alien craft whistleblowers coming forth, etc. so please give us your concluding thoughts about what the long term impacts this

story. mm hmm. yeah, in some ways. as i said before, the betty and barney hill abduction story set the template for how american southeast told and retold and retold this story. betty and barney hill were the first people to describe these creatures as being small, large heads slanted eyes, gray skin. right. and that has become the sort of fundamental motif for this. but i think even more the trajectory that the hill's experienced that is from this position of having general faith in politics, faith in government faith in the state through suspicion and fear, to embracing other apparently marginalized cultures in the state. right. that is the experience, not simply, i think, of ufo believers from the mid-20th century through the late 20th century, but of many americans.

i mean, that period as well as we we came out of the betty and marty hill era with a mass kind of national suspicion and fear, conspiratorial belief and so on and so forth. and that's their in miniature, too. well, thank you for that excellent summary and. all i can say is, as a writer, you've set yourself up to do an interesting sequel. this further investigation into this cultural complex. let's all give a warm round of applause to matthewhi, everyone.

welcome. thank you for joining us tonight in celebration of exurbia. now the battleground for american democracy. my name nyein and i'm a manager at the seminary co-op. as you might know, our was founded in 1961 and in 2019 became the country's first and currently only not for profit bookstore whose mission is? bookselling. this mission recognizes as a cultural endeavor. booksellers as professionals and bookstores as. a civic institution that supports an informed populace. we invite you to browse, and we also invite you to learn more about the co-op. our sister store, 57th street books and how to support these unique cultural institutions by visiting our website. and of course, speaking to a bookseller after this event, one of the main ways you can support our stores is by buying a book. maybe like the one tonight and we're the author will be happy to be signing books after the event. you can also become a member, the co-op and earn credit back on your purchases if you aren't already become a member when you

make purchase this evening. your support us to deliver a very rich and robust of free events. and we hope you'll join for another event soon. there will be time for audience questions at the end of the conversation. should you have any questions? please raise your hand during that time. and with that, i'm thrilled to introduce guest for this evening. david masciotra masi ultra. got it. is the author of six books a journalist political, analyst and arts critic. he has written for the new republic salon progressive monthly, no depression, the bulwark, crime reads and many other about politics, literature and, music. he and his wife live in indiana where he teaches at indiana university. northwell east. doug swartz, who he's been in conversation with, is the director of the writers program at indiana university northwest. please me and give a warm welcome to david and, doug. they do. good evening, david. good to see you. good evening, doug.

yeah, i will have to say that david has actually been my entree. a lot of the a lot of the sites that that show up in the book that that we met at zip's coffeehouse and, sanjay stereo. so david has been my guide to a lot of a lot of the the region that he is that he is writing about. i might begin by asking you to define terms maybe by doing a sort of, you may be an urbanite sort of routine or something like that and just, you know, you might be an exurbia might not even know it. that's right. yeah. so i would assume that most people are familiar with suburbia and the suburb. it's a town to an urban area such as one in which where we sit chicago. what differentiates an excerpt from a suburb is density and distance. so taking those in reverse and exurb has greater distance from the urban area than a suburb, but fewer people. so less population density and

exurbia began to take off, expand and grow and enlarge. within the past couple of decades as a later stage of white flight, which is perhaps something we'll in just a bit, but also exurbia is largely. so a real developers enter into these area as and they see that it's there's cheap land available they purchase it and they build housing complexes and strip malls and other accouterments necessary to establish something reasonable living a community and people. the diversity or the progressive politics of the city or the densely populated suburb they find themselves in exurbia. and there is a symbol closest that develops between the isolation of the town and the exclusionary and exclusive

political beliefs of the inhabitants. well, let me ask you, when i took in to be kind of the the big picture and the big question of the book and the big picture, you seem to be saying, you know, the focus is on escape buddhism and the what you call the coupling of christian nationalists and white flight and it sort of that the main direction of the book is to discuss the ways in which that escapism no longer has anywhere to escape and. that the estranging it is turning into belligerence, you said. and so i'm kind of what i was wondering and think about that. the subtitle of the book, you know, the battleground and. how, how, how much parallel we in, i guess, you know, in words i couldn't help from going to you know, taking the battleground state has been a metaphor for quite some time in kind of liberalizing it somehow

or thinking you know you said that they had they've gone from flight to fight. yes. and what forms that fighting is going to take? you know, you think of trump on january six saying we've got to fight like hell. we're not going to have a country. so that the moment in which we find ourselves in the converging crises which we must navigate are very because we're in such short term peril and danger due to digital and the maga maniacs. what we find is that trump's elected returns his popular ity is off the charts and exurbia and the most psychotic members of congress lovable characters like. marjorie taylor greene, matt gaetz, jim jordan, some of your favorites. doug lauren boebert they all represent that are predominantly exurban. so the book begins, i'm going to

