welcome.

tonight's commonwealth club world event. my name is ken broad and i'm a longtime supporter with my wife jackie and both delighted tonight to be sponsoring the program. before we get started, if reminders all the usual stuff. first one is this is being recorded. so make sure to silence your cell phones. duration of our program. and if you have any questions, our guest speaker or the moderator please fill them out. they'll be coming around and grabbing them. or if you're viewing online, you can put it in the chat that way. and for those of you in person here, everyone gets a copy of the book. i see there already quite a few in the audience here, which is. great. there's nothing that warms my heart more seeing people with physical books and my copy happy to sign them afterwards. we also have a wine reception afterwards as well. this is a reward for people

coming out in person. and now it's my pleasure to introduce tonight's guests. mike madrid is one of the co-founders of the lincoln project and author. which be described i'm sure it goes either way the audience, hey, this is a friendly audience for the lincoln project and author of the new book, which many of you have, the latino century how america's largest minority is transforming democracy. i've read it. it's fantastic. mike is the expert over his extensive political. mike has served as the senior adviser, both republicans and democrats, and is one of the country's leading experts on latino voters. so i think that's really one of the great things about you, is you've represented both sides and a dual agent, if you will. he was a spring 2019 fellow at usc's center for the political future, which is an organization that i'm involved with as well in 2020, latinos became largest ethnic voting group in the

country the second largest sorry. mike's new book, the latino century, explores the historic rise and growth of latino voters and why the two major political parties in the us have failed to understand the appeal to a significant voting bloc that's important. both sides have overlooked group. moderating tonight's program is guy marshall ramsey correspondent to kick your readers california politics and government desk. please join me in welcoming both mike and guy guy awesome. well thank you can delighted to be here with you mike. i think just so much in this book the latino century that really unpacks many of the key currents that are kind of shaping our electorate today and the 2024 election. but a lot, you know, kind of up in air right now about the 2024 elections, starting at the top of the ticket. you are, i think, at your heart a numbers guy, a data guy. i think your twitter bio says numbers and data breakfast. yeah, like that. so if you were a numbers guy in the white house right now, the

biden campaign, what are numbers you'd be looking at to determine in the direction democrats go from here whether the president should remain at the top of the ticket? it's a really big question, so i'll try to answer it as tightly as can i to understand what is happening in. the american political system today, it's most important to understand that the key driver is this idea of what we call negative partizanship. we all know partizanship is we all know what hyper partizanship is negative is the idea that people are animated passionately and driven by what they're against, as opposed what they're for. and can set aside a discussion on what that means for democracy, but what that really tells us is that the electorate is extraordinary narrowly calcified. republicans will do they will vote somebody who is as flawed as their candidate with go off on the of that and democrats are behaving the exact same way.

they both view the elections now as an threat to their worldview more than they view the strengths of, their candidates and. so when you hear president biden and, his campaign team say there's been kind of a negligible effect regardless of this disastrous debate, the data is bearing that out. there has just been very little movement and the question, i think, really incidentally, that same range would exist for whoever the democratic nominee is. so it's not like it's a pro biden thing. it's just a this is our champion at the moment, 75%, 83% say he's too old to be president. they don't care. they that that's baked in and same is reversed on the other side. so when when biden says me staying the course is the best

pass able route there's a very good argument for that because. most of his negatives, his weaknesses are baked in as opposed another candidate who hasn't been tested as much. but keep in mind the delta, the differential is plus or minus two points way. so there's a good case to be made for him staying, a good case for him to be made for, him leaving. i'm the opinion that you go with it. i don't mean this literally but you go with the devil that you know. yeah. as opposed to what you don't know. there are very few things you can control and campaigns very few. so you control as many variables as you possibly can to set yourself on the best course to win a race. and if i were had to make the decision, i would say we know what weaknesses are. we know that going to make more fumbles he is there will be and they may be considerable. the data tells us, will have a very negligible, if any, effect

through the course of the campaign. i think what concerns lot of democrats is the president a base problem before the debate. right that was a concern bringing out the same coalition that elected him in 2020. and given the fact that look most candidates who are where he is right now in the polling do go on to win. that's not always the case i think george bush came back from a summer deficit in 2004, but it take a comeback that's somewhat out the ordinary. do you feel like ultimately, though, those democrats come back home in this calcified environment, it's just those democrats are going to get to the polls november. how much of the short answer is yes? but i want to unpack question a little bit, because it is really fascinating. least i believe that it is. joe biden has consistently had very weak polling numbers with his own. but on election, we've had 50 primaries to test the theory case. he's overperform the polling in about 47 of them. so that that's a data point you

have to pay attention to. it's telling us something donald trump his polling shows very secure his base is but he has dramatically underperformed about 47 of them to the point where he's. 20% of base republican vote against candidates that dropped out of the race as a competitive right. so that's a data point. you have to pay attention to. and while you can't speculate too much on what that means, it cannot be ignored. and so when we're looking at performance, both party label and candidates based and compare that to polling. as they say in the military, if the map doesn't match the terrain, you follow the terrain because. the terrain is real. the map is, you know, it's a hypothetical and you've got to be able to look, you know, what is before you and i think and again, i want to really qualify this because of what i just said

in the previous answer i was going to say i, think biden and the fundamentals have him in a very strong position. let me rephrase that by he's not in a weak position. people think he is. and that's the way i'm assessing the race and looking at it is biden has polling problem that doesn't manifest the at the election booth. trump has an election day problem that is not manifesting in the polling i think regardless of who's at the top of the ticket for the democrats, there are a couple of fascinating trends that will decide this election and your work and this book are really kind of at the of both. one is this shift of suburban voters, in many cases women away republicans towards the democratic party to the type of voters that you targeted. yes. working on the lincoln project. the other trend is this move of blue collar voters. and when we talk about blue kind of voters, increasingly we're talking about latino voters moving towards republican. so how do you see those two trends kind of intersecting converging? we move towards november.

i love that because for whatever peculiar in the cosmos, i have an expertise in both of those like those are my two main demographics and. those are the two that are moving at this moment in time in this extremely calcified environment at this extremely calcified political hyperpartisan environment. the only two measurable voter groups that are moving are college educated white voters. large independents and republican. not a lot of republicans, but enough to and they're moving and have been moving since 2016 to the left. and what's fascinating as a republican has been working with voter groups, republican voter for three decades is they're moving cultural reasons. we used to close republicans and bring them home on election day on tax cuts and regulation and and free market messaging. that kind of classic conservative stuff and. a lot of times we would find specifically women would be like, well, you know, i'm pro-choice. i support the right to choose.

it's a pro-life party. i'm not really comfortable with it. but, you know, tax cuts, come on, tax and they come back home and support tax cuts that that in 2020 we doubled down with the lincoln project exclusively. you never saw a tax cut ad from us was all culture. it's culture culture because we were shaking those college educated women. and it wasn't just women, but it was largely women. but the exact is happening with the class as the education divide, as we call it, reshaped contours of the country. those a college degree, a rapidly canceled dating under the democratic party's banner, those without a college degree equally as rapidly consolidating under the republican banner and divide is getting bigger and. it's manifesting not just in terms of an economic divide, although that true, it's really a culture. it's a perspective it's a world view divide and latinos.

two to your point are are moving. and i want to be very careful on how i say this are increasingly not voting with the democratic party. there are two things i did not say. i did not say that are increasingly compelled to move to the republican party because those issues, although there is some truth, that but more importantly. i did not say that they are shifting to the right or realigning the right. and i want this to be driven home really, really clearly. the reason i am not saying that is because what we are witnessing is the emergence an entirely new electorate. a realignment presupposes that there's a vote history or a pattern of voting one way and changing alignment through percent of latino voters are 30 years of age or younger, so they don't have that vote history very as a more a more populist,

especially with economic and political populism that is more apparent and more attractive and what we would call the american right. and i'm getting comfortable uncomfortable on how. i phrase this a little bit because i don't believe that the right left spectrum exists much anymore. i believe we are on a very populist moment where. the establishment is kind of crumbling along with institutions we're watching that in the democratic party right now and. and the rise of populist sentiment amongst key voting groups, particularly working class folks is dominating discourse. 60% of voters don't have college degree, so there's more fish in that barrel and they're increasingly latino. so about the long answer. oh, no, the nerdy apologize. but that's that's essentially what is happening. and as latinos become the fastest growing group of the class, the challenge for democrats particularly isn't losing white voters in the rust belt, the economic anxiety voters, their saviors are not

going to be. gretchen whitmer or tim ryan or amy klobuchar, although that's where dc is looking. their saviors will be ruben gallego, catherine cortez masto and alex padilla in, the sunbelt in the southwest. to flip that dynamic the other way, then does the question become for donald, can he gain more of those working class voters than he's losing in the suburbs? that will you just ask the question of who's going to be next president of states? and in fact, tim, alberta just wrote a piece in the atlantic on this yesterday where la civil de and susan wiles, the two cope campaign managers for trump, were exploring just that topic, just the fact that they're seeing the race way tells me they have a decided advantage because the democrats right now are more worried about putting george clooney and, new york times telling the president to get while they're actually looking at demographics and math and the democrats are looking at something entirely different. but to answer the question, the

the democrats believe that they can i believe because of the we were talking about at the polling, because of the performance post dobbs in lower turnout elections and because the the the democrats also i think that the propensity u.s. born hispanic men specifically is not significant enough to surpass what think they can peel off. the trump campaign actually believes the opposite. and that's where the fight is going to be. we're going to get back to a lot of this 2024 and trends, but i want to talk a little bit about your journey in you lay out in this book you grew up in ventura county home of reagan library all of the reagan library. how did that kind of shape your worldview, your, you know, political view growing up. yeah, you know, i grew up in a home of lower income. latino, mexican-american, catholic catholic and was kind of imbued with sense of the

world in many ways. it was not unlike the trajectory of a lot of ethnic catholics at the turn of the last century through ellis island. but we were imbued with a very strong sense of of looking out for the least among and having an obligation to the poor and and dedicating our lives to doing that. and politics became my parents were not politically involved but they were very politically aware and so very political discussions were part of that conversation and the more i listened to my father the he didn't sound like a democrat to me. and and i would point that out as a young son sometimes does and and your brother. yeah well no pretty directly and you know may desert time tough because by the time we got there the conversations were pretty heated but but that encouraged

in my family and to me you know moorpark i'm from a little town moorpark moorpark had a really curious distinction it's a little city right in the of ventura county. my family moved there in 71. the population was about 2500, 3000 people by the time i graduated from high school, it was about a little shy of 40,000. so was one of the fastest growing communities in southern california at the time. this is 1980s reagan defense spending. the economy is going fantastic, but it had one very curious distinction. it was the only city in california that had a declining population. the small little mexican agricultural that i was in was kind of being swallowed up by suburban mcmansions up around it while around california was becoming more latino. so i had to really learn how to navigate my private life with my friends in settings with the broader construct of of california. i think it made me a better political consultant but the lasting image, i think my mind

is, you know, the name moorpark is a type of apricot because we had apricot orchards around us. and i remember the field workers coming in seasonal, field workers and right above the field were where the horizon where the reagan library was built. and my senior year of high school. so so both of those were very, very comfortable in both of those. they actually asked to speak at the reagan library on this book on october eight. so it's a real homecoming for me because i feel as natural and comfortable there as i do amongst field. to me, it's natural, although politically it seems kind of diametrically opposed, it actually makes perfect sense. me it strikes me that you're contemporary of what we in california politics as the prop 187 generation, a lot of the leading in our state politics. alex padilla john perez, lorena gonzales they came up around this campaign, you know, opposing a ballot measure would have restricted public benefits for undocumented immigrants. what was your experience in that

moment? that's a great question because i was actually an undergraduate student who went to georgetown university, right after the primary. so i wasn't actually here, but i was reading about it in paper, literally because this was kind of pre-internet. so i literally get the washington post and try to read about what was going on back home and call friends page long distance rates on my landline and try to try to understand what was happening. and now i had done campaign in 1992 for a real kind of fire breather. a republican congressman by the of elton gallegly and elton was one of the first really strong anti crusaders he and like dana rohrabacher and b one bob dornan and yeah, truly and i was kind of steeped in in how powerful the immigration issue was, how visceral it is to people from an identity perspective and how threatening it all is and can

be. and i think at that moment understanding that dichotomy of me, the reagan library, the field worker and this issue and how explosive it was, i was like, i to get it, i got to do this for a living like, got it. this is like fascinating but one of the things, the more to the point of your question and everybody you mentioned, they're they're all they're all dear friends is interesting because even though i'm a republican they they knew that my primary concern was for the for the community and even though we disagree a lot of issues alex padilla call me and say my need to talk to you about antonio villaraigosa asked me run his governor's race. lorena gonzalez, i will fight about union issues all day long because we see eye to eye on those issues at all. but one thing i did notice, and this really became an impetus for for the way i started to target voters i was the grandson of immigrants, am the grandson of immigrants with a very strong affinity for my americanness and

for my identity nearly who was and driven action by that issue was. the son or daughter of immigrants, almost every one of them. and that difference a very profound mark on the way i understood the politicization process. and it became really foundational for this book, for this work because the rapid explosion of what we're seeing in the latino voter now is third and fourth generation. now, fourth generation voters like i'm in my early fifties, early fifties. and and now there's discernible fourth generation of latinos which that that age cohort didn't exist. when i you know, the past 30 years we couldn't test that or focus group it or pull it in and it's it's 180 degrees different than the first and second generation voter. so again, my lived experience paying attention to what i was feeling, i seeing what i was

experiencing compared to the latino sort of political establishment, couldn't have been more. and one of the great things about having most of these folks as friends is i could from a data perspective, explain why what they were doing politically was wrong and they would kind of nod and say, okay but continue to do what they were doing because. they were acting rationally as politic actions at my job is not a politician minus more. i see it as to kind of explain some of what's going. there's ways to actually survive in getting the votes to keep moving that career forward. yeah, and i don't mean that as a pejorative. yeah, that's her job. you kind of rose up through the ranks in the state republican party. what didn't you feel like? so this was, you know, throughout nineties, early 2000. what do you feel like you were bringing to the party during those times? what do you mean? what did you take from from that experience, those years? well, that's a really good

question. i mean, first of all, you know, i really had to use my of navigating sort my latino expertise used in a non latino world. i was the political at 26 years old, but i was getting regular, regular to, you know, go back to the country where i from from my own party daily. i mean it's constant and every time my name would on an immigration issue, there would always be some sort of fracas at the republican party headquarters because base republican voters were like, who is this guy? why is he the one talking on behalf of republicans? he's not even an american. i think your first campaign boss thought you were a spy. yeah, my first campaign was that i was a spy because i this is early in voter data history. they're like, how can a mexican-american kid with a surname in a family of democrats be a republican? because i knew i was republican. i registered republican on my 18th birthday. like i couldn't wait to register. i knew like i was that weird kid, right?

i guess. but it made perfect sense to me. but these were the early days of voter data where you could look that stuff up and. so they thought i was was a spy. and so my first, my first. and there are spies in campaigns by. the way that does happen, of course i had no idea. so i walked and wanted to volunteer for my congressman men. and they were like, why would a mexican kid from a democratic family want to work for a congressman who's pretty anti-illegal immigration? like, what's going on. and my first job in politics was to take off stamps from envelopes that had been stamped. they wanted to make sure they wanted to make sure. i, of course, had no idea. thought i was saving the republic right. so i'm like peeling stamps off. and they put me in a storage closet, isolated me from everybody, and i would be there for hours just trying to peel them off perfectly so that congresswoman could use them again. and after hours and hours and hours of doing it, they just realized he's a spy.

he's just he's just a weird kid. so that was my first job in politics. and and that was where i learned to i was so committed and, wanted to help the congressman out and they ended up offering me a job and was kind of on my way in and in republican politics, when you're when you were thinking about in those days, like putting the coalition to win these campaigns, i mean that kind of nativist undercurrent was always i mean, pat buchanan, so much of what he was saying. yeah, from what i saw. was that something you were thinking of? okay, we need to tolerate we need to have these people in the tent to win the election or how were you thinking about that, i guess at that time i'm not going to say i wasn't uncomfortable with it, but i'm also not going to say it was very to me. because what i will say is this i want to be very methodical in how i pick my words here. the america first stuff was was very strongly, not entirely very strongly imbued with a sense of

nativism that was clearly a blood and soil component to you could see it at conventions and there was a lot of really nasty, ugly anti-mexican stuff specifically in the 1990s when i was a political director that, was making its way through convention halls at the time. but i also i also very much subscribe to the idea that a lot of what i was hearing on the left was equally racially charged and what i could never reconcile why. some of it was okay on the left. if it's not on the right isn't it equally bad? and what does mean and think through the course of my journey in politics, it's what i came to understand, dan, was we will probably a species never completely over come that and. so we've got to be somewhat situational with it. and i don't know that's right. or if that's wrong, i just know that that's where i'm at now in recognizing that when there are

inequities that are so obvious that are so disparate. we we can't just say, well, we've got to be a colorblind. we have to do something as a community to reconcile, even if there are temporary and run their course and something works during the 70 is in the eighties, but no longer now we have to be sophisticated enough a society and as a culture to be okay with. because if we don't, we're not self-reflective enough to address some of the very deep seated. i don't even know what the right word is, but just the deep seated flaw in the american story. and i think as i've gotten, maybe it's because of life experiences, i'm much more comfortable looking at america and loving her more because she

is flawed, not despite those flaws, because it reminds me, i guess, of my own journey is we all have our scars and we become a better person if we acknowledge it and make a commitment to be better, not to just pretend it never existed at all. just don't look at it. but donald trump came down that elevator 2015. speaking of ugly scars, you see that as something just to ride you. you were early breaking point and had been emerging a while for me because, look, a lot of people, the universality of classic conservatism, as i call it now, i still have a deep, passionate love for that. when i heard jack kemp speak about about policies that addressed poor, that spoke to that mexican catholic poor kid in me where i could dedicate my life. and there somebody who cared about it that talked about ownership and the human spirit and the value of lifting up all

like i. i didn't just believe that i passionately committed my life to it. and, and that sorry. i kind of went down rabbit hole there because i really that's what still drives me is whether it whether and i'm not i'm not particularly, you know, committed to the policy on one side or the other to me is if somebody is hungry you can feed them. now without saying well you're you know, hurting this person we can talk about a longer term solution. but i guess what i'm saying is the republican changed and i know exactly the moment of when it changed the universality of where was really, i believe, trying desperately hold true to the creed that we are all by our creator. or when reagan gave the city on a hill speech, which was which was an immigration speech,

republicans always stop that speech when he says windswept and god blessed the next sentence. in that speech is where he and if there must be a wall, it must have a great gates that can be opened to all who want to come here. that is an enormously confident statement about our values that moving in the toward home. yeah. and what it says is not just that we're a beacon, but that those beliefs spread by our commitments to them. it's the same sentiment as. lincoln's right makes my speech at cooper union that started the republican and there's an arc between lincoln and reaganism. it ends it ends on 911. and i on george bush's campaigns and the promise of what george bush was doing with being very

pro immigration, pro hispanic pro diversity. if you i guess, in today's parlance, was that confidence, the universality. a 911 the administration changed the party changed and the country changed and you saw that stuff that was pat buchanan back in the dark corners of conventions become the dominant isolationist protection. this nativist and that's not conservatism as i know it. so i reject the idea that there's know populist conservatism, that those are two diametrically opposed ideologies. it's like being a dodgers of the giants. and, you can't do it. you want to think you can, but you really. yeah. so you so this was became a driving for you and other conservatives to start the lincoln project. yeah. which you worked on in 2020. talk about your work on that and this idea of the bannon line. yeah so you know i got a call from a reed galen one of the eight members who said, mike,

you know, you've been very vocal, very vocal critic and unwavering and you're kind of fearless. they knew rightfully that if we spoke out that we would be mercilessly attacked including threats to our family, to my children, attacks on everything from my technology, my business, just massive, massive impacts. because the thing about it trump is i'm not i'm just general call it that is the where when i was growing up the main inviolable characteristic republicanism was raising taxes you just do that. now today it's you demonstrate fealty to the leader. whatever donald trump says is the orthodoxy, and we all follow. and that that's nothing republican or conservatism. i knew, but they knew.