get to your questions take the long way around the scenic route through exurbia. the book begins as a work of political geography that rather than examining trump because we've all read a number of of trump they're all quite gruesome and unpleasant. rather than inspecting let's inspect the places where they're most popular and perhaps through inspecting those places we can learn about the people who vote for them and the movement that they represent. and what we discover is the movement is reactionary, but it's also reactive in the sense that it's an adverse reaction it's a backlash to the progress, the immense progress that is taking shape across the united states in my lifetime, your lifetime, just over the past few decades, the progress on issues of race, progress on issues of gender the progress on, issues of acceptance and opportunities

for lgbt q people. and it's not to say that we live in an in an endemic paradise or a. there's still so much work to do and so many injustices to. correct. but it's due to the quiet revolution of the civil rights movement that is still in motion. and it's due to the increasing of people of color and lgbtq people in positions of power and prominence that the people who have fled to exurban counties and exurban towns have run of the means of escape. as you were asking. so it's a fight or flight politics and there's nowhere left to take flight. so they've adopted a fight mode against the very mechanisms, against the very that made the progress that they so vehemently

oppose. and that is constitutional liberal democracy. so in trump they found an authoritarian figure to speak for the hinder lands, to speak for the exurbs, speak for the small metro suburbs in of an aggressive against the mechanisms, the systems and the culture. all forces that have made this country more more just diverse and more progressive. so exurbia becomes the staging and breeding ground of a radical right wing insurgency that is opposed to what's in cities such as this one and what's happening in the suburbs that immediately surround. hmm. would the people you're talking about. yeah. and this is. this is an impossible question, i'm sure. are they able to conceptualize their own position?

articulate their own position? one of the things i sort of vaguely was thinking i would find in the book, but i didn't, you know, was any encounter with you and serbian and exurban escapist themselves? you did write about attending a tea party rally and saying, well, what is the evidence example of that? and they had this sort of very trumpian locution, well, you just need to pay attention to what's happened, you know, which trump continues to use and then proceeds to avoid any kind of example. so i used to question how you know if we're thinking what is a battleground democracy? is it possible to conduct the battle on, their turf on terms other than theirs. that's an interesting question. so. one of the early reviews of the book that offered a criticism is is something that you're echoing right now. so so thanks for that doug. i appreciate it.

and that's that that there are profiles of the maga. exurbia writes in the book i did that for the deliberate reason that and perhaps this this is a flaw i'm perfectly willing to acknowledge. but i grew rather tired those profiles the the reporters going into the diner and talking to the guys in the ball caps and saying, why do you support trump and and and why you support marjorie taylor? greene and. and do you really think that bill gates is implanting a micro trip inside of your skull? i grew rather tired of that because i found that it was reinforcing the prejudicial bias that those are the real americans. so i made an effort to instead fill my book with correct who represent something different even in the suburbs, even in the exurbs. so lgbtq youth or people who

start a local environmental group in. the town where my wife and i live. or robert cotton, who was part of the cotton family, the first black family to move to a sundown town of valparaiso. and cotton, now on the city council of valparaiso. so stories of hope and stories of and stories the diverse possibilities that exist in the united states of america. but it's an interesting question you ask about how much are the exurbia nights reacting in the fight mode against the progress that has occurred in this country consciously aware of their opposition to democracy. of they would say that they're not opposed democracy. they would probably argue that they're defending democracy. but what i find is that often

times you can't take these people their word. so i draw on a story in, the book about when white flight in my hometown, no one said, we're leaving the town of lansing, illinois, south of chicago, because more people and a few latino people moved into our neighborhoods. they cited, like property values and fears, crime and real estate trends. so there is always a way in which they will smuggle through custom of fear or and anger against multicultural and the culture that it creates. and of the things i attempted to do in the book is write about the on the ground that exists in the in which people actually live their lives in these towns gives some sense of what life is

like in these towns because so much of our political dialog and discourse has become radically divorced from reality, you know because of of the dominance of the right wing culture wars and the need for a reaction to it. we can't just ignore these things. we spend half our time about the bisexual eminem's or or aaron rodgers or there's illegal immigrant on every corner preparing to kill an elderly christian. you know, these fever of the right wing and we're not talking about what's actually happening in small towns like lansing, illinois, or highland, indiana or, or three oaks, michigan. you know, fill in the blank. so we're not talking about health care. we're not talking about living wage. we're not talking environmental

sustainability. and the people who have create this culture war, who fund it, who feed it, and who support it. they will that they're interested in a higher standard of living in, a more robust democracy. but all of their actions from voting to consumption to habits of assembly indicate otherwise. well, one of the i think one of the another misperception or misconception that you seem to want to address in the book is the idea that that there's an economic behind support for trump. and then you want to reestablish priority of the social and the cultural. and i want to get to this in a minute the sort of the religious or the cosmic, even sort of motivates us. so could you talk maybe about that? yeah. so in some ways the book was born of frustration because i as

noted earlier, i live in region that i write about and i've enjoyed showing you some of those spots. maybe we'll do an exurbia now tour. i'll get a bus and it's we count on you to attend. so i and i noticed in a contradiction and a pretty extreme one from the start of when trump declared his candidacy in 2015. people clamored to claim that support for trump was to frustration over trade deals and economic precarity, and that the average trump voter was the reincarnation tom joad or. some character out of a woody guthrie song. and perhaps there was some truth that at the very beginning. but now we've had nine years to