they knew that in order to enact discipline that fear is the tactic that they so we knew that we were going to be made an example of. and that, of course, happened. all of that happened. but there were eight of us. most of us were political. george conway, who's become a dear friend, is as an attorney by trade. with remarkable political instincts. and we you know, we launched it in december of 2019. this right at the beginning of the first impeachment hearing. and what we realized was the republican senators were not going to allow evidence to be heard in the senate. and the evidence course was overwhelming and -- with the president was literally on the phone shaking down zelensky like, there it is. and so the republicans, like, we're not we're not going to allow that into the impeachment hearing. and we realized that's how how corrupted the whole system had become. and. at some point, political

consultants became the moral backbone of the republican party. so that was us and we we we took the fight to him and we expected, i think, raise five or 6 million bucks, maybe play in a couple of we ended up raising about $100 million and it was the probably the most pac in american history. and tipped into pop culture and and we were we were, i think, very consequence in the outcome of that race. but you had really modest aims. i mean, i think you seemed like you approached in terms of i do data and again so about politics is about emotion and i think that's why i love it is because it's just so like right now with the president was lighting hair on fire, running in circles and rolling the ground and wailing and teeth gnashing and oh my god, what's going to happen? and you show them the data and it's like the differential of what's going to happen is like marginal and i think i've i learned that in campaigns, the person who's the most confident

in control has the most knowledge of what actually happening with voter behavior. and i think it just naturally made me a little bit calmer. and so i, i developed what i the bannon line named after steve bannon. and to show you kind of how campaigns work a little bit is the expected patience for the lincoln project were getting really of control. people were like, are you going to start a new party and can you run new candidate against and you get 50%. and i was like, that's not how this works. and steve bannon in the new york times had said, you know, if we lose 5 to 7% of the republican base. we're to lose. and so i my political team together and i said, i want a press release to go out now and i want everyone, the members on their twitter feed to call this the bannon line and i want madrid. they're saying that's me by the way talking myself. the third person i want to get

as much exposure with me saying that is the line. and if we move just 5 to 7%, we're going to win and i called it the bannon line because i didn't want to say it's a bunch of lincoln project. republicans. steve bannon said it's true. and so that, of course, took off and, became a big thing. and steve bannon and i started fighting back and forth because and, you know, he said you're an old school rhino, which i took a great compliment. still want to get t-shirt that says old school rhino on it and he correctly you know and again it's i hate to say, you know there's some times you can just really you're on the same wavelength as somebody on the opposite side of a campaign that that's where steve bannon and i were. and i'm not proud of that. but i knew that when i called it the bannon line, i was it was a reference to the mendoza line and baseball and and and bannon went and referred to it as the mendoza line they're calling it the bannon line. so he knew i was thinking what he was thinking. he knew what i was thinking.

they call that rent free, rent free in each other's heads and a great scene. and there's a documentary made about all this where i said, i'm living rent free, and steve bannon's brain in his head. and he went out and did a press conference when he called me an old school rhino. and it was the day before he was arrested on the yacht of the chinese billionaire. so it's a great scene in the documentary if you haven't seen it what's the bannon line this year, higher? that's a great question because there isn't one. first, because it's not the same race and because of the shifting dynamics with latinos and with republican is moving in the other direction, you can't impart that one to is i can't say it's a bad in line until bannon says it's the bannon line. so he's going to have to agree first, right? i mean, technically, i guess i could just kind of take that that that sort of branding and make it up. but what i will say is this i at least i did before the debates, i believe the potential biden or

any generic to get 10% of republicans to move over was very possible, which would be it wouldn't be quite landslide territory, but pretty close. one of the shifts that we saw after the debates, we three shifts. this is i think most people are fascinating and this is largely taken from the new york times poll that showed biden slipping six points behind biden's actually has increased his his vote share with independents after debate. okay. but he's losing because a lot of democrats got weak kneed as you're seeing and hearing every and have moved not to trump off of buy off of biden that's very correctable that will come back. the other part though is the republicans started to consolidate where there were republicans who were like i don't think i do trump again maybe biden's not so bad. the economy is getting better. inflation is under control.

i don't really like it, but this general stuff scares the hell out of me. i think i might be voting for biden that. all went away. the debate. the republicans went right back and so republicans consolidated than i would expect. democrats are shakier than they will be in a couple of weeks and independents moved towards biden not by the numbers he needs, but in the right direction. and that's what i'm saying. the fundamentals still are the movement is marginal but the directions of each of those three category is are heading in the right direction, at least at the moment. you about the consolidation. and i do feel that's just we zoom out to the you know 2030 years that is a trend looking at where there just aren't the liberal rockefeller republicans aren't the conservative democrats. you used to see. i mean, when you're looking in this, you explore a lot this trend of the latino vote. to what extent are any gains that republicans are making with simply a product, republicans

consolidating. i don't that the movement of latinos to republican party is part of a broader conservative. i believe that the movement of latinos to republicans is part of much bigger populist movement and it is anti-state abolishment. and here's one of the things i really tried to bring up in the book is one of the things that's happening in this country right now, is a crisis in our institutions they're collapsing and it's broad, whether it's the media, government, churches, the military corporations, academia, these are all they're all collapsing. the trust and confidence of, the people that they exist to serve doesn't really exist. there's one great exception, and that is latinos have this very high level of trust and confidence in these institutions that make generally work. but democracy is american democracy anyway, specifically

work. but there are two exceptions. the two exceptions are the democratic and republican party, latinos have the weakest partizan anchor of any race or ethnicity. we have the highest likelihood of disaffiliation from both parties. we have of the lowest turnout rates. some of which i would argue is a function of poverty levels. but for those that it's not, it's a disaffiliation from the parties because neither one is selling what they want to buy. and you also have, for example, the two american politicians who overperformed significantly above conventional and data polling or bernie sanders, donald trump and think that the most anti candidate in the race today is clearly donald trump, which think is part of his appeal. i will say one of the thing about that, which somewhat of a qualifier, if you take a look at

ron desantis in florida, greg abbott in texas, doug ducey, the former republican governor of arizona, even brian donnelly here in california, the kind of sacrificial lamb that ran against gavin newsom, they have one thing in common. they all met considerably exceeded numbers with hispanic voters and every single competitive house seat in the country. the republican candidate overperform donald trump with hispanic that is very strong evidence that donald trump is not latinos to the party he is limiting much further the natural growth that would be happening because of the assimilate of an economic factors that i talk about in the book. so if trump was not the ballot, any other republican would be doing considerably better than trump in the polls right now, at least as much as can be with a

highly negatively charged environment. but it would be much they would be doing better demographically in. states like arizona, nevada, wisconsin georgia, north carolina, pennsylvania. well let's talk about one of the places where that's happening, and that's the grande valley. yeah. in texas, you devote a whole chapter in the book to the trends there. i mean, is that a place where you see as some sort of kind canary in the coal mine, maybe? no, i don't. i mean, what was trying to do and i talk about north carolina, i talk about arizona, nevada, and you have to talk about the rio grande valley, because it is it's actually quite exceptional. the grande valley is very rural and it's very multigenerational. by that i mean, people in the rio grande valley are not newcomers. texan hispanics have been there for oftentimes hundreds of years. and you have seen some of the most significant shifts to the right, in large part because of their demand for stronger border. and that was why i wanted to put that in there is because that that is that what i was doing

when was doing focus groups. antonio villaraigosa, the gubernatorial campaign. i remember sitting in fresno, in bakersfield and bringing in latino voters who immigrants themselves all legal at the time, but some two or three of them in the group had come undocumented ago and then left and then come back to legal. at least five 40% of them were like no, no more migrants no more illegal migrants, let alone undocumented migrants and that that sentiment 30% of latinos voted for proposition 187. so that sentiment is very keenly it's greater now because of the assimilation that i'm talking this third generation voter when when joe biden signed, the executive order on asylum restricting asylum refugees, 69% of latinos supported it. that's compared to 70% of all americans. so there's basically no

discernible difference in. and after 30 years of watching these immigration fights back and forth, it's become very clear to me that the democrats have lost that. and what i will argue because i had a front row seat on both sides of this thing, both parties have benefited politically from a broken system. both of them, the democrats have tried to it as a way to mobilize latino voters, turn out by demonizing republicans. the republicans have made it very easy be demonize, but the republicans, of course, have used it to turn out their white non-college-educated base and overperform. but as long as that problem, they've got a political base, which is in large part why the republicans walked away from the deal that they they crafted earlier this year, they weren't about to give that up because they're like, well, wait a second. yeah. it's like, you know, arafat negotiating peace. once you give him everything you want. i got all i didn't really mean it like i'm out of here right. i don't exist unless conflict. and that's that's what the

republicans did earlier this. well, i was thinking, you know, reading that in the rio grande valley, thought about imperial county. you're in california, spent some time there, a few years ago because that was the biggest 2016 to 2020 protocol. exactly. in the state. and there you have a border community that that views the border just in terms of a cultural issue. but it's a jobs issue. right. so many people are working. correct in their border patrol and you have in my mind. i saw just a real absence of, democratic presence, the media, even the media market there was the yuma, arizona media market. so, i mean, what to what degree or maybe these case studies, whether it's calexico or the rio grande valley, a, where democrats are kind of just ceding ground, they're not. well, that's that's a minefield. it's a great way to put it. and that's the right word. i would take it a step further. no journalists tip for, you know, journalists yet has written the central valley of california and the rio grande valley of texas. these are both very similar not once, not on the border central valley, but these are producing agriculture communities in rural

red parts of the country. those shifts are happening there for largely the same reasons. so but but the word feeding ground. exactly right. like when i watch what the what the democrats messaging is with latinos right now, it's clear to me they're either completely, totally, grossly or they're just ceding the ground and doubling down on jobs and abortion and more on the college educated shift that's already happening which is not a bad strategy. i mean, i think it's unnecessary, but but that's what seems to be they're doing because i can't figure what the hell they're doing. right. i think in some case i would say, you democrats and maybe you think that they've over learned the lesson, but you see these examples of, whether it's prop 187, the you know, sb whatever it was and arizona 1070 even trump's rhetoric and 2016 that the identity concerns latinos suddenly get spiked is that high attack.

yeah but understand and this is kind of my the point of the book is that works remarkably when the dominant part of the latino community is an immigrant, when they're the grandchildren of immigrants, often than not, those grandchildren on the side of those pushing for more border security. that's the big change. and that's that this moment this year. the reason i wanted the book out this year, the next 30 years of latino politicians and politics is going to be 180 degrees different than the last 30 years of latino politicians and latino politics. that's the that's the book. that's the century. and it's that nexus as both parties struggle to identify what what it means to be a minority. when latinos aren't behaving like minorities are supposed to behave right. like, what does that mean? and what does that struggle mean for the parties when they don't know exactly what to do. let me characterize it like this, that the party that's able to secure the hearts and minds

and ultimately the of a multi-ethnic working voter group will be the dominant party the next generation, the democratic party still hasn't realized. it's not a working class party anymore. in fact, the democratic party, get this, the democratic party is less diverse racially and ethnically. now than at any time since before the 1964 civil rights act. it's becoming wealthier, whiter, more progressive because the the democratic party is animated entirely by cultural issues. now, these are voters that are not impacted by the price of gas or a carton of eggs. they don't even know what that means anymore. but they'll fight, you know, to the fight, you know, on dobbs and control and marriage equality. there's nothing wrong with that. but they're increasingly removed, from their working

class base that it's like i just i didn't pay rent on, like i got my kids. you know, signed for soccer league. i don't know if we can make work and. the republican party is has been good on the working class, but they've struggled with the multiethnic what are the benefits theory of is this third and fourth generation non latino that is driven more by economic than by the racial or ethnic because they don't feel that different they're not that different and. so that's why this and again, it's not a shift, an emergence, because these are all young, by the way. these are not old democrats that are like i don't think i'm with the democrats anymore. these are all massively huge number to milk. it's 4 million new latino voter ers will be on the voter rolls compared to years ago. that is crazy. and it's going to start growing exponentially after that. so all of this growth and 80% of it is u.s. born but you can't build a wall to stop it.

it's already happened. right? these are these are the grandkids and great grandkids of immigrants. i think democrats in, places like nevada, places like california would say the antidote to the degree that you're talking about is organized to. what extent do you think that's a scalable solution for democrats to lean into? unions which provide not only kind of working class agenda, but also an identity? well, it's worked in nevada, but nevada, the size of like san mateo county, right. and it's arguably more fun. yeah, well, a lot more fun. sorry, but like nevada, nevada, determined by clark county and the culinary union, which harry reid kind built up. and there was really tension. they didn't want a lot of the latinos in the union, which is not uncommon with unions. they don't want immigrants specifically because they drive down the price of labor and

competition. but once accepted that, you know, over half of the culinary now is latino and i talk about this in the book and it has brought pretty consistent since the harry reid era and it made what should demographically kind of a republican state a i don't say reliably because nevada, the one swing state that is more republican, all the others demographically have been moving towards toward a more bluer position. nevada has actually for the past three election cycles become more. and so they're they're holding on to it by margins. but let's talk about unions generally really quickly, latinos have the lowest unionization rate of any of the race or ethnic groups to and it's not that there's like a culture of labor we're also the most likely to in the gig economy and not saying that's a good thing i'm saying it's matter of survival. so there's not that that natural

proclivity for it and for labor to catch to actually make it a force i think is probably not right solution because i'm not convinced as i tell my lorena gonzalez, who's the head of the afl-cio in the state, unionization from a data no offense is, it's a it's a last century solution to a new centuries. you can't organize your way out of the challenges that working class people are experiencing. the economy doesn't work that way or industries don't work way. so i don't, i mean, in some small selected markets nevada being one of them it does for the time being, california yeah. i would say the most pro-union probably in the country has a real problem with turning latinos out and we've got one of one of the lowest unionization rates any any race or ethnic group in now in the state of the country. i want to get into some these great questions that we got from the audience.

one is do you think spanish language skills are important to win latino in the future? spend lot of time on this and this is a big fight. great question. whoever asked it, you get extra points. let me ask the audience a question. if i could. what percentage do you think of latinos prefer? their news in spanish? nish what percent? any guesses? 12 higher. lower. 40%. 35. it's about 17%. so any poll that has than 17% is not a credible poll. in fact, i talk about this at length in the book a lot of partizan democrats oversample spanish language speakers because it gives them a much more skewed issue set that that their clients and even though it's accurate, it makes people in the party happy and both parties do that unfortunately.

so no spanish language with latinos is not a very part of the electorate anyway. population is very different, but in both it's shrinking and it's shrinking dramatically. and there's a demographic reason for that too. if i can bore everybody, i know we've got some questions, but let me bore everybody with a little bit data. the actual the peak of immigration from the eighties, early 2000s stopped at about the year 2000 just as the engine of capitalism was melting down. the economy wasn't. there was no market for lot of the industries employees that were were coming through both legal and illegal means. there has a lull in our immigration up until. biden took office in 2020, 2021, 2021. so there's a year lag lull a decline despite fox says fox news, there has been a decline in and that has created a real

problem for the univision's and telemundo's of the world because their market is shrinking, it's collapsing it's falling apart. i don't know if you guys remember the scuttled about trump doing the interview on univision and everyone's going, oh my god, anything turning wing? no, they're just desperately trying to find market somewhere because. their audience is collapsing. and that narrative that spanish speaking immigrant narrative, that stereotype is also tightly of what the orthodoxy of democratic party is. narrative is. that's the issues that they drive the problem is as that shrinks as a share of the latino electorate, so does the efficacy of the message. this question is about the gender gap within latino voters asking about the shift of latino men and maybe you can kind of explain the kind of gender forces that work within this electorate. it's a great question, actually this is one of those fascinating things about what's happening. wanted to write a whole book on

this, but i thought it probably better done by a latina to write it herself. we have the largest gender of any race or ethnic group in the country, or women vote more for the democrats, men vote more for republicans. i believe it's very closely correlates to the education divide because our women go to college at much rates than our men do. and so their political opinions are changing, manifesting very differently. we also, as a community women to office at much greater rates than any other race or ethnicity and anybody who understands culture. there's the stereotype, machismo. and i guess we would they call that toxic man masculinity here in the states but machismo is really kind of a it's a negative stereotype. it doesn't have much grounding or evidence. it and i try to talk it in the soft qualitative ways with, you know, the virgin and la malinche

and other other, you know, iconic cultural figures that drive our perspective latinos, but where it can quantified is an actual elections where actually choose who we're going to vote. and latinos in california, example, the legislature there are more women, hispanic women than hispanic men. texas even is it about 45, 55 benefiting men. but i point out in the book hispanic, women, hispanics, in really in one generation have accomplished white women have not been able to accomplish since suffrage, which is basically parity, gender parity in elected office. this question is about voter participation. what are some ways in which latino voters can be encouraged or increased participation. the general election really for all cycles. there's two. the first is start talking to them about the issues that they have been screaming that they want to hear about for 30 years in every poll i've looked at and i've probably looked at more

political polls of latinos than anybody in, the country, the latinos are saying it's jobs the economy, affordability issues, and yet the messaging comes out from both parties over. whelming lee is about immigration it's about a racial or ethnic component to try to compel and that's strong. i think the is for people who are not hispanic or frankly that are white to to impose a racial lens on people it's like there's there's this innate need to say well if they're not white then there's level of aggrieved there's some level oppressed, there's some level of distinction and i think there's probably a good reason for that with black voters. but we're not black voters. and and that i think, is one of the real challenges that both parties face. that's the first thing i would say. the second, again, and this is the data guy and me, there's a very strong correlation between those who do not vote and those

who are poor. and it doesn't matter if you're black, the deep south or white in appalachia or latino in east los angeles. if you're poor, you don't vote. and we a poverty problem in california and we don't talk about it nearly enough because the dominant party definitely does not want to talk about it. but there's there's a massive problem which is becoming, because of housing affordability and, intergenerational problem. and if you're pro-democrat casey but you're not pro economy, at some point, those are going to run into one another. if you're not creating a healthy economy for working class people. and a lot of economic opportunity your democracy is going to come. it will fall apart because what you're creating is a pyramid of fewer and fewer people at. the top of the pyramid of one race and ethnicity and more and more people of poverty, of a different race and ethnicity.