review data, to review to review journalism. and the the the evidence is overwhelming that the majority of the the paradigm, an overwhelming majority of trump's support, cultural and social, that it's it's rooted fear and hostility towards fear and hostility toward voters of color fear and hostility towards progress of. the secular. sort for lgbtq people, for liberal women and i at this point donald trump isn't even talking about economics it's all of it's all this grievance tour and a resent tour and yet there are still people who insist that there's a very powerful class dynamic at work. one of the ways that i address in the book is to do a big push

back against the asinine david brooks stuff notion of working class. i know david brooks is someone you deeply admire. doug. i should say, since we're on the record, doug does not admire david brooks, but but david brooks is one of those most responsible for defining working as someone without a college. so other words, an elementary school making $33,000 a year is not part of the working class. but a construction crew foreman. making $85,000 a year is part of the working. so that's most of trump's support that people define as working class people make in the trades earning a good living and motivated by fear and has to still ity towards immigrants, towards single women, toward

lgbt people and so on and so forth. and it's important because if we don't properly diagnose the threat and understand the motivation behind it, then we won't know how to properly combat. well, yeah. can you follow up on that? because i sort of remember a passage or a sentence, the book where you say it's easy, mock this and find it ridiculous, but that you thought it would be better a wiser choice would be to measure, mitigate. hmm. and wondering. it's kind of another version of my question. okay. how do we actually combat? how do we actually kind of engage? i mean, can you engage with these trump voters? can we talk them? they used to be a kind of genre of, you know, ten ways to talk to a trump voter or something like that different ways to kind of here's how you can you can engage them and not not yet. and they won't shut down. is that possible? is that how do we mitigate?

how do we how do we know what we're dealing with and how we then. well if so, there's two ways to answer that question. there's there's the sense. of our own personal lives and what we do at the family gathering when quotes alex jones or you know you say pass the gravy and he says the wall or something like that. you know, how do we handle that? awkward moment? i think that it's it's it's possible to in those scenarios and and i've found some luck asking questions because these people the ironic thing is they're the first to lambast for being woke or politically correct or a snowflake but they're often the most sensitive. so if you if you go into the conversation with questions and kind of ask them how they feel, you might find an avenue to to

go down and find some productive possibility. but in terms of overarching political strategy, i don't think it behooves leftist organizers or people working within the democratic party to try to reach out to the voter. and this seems to be a bit of a sickness on left, or at least the democratic party left that we can we can always reach out to the right wing voter rather, trying to maximize turnout among the base is, you know, i wrote another book on jesse jackson and he addressed this in the eighties. he said the democrats were so worried about regaining the reagan voters that they lost, that they neglected their own natural base, blacks and latinos, student voters and others and think that there are some democrats who fall into the temptation of doing that again,

whereas jesse jackson also says that, if we vote, our numbers will win. if we don't vote, our numbers will lose. you referenced this with your very first question. the numbers are the side of the progressive left voters of color voters, lgbtq voters, a majority of women voters. so those to win elections should do what they can to maximize their turnout. but in our own private, personal lives, you. i don't think we should just tell trump voters to go to hell. although it's. yeah, i see your facial expression. it's a tempting option, but you know, we can look for opportunities to have conversation. i was sort of thinking the question that i started with that i agree with and accept that approach. part of what is frighteningly

perilous about our situation is that win or lose, that substantial section of our society is going to be there and they're going to be trouble that. if trump wins, then certain kinds of violence and certain kinds of harassment and certain kinds of things will be sanctioned and empowered. if trump loses, then stop the steal again then. yes, that that that. we that elections can be won and it's just not thinkable. that they will say, oh, well, we gave it our best shot. mm hmm. yeah. yeah. those. you're up on some of the frightening developments that i try to address in the book. one of which is political violence. so tell a story very early on that occurred in crown point, indiana following the murder of george floyd. and we the black lives matter summer, some high school and

college students in this little town of crown point, where i've had many good times, they had a for a while they had a bar with a bob seger theme, which was fun, but some high school and college students organized a black lives rally protest march around the courthouse. they were flanked by mostly men, white men with osama bin laden, beards holding, assault rifles. and because indiana an open carry state, there was nothing that the police or any other authority could do about it. so you had these this this multiracial, multi gendered coalition of teenagers and 20 somethings and some of their parents and relatives, peaceful marching around the square and with menacing looking white guys holding guns in their direction. i end the about political

violence with the question what happens when they decide to shoot and that relates to at a recent turning point usa turning point usa is kind of the maga youth you know the nazi youth reincarnate. somebody asked charlie kirk, leader of the organization, when do we start to use the when can we just start shooting these? and kirk said we shouldn't do that, but very revealingly he didn't say we shouldn't do that because to kill innocent people is wrong. you know, that would be woke to say that murder is wrong. instead, he said it would play into hands and it would allow them to depict us as fascists and violent. so by any stretch of by any imagining the definition we're living in an era political terror