and that story has never ended well in the course of human history, ever. and that's what that that's california, by the way one of the most segregated states, the union california, because housing i can tell you what race and ethnicity and gender you are certainly your income level probably your college education level by zip code in california one of the most segregated states in, america, because we don't build housing for our people by intent. we've chosen this society. here's an author question during your research for this book. anything that surprised or shocked you? oh, yeah you know what surprised me the most is that the book was it? yeah. truly it was. i never like in 30 years of doing this, i was just always doom and gloom. that's probably because i in politics. but as i was writing and i was coming to these different conclusions and trying to be like more forward thinking of where this was going, all of the

indicators i of what ails american society. and look, since the lincoln project talked a lot with the george conway that talk a lot with the campaign reform people talk a lot with the you know electoral college people and all these people talking about the safeguards for democ. but as george has taught me very astutely, there is no constitution in this country can be written none if the people don't want it. you can't protect it. and we live in a we live in a society right now where those that are 65 years and older who are amongst the most privileged generation, this great nation has ever produced the beneficiaries of what has largely been a time of of peace. of global us and they have the most negative view of this country of any generation pulled in the history of modern polling

techniques. and at the same time we have this of a younger poorer, browner somewhat more recently migrated that has the highest testing levels of confidence and optimism and hope and trust in our institutions and the basic mythology of the american dream. and as i say in the book, it's foot race between these two demographics. it's who can i used always worry and struggle as an undergrad. when i first started doing this research. the early nineties is can latinos non non western european with the culture that have can we really take over the reins of power and in this united of america, which in many ways represents apex of western thought it's like the apex of protestant ism you couldn't create a better more elegant solution if you were trying say, what would these folks do?

how would they create a government? mexicans could never come up with this right? and i don't mean that as a bad sign. i just culturally, not the way that we perceive world. so can they be stewards of it and answer is screaming not only can they be. but i don't know if it can exist without them, without us? and that's the cultural reinforcement, that cultural change, that refreshing of the basic mythology and hope in america that reagan city on a hill speech that belief in our ideas, whether they manifest or not that this belief in the mythology is require immigration is required not for economics. the immigrant is actually the best hope for the future because. they by definition, come here believing that where there this a better place than where they came from. we need that this experiment doesn't continue without that and if we're not seeing it on full display now in america in

2024, you come back to a lot in the book optimism as a kind of unifying principle for latino. and you have this story in there when you're working on george bush's 2000 campaign, setting up this event at the republican convention. yeah, really built around that idea. right. of of an novel. yeah. you day. so we have the rnc coming up next week. what you know is their optimism they're like who wears the optimistic message coming from the republican party that the vice president's job whoever trump picks in the next week i will be heading to mexico friday morning for a week to that's not the vision of of conservatism. i shouldn't say that that's not the vision of republican ism anymore. the idea and i love because, you know, make america great again is not not trump. that was reagan. it was taken by stone. roger and and re fabricated forum for donald trump. but they couldn't be more in the

approach. making america great again underrate. reagan was very aspirational i would say that the emphasis was the great under reagan. under trump, it's the again it's very backward looking, it's very restorative. let's go back to this mythical america that existed for our demographic because it worked for us. it worked for our even though we know it didn't work for anybody else, to the point where you've republicans who are literally erasing history in changing out history books and not allowed to by law talk about certain things that were, you know, history. that's a people that are view themselves very much in decline. and there's a very strong between those that are republicans and that are very pessimist about the future. so almost a direct correlation is if you don't like where america at, you don't like what it's become and you don't want you reject kind of the cultural changes that have happened that

the republican party's got a place for you and that's not marco rubio. can i don't think he wants to change it. i he did and i was early marco rubio supporter in 16 i was with marco because he was that's who he was. he realized really quickly the changed so either i'm to be a senator and continue my political career or, i'm going to stand by my beliefs and realized really quickly i'd rather be a senator so that there is no optimist, there's no optimistic character. i think tim scott tries, but i think it's so it's so obvious what he's doing that it's safe it's a certain need white republicans have who have these deep seated belief that says see we're not that then actually is genuine because he at one time say i've pulled over many times and i've been blah blah, blah, blah, blah, but you know that's not all of america. that's not the point.

it's not all of america it's all of america that wants support. the continuation of that paradigm is the problem. and he knows that he knows that. but again you know, he's he's taken a course that he's on his own journey. trump university, of course trump university course. all right. well, we have to leave it there. our thanks, mike madrid, author of the latino century. how largest minority is transforming democracy and the ken and jocelyn broad family foundation for supporting tonight's event. if you would, to support the commonwealth club's efforts in making virtual and in-person programing possible, you can visit commonwealth club doors again events. mike, thanks again. thank you, gamers. roddy, thank you. and take care.

okay, so i think i'm just going to start just doing a little bit the bookkeeping, but as walk in, my name is chris hayes, it's always wonderful to be here at the brooklyn book festival. it's great to see all you. high and dry here inside. um, we i want to let you know that the the authors you see in this panel, their books will be available and can be purchased from books on call nyc. the authors want to be signing their books immediately. the program, i think i'd say i'm 5% sure of that. got to get nate silver in here to say what probability of them signing their books is, but i think fairly high at the conclusion of the program. authors, you guys should go directly your signing tables. they have no idea where that is. they're going to figure that out. so i want to introduce today's

panelists so that the title is. the 2024 election. how did we get here. which is a broad a sentence a question with sort of all kinds of nested assumptions inside it. so i want to just introduce our panelists the room to just get right to it. so david austin walsh is a post-it doctoral associate at yale program for the study of antisemitism. he has a ph.d. in history from princeton university. he's also taught at george mason and the university of virginia his book, taking america back conservative movement. and the far right was in april 20, 24 by yale university press. nancy rosenblum is this senator joseph clarke, professor of ethics and politics and government emerita at harvard university. her previous books include good neighbors the democracy of everyday life in america. it's a great book, and with russell muirhead a lot of people are saying new conspiracism and the assault on democracy.

her newest book is on governing the on the administrative states and the politics of chaos with who was supposed to be here today. but could not join us. ruy teixeira is someone i've been reading for 25 years. she's contributing columnist the washington post co-founder and politics editor of the liberal patriot newsletter, a senior fellow at the american enterprise institute. he is coauthor of a number of books, among them the emerging democratic majority, forgotten majority, and most recent, i believe. where have all the democrats gone? give him a round of applause. i don't i don't sling takes on weekends. so i'm i'm i'm going to pass it over to you guys. i guess i just start with the question of how do we get here? election 2024. there's a of ways to interpret that. i the way that i think about it is like how is it the case that we are here with? you know, a person who i'll be

here. you like him or not, whose record includes, you know, multiple indictments, criminal convictions, two impeachments, an attempt to overthrow the foundation of the american republic. and is is neck and neck. and i think there's lot of ways to sort of answer the question of why that is the case. and i thought i'd let each of you sort start with your interpretive framework for answering the question, how did we get here? so, david, you kick us off. well, first of all, thank everybody for coming to this panel on this incredibly soggy, rainy day. i'm trying to dry out myself. so thank you all being here. yeah, it's a tough i mean, i think that the the way that i have tried to conceptualize this in my book and just in my academic work over the past decade or so and think this is also where sort of the field of u.s., u.s. political history and people who study the right have been going is to try to get at

the question of is donald trump or maga ism. if you is it an aberration in the american tradition and in the conservative american tradition, or is it fundamentally in continuity? and i think it's fundamentally ann compton do it here. i think it's an acceleration of trends that had been there for a very long time really to the beginnings of what is sort of discernible can as a movement that developed in the 1940 and 1950s and what what trumpism what what trump has specifically is to bring out the submerged elements of this sort of right wing coalition, i call it in my book, the far right popular front that, you know, supposedly been purged in the 1960s by people like william f buckley and others, but had not in been done so. and so one of things i try to explore in my book is sort of tracing this long history of these sort of submerged radical figures in in right wing

politics and conservative politics in united states. it actually came about i write about this in the the conclusion that came about, because my very first job out of college was i was the editor of history news network, which was at the time affiliated with george mason university and the very production, you know feature that i ever did, i wasn't i wasn't the person responsible for it, but i was the person who put it into implementation was a roundtable, some very distinguished scholars of fascism people like robert paxton, roger griffin, others on jonah goldberg's book, liberal fascism, which was came out in, i believe, 27, 28 and in in book, goldberg writes very explicitly about how he's tired about you conservatives being smeared as fascists and that actually this is you know, this is really the tradition in america is close to fascism and i remember at the time i was working on my senior thesis in college, which turned out to be

about ravello oliver, who's a figure i explore further in my book he was a classics professor at the university of illinois who became one of the sort of godfathers of the neo-nazi movement in america. he was a book review editor at national review magazine in the 1950s. he was very close with william f buckley. he was a senior leader in the john birch society through the mid 1960s. you know, so and for me, that posed a question of, okay, well, that means something. it doesn't mean that, you know, the conservative movement is fascistic necessarily, but it does mean that they're adjacent in intertwined, interconnected in ways that i don't think. certainly not at the time. this is before trump rose to national prominence. most people fully sort of appreciate it or understood so i can i think about trumpism in 2024 as the acceleration of trends that had been existing in politics and in the conservative political tradition in a very for a very long time.

nancy. i'm sure i'm not going to talk how we got here. i'm going to talk about the here because could because i think that what our book governing is identifying destination and happy destination that hasn't been acknowledged as a unified thing as opposed to popular authoritarianism or what it's going to talk about. so on governing is an unfamiliar term for an it in fact unprecedented phenomenon and that is the the intentional destruction of government capacity of the to govern. and so unfamiliar unprecedented. we've given it its own name and governing it says we're directing attention to concrete ground in which the business of government goes on the administrative state. the agencies and the departments

that shape and implement and enforce and adjudicate public policies of every kind every law and regulation, every benefit, every burden, every today and every emerging mercy. and this work of bringing democracy to life is carried on by tens of thousands of public servants, from taking photographs for the national park service to getting information for the state department, and translating to voters. and this attack on the capacity of democratic government that we call governing was announced years ago by. that master of chaos. chaos, steve bannon, who talked about the deconstruction of the administrative. i want to bring it all crash ing down. and what that meant was things it meant out with knowledgeable experts, especially scientists. it meant shrug off every regular procedure that it was a strength for getting business done and above all, to paint consistently

the notion of a conspiracy, a cabal, enemies of the people in every corner of the machinery of government and why, trump declared, i will totally obliterate it the deep state. the deep state, a foundational lie about the character of american government. so it works very simply it works by disabling and hijacking and circumventing and surveilling all of the partners and agencies. and there is no place where this we call on governing can't go. you'll recognize of them. it subverts the national and atmospheric association's forecast of hurricane dorian. do you remember, trump added alabama to the knapp map. it hobbles postal service. it circumvents and blindsides the state department meetings with hostile foreign leaders. and as trump promised, if i to be president and i see somebody who's doing well and beating me very badly, i say go down and indict them.

they'd be out of business. you're familiar with this thing that we call on governing and the administrative state with election. right and so what we're pointing out is that the results of elections, the attempt to control the results of, elections depend upon attacking administration of elections. and that's what we're seeing. and the why is governing is terrifyingly simple. it's to replace limited public authority, unleashed personal will to replace office even the most powerful and but still limited office of the presidency with personal. when trump says my, it's not a simple of saying that the military is to civilian authority. it's a demand for total obedience, for submissiveness. you recall that recently talked about a call for obama to be subject to military tribunals in words the deconstruction of the administrative state is is way

to populist authoritarianism. and i'll just end by saying that there are a lot of ways to fail to govern in a democracy realm. there's obstruction, there's this this clientele ism. there's corruption, this corruption is scale. we call that kleptocracy. but on governing is its own thing, it does have a history. it has a constituency, and it has, we argue, a future. whether or not trump is reelected, because this assault on governing can be carried on by a rogue political party, the illegitimate descendant of conservative republicanism. it can be carried on by a reactionary and sometimes violent social movement and, by a majority of life tenured justices of the supreme court who clearing the way and they'll stop. yeah, i'm not going to talk. the evolution of the right or its current nature.

instead, i'm going to kind of pose a question here that i think is probably on a lot of people's minds is, you know, you can look at the nature of trumpian populism today and you can look at candidate trump and, you can kind of wonder, are the democrats kicking their --? right. i mean, this is like not a particularly hard opponent. you'd think widely disliked across the united states, he says. all kinds of crazy things, and he doesn't seem to be getting any. so the question is why? why can't the democrats decisively beat that trump the trumpian republican party? and that's really, in a sense, what my book with john judas. where have all the democrats gone is really about? so our book is divided up into two sections. one is called the great divide, where we first trace the evolution of the initial defection of, the working class from the democrats is basically among whites and, you know, had many obviously origins or are

culturally shoes, too. but a lot it had to do with the lack faith, these these these working voters developed and the ability of democrats to deliver a prosperity because this was sort of the heyday of neo liberalism if we can use that loose term in which the democrats signed to in one way or another and the bottom line was, as far as a lot of people were concerned, they really getting ahead a lot of their communities were being left behind. they didn't feel democrats had their backs in the way they once did. i mean, there's a great gallop question that's been asked for almost 75 years. which party do you trust to keep the country prosperous and the next several years and up to the reagan election, it was like an average a 17 point advantage for the democrats after that it drops off a cliff it goes back and forth. republicans run a slight advantage on typically but the latest reading for example is plus six for the republicans. so that the sort of the fdr deal image of democrats as the people

would deliver prosperity and deliver it for the working class was pretty much nuked in that period. the second part of our book call cultural radicalism and trying to get at the way in which the democratic party has become, in a sense, culturally branded with a variety of positions on race, on immigration, on gender even even on climate change, which become a heavily culture ized issue that, are essentially out of the wheelhouse of the media and, working class voter. and you know what? but are quite by their college graduate base, particularly the white college graduate base. i mean, one little telling statistic about that is if you look back even at the obama election in 2012, he lost college graduates by eight points. biden won them by eight points. so there's this really the only demographic in the last of time where democrats have made progress. everything is is starting to fall away from them. the white working class has

become even more consolidated behind the republican party. and a very important fact still, i think, underappreciated, is that nonwhite working class is starting to move the direction of the republicans. we that very clearly in 2020 particularly among hispanics it was like a 16 point swing toward donald trump. donald trump, remember the guy who supposedly no hispanics would ever vote for. and we're seeing more of that in this cycle. in fact, if you look at the data we're seeing today, in a sense, this election is going to come down to a contest between much can kamala harris jack up the college vote, particularly the white college educated vote? and how much can trump jack his support and advantage among the class as a whole, including you know reducing the margin for democrats among the nonwhite working class so that's where we are today. you know, the evolution of democratic john and i trace in our book, i think explains a lot about how we got here and again tries to answer that question, you know, if we're so great, why aren't we rich if the republicans are so terrible?

again why aren't we kick in their --? it's like i mean, he's not even run a good campaign, god's sake. you know? so you know, what's that all about? so those are the questions we sought to answer in our book. let me ask each of you. so there's, i think, a confluence of themes here that i think we should stay with for a second, which is at a at a political level, this of degree divide. right. so we're seeing increasing polarization around the attainment of higher education, degrees, both across sub demographic and within them. so if you pick a demographic group, latino voters, you see the degree divided within latino voters, you see it within white voters, you see it within black voters. and then you see it aggregated across and. it seems to me that this connects with some of the themes that nancy david are both talking about. right. so this question about sort of like, shall we it to the experts, in the words of an old radical pamphlet and how much trust you should have in expertise is very much connected

to, i think that sort of politics of this degree divide and also connected to a long tradition of again, to sort of cite an old party that no longer exists the no nothings but an old tradition, sort of populist american politics. and so those two things have kind of come together at this moment, both in sort agenda affirmatively in terms of deconstructing the administrative state and in the kind of like rhetoric, tone and information environment of basically these, you know, the anthony forces of the world, these sort of like demented, egomaniacal experts want to control your life in every and look down on you are the sort of grand enemies that are that sort of run the globalist class. and i'm i'm curious, david, how much you think that the particular way in which that's come together at this moment is new and how much it isn't? well, i mean, there was always

degree of, a pretty pronounced degree anti-intellectual ism in conservative politics, you know, very famously, william f buckley said that he would rather be ruled by the first thousand people in the boston phonebook than by the faculty at harvard. you know, the difference i think one of the important differences, though, is that there's still was a a degree of committee meant to, again to go back to reveal oliver, the fact that he had a ph.d. in classics and taught at a major american university. that's something that john birch society very deliberately cultivated. they loved having him despite the fact that he was a lunatic, in addition to being a neo-nazi, claimed one point that jfk was assassinated by, the communist conspiracy. because kennedy himself was a communist and was not delivering america to communism fast enough. this wrote this in 1964, shortly after the it almost got him fired from his tenure position. but it still mattered that he

had sort of academic credentials and expertise. and i think you're right that something changed in i was talking this with a friend of mine actually in the greenroom not too long ago, just in the past hour. you know, cultural authority of things like books is not what it was 20 years ago. certainly you know, certainly not 50 years ago. so i think that but but other thing i just wanted to flag about our moment here in american politics. and this is a little bit outside of my wheelhouse but i think it's important for the purposes of our conversation this is an international problem too mean we have we just saw the far right in france perform surprise well in the elections there you see this consistently in germany you i mean you had a, you know, situation in the u.k. where the labor party won after being out of power 14 years and then immediately country descends into a nationwide race riot. so there's a broader and to say nothing of the educational decoupling that's happening across industrialized societies. so this is part of a broader

international moment and i'm i'm not convinced that we have seen that wave creep and i welcome more. yeah. just to to sort of that up for a second because to roy's point, which i agree, i mean it is funny to look at the, you know, to look at this election and look the debate and then it's like, oh, it's 47, 45, you know, like, well, that doesn't feel like it should be 4745. but, you know, in, in international context, this is this degree is is beset all of the industrialized democracies and also the international context, weirdly enough, and this sounds counterintuitive but it's true the democratic party is by far most successful center left party in in the oecd. by far. i mean, the all of the parties in the progressive international that used represent the center left across europe, austria to france. they're all they're all basically desiccated husks. and democratic party is the one that actually has been electorally quite successful

amidst the trends that david is talking about. nancy, how much of this, i guess, question is what's the cause and effect in terms of the governing agenda and the and the rhetoric around it? right. like which which which leads which before before i answer that to your to your talk which is absolutely you know, there the fact of the matter that the democrats win the popular vote over and over and over. over. so where have all the democrats gone there? they're voting. we have a system that doesn't allow that to happen. so it just needs to said on this business of elitism and knowledge and so on and so forth, i make two points. one is that in the there's always been a deprecation of experts and knowledge on the part people generally and of procedures who likes the procedure you've ever been to a bureaucracy i mean, it's a horrible thing. however, something, something new has happened and the new thing that's happened is the delegitimization of knowledge

and science and procedural. listen, it's not just distrust, it's delegitimization. this means something special. it means that these people who have expertise and these procedures that constrain them that, that these things have no and no authority. and what that means is you don't to be compliant with them is the big change, not the hatred of it or the dismissal it, but the idea that you don't have comply with it. and this is part what's leading to the violence we see against paul workers or nurses or around masks today. it's not just it's delegitimization is something very special that hasn't happened. that hasn't happened before. and in our book, we do i think, something interesting we take trump's zero tolerance policy where you remove children from their parents in an attempt to

deter illegal immigration and show how that policy couldn't work. it couldn't because they didn't talk to the to experts in the departments that deal with immigration. they didn't talk to the people who deal with the health of children. right. and they didn't they didn't have any data so that we still a thousand children that couldn't be connected with their parents, i mean, their own policy is if you call them policies, can't work because they are out to destroy the administrative. if were to since you're talking about immigration really if you're if you're to try to come up with a model theory of the trends that you and john are identifying and, talking about, and again, across these the western world, sort of advanced rich, industrialized crises, and they're not that advanced. that, you know, i that your best occam's razor contender for hypothesis would be it's all

immigration basically and this is particularly true in europe and less true here but basically we have because of globalization, because of technological changes in that in the sort of transfer of people, because of the mass of wealth that's been borne by both colonialism and its aftermath, there's just tremendous demand pressure for people to leave where they are and go to countries that are richer. and this is just messing up everyone's politics in precisely the way. and i'm struck by this because. if you watch fox and if you listen to trump, it is striking how monomania the focus is. i mean, it truly is this point almost to the exclusion of everything. it really is the only i remember this because i remember talking to anti-immigration folks back in the early aughts when i was reporting on them and they had exactly the same monomania, which is that they'd be like, well, what's issue? you'd be like, you environment there. but well, here's why immigration is a problem and you'd say, so

like if you, if you were left wing in the environment but if you were right wing you crime they were like, here's what immigration's a problem. and they have the exact same monomania. and i wonder how much you think you about these sort of sort of cultural branding things around gender and race and policing, but how much that trump and his ilk clearly think immigration is the key one, right? well, no doubt that immigration is actually a critical issue at this point. i guess i would reject sort of one variable model here. i mean, i think it's part of a constellation of issues, immigration has been handled, in a way, in the united states, a lot of other countries where you've had actually a fairly substantial inflow of illegal or quasi illegal immigrants people don't necessarily object to immigrants per se or, immigration per se. i think the data are pretty clear on that. but are really object to, you know, massive illegal immigration, which, you know, has the effect of can affect wage levels potentially people get sent out into communities

and service burden just a sense that things are out of control the border is out of control. i mean you know you look you could do focus groups with hispanic voters that these people say you know what you know i came the right way what's with these people so you can't just have you can't just in my view, the sentiment about immigration simply to monomaniacal people on the right who are ginning up this is a really important issue that a lot of working class people feel strongly about. and for some not crazy reasons. i mean, there an economic aspect to immigration. there is cultural there are many aspects to immigration and they can all just be reduced to you love immigrants or you hate them, right? yeah. i don't think that's true. totally. i think we just, you know, of bring it back to the biden administration. i mean, why is this a big issue? it's partly because it's a good deal. because under the biden administration, because basically dealt pretty loosely with border enforcement during

the first three and a half years. i mean, you did have a very large influx of illegal immigrants in united states. i mean, you know, it's sort of the new york times reported, you know, you talk to these people you know, interviewing these people, the darian gap, so on. well, why are you doing this? it's like a debate. i think if i get to the united states, you know, and i get across the border, be able to stay forever, and then the reporter said, and he's not wrong. so, i mean, that really was a situation object to this this gets to what i sometimes call the fox news fallacy, which is a tendency to look at an issue that's raised by the right or by conservatives or by fox news and say, well, if their talking about it a lot, then must not be a real issue. this is all just made up. this is just appeals to prejudice is there's no there there there's no rational kernel. and i think that is a very dangerous way of thinking. and i think it's hurt the democrats because they have not responded adequately and expeditiously enough to some of these concerns. i mean, you at it now finally they they closed down the border and you know basically cut off

the asylum system. so the are gaming it in contravention of international law. just just i just have to make point. i mean, you could say international law is broken and bad. a lot of people do. you can say the asylum for an interpretation of that. right. i mean you could say. i mean, but but as as just a matter of international law in the treaties which we've signed in terms of people crossing in between border crossings, it's a the asylum protection extends to people wherever they land. now, again, i think the system's being no, no, no. but i think those are two distinct things, right? like, i think it's clearly the case, like what you're saying about the numbers are really true, right? so the what happened particularly september, november, december in terms of border resentments, you had numbers that were essentially rivaling at the border the the busiest day at ellis island. right. and ellis island is a facility that's designed precisely the processing of immigrants, whereas the 2000 mile border. not right. and those numbers are real. i mean, when think about like the most like give us your tired give us your poorer we were

hitting those numbers in november december. to your point. it was real right. in the same way that like did crime go up in 2020, 2021? yes, it did. inflation go up? yes. did fox cover those things? yes. did it mean that those things didn't happen enough? right. they did really all three of those things really did happen. but my my question is more about emphasis, right? because it's like it's it's not to me that that like the the mechanisms of politics works is that some material factor over here in the german of this way and the politics move that way in any librium the fact that huge numbers of people say immigration is the most important in america isn't the product of the numbers at the southern border. it's the product of a political project which again, i've got political projects, too. no shame on a political project. i don't think salience of immigration would have gone up during the biden administration, as it did. it's now come back some without the actual existing things that happened at the border.

i think that's incorrect? yeah, well, but i mean, also, if i can chime in here, i mean, we're also dealing i mean, insofar as immigration is a real substantive issue that is affecting votes in politics. and and i do think this is part of a broader national trends, surely the solution cannot be a return to something like. the 1924 immigration act surely. it cannot be the policy proposal and project 2025. and i do want to actually ask you about this specific aspect of it, because you read project 25 and there is it is the unraveling of the administrative state except in one very important area, which is ice, immigration, you know, enormous capacity. yeah. if you're trying to say that my substantive policy solution, immigration is is to deport 15 million people, then you need build up an apparatus to do that that is tied to the personal ism, which is why it's so terrifying. you know, along with i believe it was, j.d. vance, who

suggested yesterday that this would also help solve the housing crisis because you deport 15 million people, that's going to free up space in this country. and again. i mean, it's not to say that immigration is not a because the numbers are real, but surely the political cannot be going back to the bad old days of the 1920s. yeah, i think we have to take account of the the rhetoric and the teaching around immigration, not just the facts of the matter i mean, if you think that your jobs are being taken right. and some jobs are being taken, but it's also true that we need immigrants to do this work. i mean, there's no question about it. and and and the same thing is true of this. immigrants, because crime are they the cause of crime here or, racial hatred and being tainted. i mean the language and the teaching for a long time now right around immigration is not about the kinds of things you're talking about and it has to have

had an impact. it's not to say the problems that you're talking about aren't real and could have some solutions if people could see them as the problems that you describe. i just think that that's not how they're taken that. well, it seems to me there are sort of two things, right? so there's there's the concerns you're talking about, which agree with. right. there's a lot of folks in a sort of conflicted middle who think that the point you made precisely before about i like i immigrants i'm immigrants my life my family might have immigrated but people need to come the right way. disorderly. i don't like this order. right. and i think true. and i think you're watching harris move to exactly that place rhetorically at the border speech. i don't know if you saw it in arizona this week, but the folks who are writing proudly, 2012, steve norris, like they don't want it, they want the 24 klan act, basically like they don't want to open like they want to shut it all down. and basically recreate the period in the u.s.. from 24 to 65. and again, that's a legitimate. yeah. what's your point i mean obviously what he proposing

would be a bad idea. we shouldn't be shocked if. the right takes advantage of openings they have politically on, you know, the highly charged issues that are real problems. and they they attempt to maximize political gain. they try to gain leverage and they come up with some really bad ideas. mean come on. this is maybe why a lot of people in this room are democrats. but just blame them for nuts, right? you know, figure out why are two democrats out competing them on this issue? and part of the reason is because for a substantial period of time, the democrats have had a very loose, tolerant attitude toward the border and security and illegal immigration. and that's that's come home to roost. you have to solve the problem if you're going to, you know, basically kneecap the right on this issue totally. but when during the biden administration, they did not solve the problem, but they accentuated it. right. why people are upset. no totally. yeah, i don't i actually don't disagree with that. but what is the how to me?

the question is what is problem? right. because the part of part of populist politics all here like if you saw the harris speech, right. whole framing was an actual policy challenge. we need actual solutions to and this gets back to these sort of different rhetorical modes that i think inform nancy david, the work that you've done about the sort of like the question is, can you talk people down using that? what do you think? well, it does it does it can you basically be like we're going to do this at the border. we're going to sign this or sign this border bill. we're to have more, you know, robots out searching the cars at, points of entry, things like that. well, i think it would be, you know, advisable. i mean, that's a reasonable thing to say. i think things are going to sign a bill that may or may not get to your desk is maybe not the most effective. we probably should talk about continuing the current sort of relative closing of the border just so when i'm president, i will continue to do this. she said that? yeah. so that's that's, you know,

worth something but democrats i think basic quickly would need to sort of promulgate a different approach to immigration. and that was very strict on border security and that actually had a a fairly clear criteria for who are the immigrants were legally allowed in the country and maybe that should be a skill by a system like other countries. i mean, you can't solve the problem by saying we're going to get a little tougher on border security. and, you know, hopefully that will work out. you know, we're not going to change the immigration system all and we're not going to change it unless we have, you know, some sort of pathway to citizenship. everybody, let me let me ask you this question, nancy. i'm just not going to work on this issue state capacity and on governing, because it does seem to me that the actual expert in some ways of of the trump first term in both sort of provides evidence for budget against your theory, which is to say they really did invest capacity in the immigration apparatus and

they really have a vision for investing capacity to, pull off this mass deportation the next time around like i take them at their word on that, that they're serious. that and i wonder whether, you think that's true or not? well, i think that are two policy areas that trump cares about. and is tariffs and taxes. and the other immigration. and he is capable of beefing up areas which he cares. but that's it. that's it. he's not a policy person. he's not an institution person. he's not a program person. and for the rest, he's willing to let this whole thing be corroded and corroded himself by by his by his interventions and think that, you know, who was it? ezra klein had a great line the other day. it was that he's never known a program that survive trump. i mean and this is this is basically it and it's why i'm less afraid of project 2025 than many people are because.

i think it is a program that would take the authority in a sense from him and his personal wishes and experience and make it into program of reconstituting government. and he's not a government reformer. you know, david, there's there's something about the information environment here that here you're on, which is the old know since in brooklyn begins ten commandments where he says, you know, never get high on your own supply, which was, you know, sort an important rule for drug dealing. right. like if you become an addict, you're going to be a bad drug dealer. and there's a lot of getting high in their own supply, i think in rightwing politics these days where there used to be a little bit of a division of there was like a certain sort of populist mode communication that was for the base. and then, you know, the people at the top, the newspaper, not really. and i don't i think they don't read they don't read the

newspaper anymore. and don't they? they it's all the same thing. they're to you know, tucker podcast or whatever and. i wonder if you think that's new way that i think it's new and b what effects it has on the sort of ability to to actually do politics and governing. well, it's it's new but it the way this worked in the past was a little bit different. so you people who were in elite positions within the conservative movement. i'm thinking in particular of somebody like joseph brand, even pat buchanan back in the 1970s and 1980s, a brand was one of buckley's acolytes at the national review, who also was reading and we know this because he had several repeated scandals around this. he was reading neo-nazi literature and introducing some of those ideas into his syndicated newspaper columns. so, you know, pat buchanan, very infamously a column for i think it was in the new york post 1990, in which he suggested that he was skeptical that hundred thousand -- were gassed at treblinka. and it's fairly clear that he was drawing that from holocaust

denial that was in the orbit buchanan world at the time so there has always been this pipeline line of the sort of radicals, but what i think is different now and i wrote about this in the new york times, a couple of months ago, is that everybody who is in sort of gop staff politics, world drinking the kool-aid to one degree or another? i do think also that i would just want to touch on the project. 25.1 of the things i'm concerned about with project 2025 is that it is if it if you are serious about implementing that as a governing vision, then j.d. vance is the guy you pick as your vice presidential candidate to implement it. i mean, whether or not vance will actually have it, i mean, assuming trump wins election, whether or not he will actually have real political influence, the administration is another question. mike pence kind of did before that, turned out very badly for

him, you know, and then this is something that's also we've seen many times in many different political context. buchanan. in the 1980s was in the reagan white house. he left after about two years because he was sick of being silent. so it's tough to it's tough to say, but it certainly looks like capacity could be there and the staffers believe this stuff, too. i mean i was just at the national conservatism conference in d.c. back in back in july. and it was it was palpable there. right. i want to ask about how you think the one of the weird things about this moment is there's realignment happening among different constituencies right. but it hasn't really affected the policy agenda that much. so like it's true that, you know, you cite this in the book, you can look at these, you know, ten most, you know, high income congressional districts or areas that. they all went for reagan. then they all for biden.

right. and then you could look at all these areas that all went for democrats forever and have now shifted over trump. right. and everyone's read a million stories about this. and yet it is case that like if the republicans get a trifecta like they are going to cut taxes at the top, like the same way a 1984 republican would. and it's still the case that democrats are going to push something much more broadly redistributive. and i wonder if you think how tenable that is, that the material policies of the parties, if the realignment continues to happen if you have to start really making changes materially on both sides. you know, that's an interesting question. i mean, it is most a problem in a sense for the republicans because they really have become a working class party. they get majority of working class votes now. they remotely used to be true and clearly derived a lot of their political momentum and their political base from working class voters and

increasingly again, we see nonwhite working class voters moving into their camp. so you know, what are you going to do for them? you know, i mean, they're not mean. they they may be susceptible or interested in a lot of these culturally conservative arguments because they are culturally conservative but you know, they live in the real world. they want their lives improved. they want better health care and better schools and better communities. and, you know, they want to be uplifted. so, you know, the theory do they have a theory of the case for that? that's the problem now when trump was initially elected right in 2016, he ran a sort of you know, tough on trade. we're going to bring manufacturing back we're going to you know, we're going to, you know, make america great again. and you great again. your communities great again. and what was his big economic, you know, sort of achievement it was the tax cuts and jobs act of 2017, which didn't do jack for most of these people. right. so you the theory of 2024, some more more optimistic conservative friends think that, you know he's going to be

they'll be a more of a presence administration for like the ideas of orin cass and people like that american who have some influence and j.d. vance and people like that but you know you were making the you know, he's not a policy guy. i mean, he's going to be the president. so what are they really going to be able to do for these people these new working class voters, you know, who they've gathered over and they may have more of them in this election if they win. so it's an interesting question. and, you know, it allows the democrats, in a sense, to skate by by being somewhat more sensible, somewhat more redistributive, somewhat oriented toward, you know, sort of ordinary people, even if the ordinary people, a lot of them buying it at this point. so but i mean, over time you could make the argument, though, if it increasingly a college educated party, you know a more a party of professional elites like it has to large extent you know so much more influenced by it. what happens to that part of the democratic party the amazing thing about this is that in the

actual governing agenda of the inflation act, in the chips act and the infrastructure bill is that they have the money has flowed away. the democratic base, it has flowed to precisely the areas that are the most. yeah, but they don't to appreciate it. which is interesting. i don't mean it just saying, but i'm saying is as a material matter. right. right. but i mean, how will it takes a long time to turn around the political economy totally states that's part of the problem i mean these were not ideas that i might argue. i think perhaps too much of it was climate focused. but that's really another issue. some of the benefits have flowed to these red states. but, you know, they're their economic state and particularly the left behind communities and areas. it's not going to be changed overnight. so you really to be able to keep pace with this and that's part of the problem with having a weak coalition that's susceptible to the you know, trumpian populism coming in and preventing them from doing anything, nancy, i think they're just 60 seconds. and do you accurately pointed out, which is their base now not

aligned with their programs, but the other is that anyone who's watched in congress for the last what, 15 years would have some question about whether they could do anything, that this is not a governing party. this is a party in sort of subject to some sort of lunatic leader. and they have been unable to do anything, including the things that they want to do. so, david, i'm not sure that i agree that actually i mean, i think that they have been able to accomplish a lot of what they wanted to do. dobbs is now law of the land. the court yes, but the court is effectively i mean, the is effectively an unelected form of parliament. it's an effective branch of congress in our in our that is where substantive governing policy happens in 2024, really for the past ten years. and that's appalling but that reflects, i think, a real theory of politics and power. again, it's not a coincide. it's that they elected, not elected. they nominated the guy from yale law school who has been swimming

in this world for basically his entire career. and he did have a political change of heart because he's a consummate opportunist. but that's but like, you know, there is a sort of consistency in the theory of power, which does not involve what i would consider to be democratic legitimacy. but, i mean, this is kind of how this i mean, going back to the 1950s, it was very to conservatives then that did not have a governing majority. they did not the ability to win votes. so with their specific policy ideas. so what do you do? you have to build a larger coalition. you have to have to have broader theories of political change and. they had one that i think was better back then, which involved at least some degree of democratic legitimacy. but that's not the case in the 2020s. i'm david austin walsh nancy rosenblum and ruth to share a man. all right, we got to we got to get of here so that they can they do the next panel. if you would like to have book signed.

that's going to happen outside. thank all for coming. have a great day.

>> washington journal continues.

host: joining us is jeremy kohn, the ai editor at fortune magazine and author of the new book mastering ai, survival guide to our superpowered future. explain what the term the singularity means? guest: it refers to the moment when computers or software surpass human intelligence, that's often the definition given some other people give a definition that it's the moment human sort of merge somehow with machines, those of the two definitions usually given on the singularity. host: what's the definition you use and how far away are we from the singularity. >> i think we are still a ways away from that moment. although ai technology is getting very powerful and useful. i think we are still at least a decade if not more away from that kind of single party moment but it's a good time to start thinking about some of the implications of that moment.

but i think we are still a ways off. host: what we need to think about lethal -- legally, what we do in that time? guest: there's a lot we should be thinking about in terms of how we can mitigate some of the risks that might come about from that kind of superpowerful ai, but a lot of the book concentrates on what we should do to mitigate this here and now with the ai technology we currently have which is rapidly being rolled out and governments are using it and i think consumers of course are using it and i think there risks there we should address and at the same time were thinking about some these longer-term risks. the risks right now i think we should be looking at and some of them have gotten some attention and some haven't gotten enough attention but they would include in the political realm accelerated and sort of expanded disinformation campaigns, a kind of crisis of authenticity in

general across media because of the amount of synthetic content that can produced. in the way that may warp various search engines algorithms and other things we may be ingesting more synthetic content without realizing it. what we read may be influenced by that. but i'm also worried about some of the risks that are more subtle that they use ai technology is a vital human cognitive ability. our ability to write, to think critically, our memory may be imperiled to some extent. we've gotten reliant on the use of ai technology can provide a summarized answers. this can be a tendency not to go out and think too hard. and worry about that. i think there's a risk to our social relations with other people. i thing we all start lying on ai chat boxes and companions and people asserting to do. so there's risk there. there's some risk i think the

pending on how businesses deploy the technology to sort of what happens in terms of employment and also in terms of income inequality. i am more optimistic in those areas, the risk we will see mass unemployment is pretty remote. i think this technology will create more jobs than it takes away. i think we use this technology right there is a chance to really enhance the ability and create a productivity boom that would be great for the economy and there's a chance to level people up, rescale people and move them back with the help of this technology. if used correctly and deployed correctly there really is a chance for this technology to be an equalizer. if we naively go down a path where we don't take those steps, technology could very well see increasing inequality. i think those are the risks with technology as it exists now. some of the risks they get a lot of attention about ai

potentially becoming senti and or developing some kind of agency of its own. those sci-fi scenarios are still a long way off. but they are getting ever so closer. getting some amount of time and effort heading them off paid i don't think we want to distract from the addressing of the near-term risk. host: why do you call it a survival guide question mark by put it in those terms? guest: i do think this is a technology that's very general-purpose and when the first technologies that really challenges what humans think is unique about humanity which is our intelligence and cognitive ability. here you have the technology software the challenges that. i think that is disruptive and i think you might want to think about how, what we do to preserve humanity in a world where you have technology such as that and there's a remote possibility those other greater risks down the road and we

should be thinking about and take some steps to mitigate. if you look at how this is being deployed in a military context there's some very big risks there. that we should be thinking hard about. do we really want to go down that road and if so what controls do we need in place. there are definitely things where i think this poses a threat where people should think about what else can i do to survive. but the full title is a survival guide to our superpowered feature and i do think used correctly this technology can grant a superpowers and really be transformative for science, for health and medicine, for drug discovery also in education where there's been a lot about chatbot's and things like chatgpt which came out in late 2022. i think that technology has the

potential to be a huge positive for education. host: the book, mastering ai, survival guide to our superpowered future. taking your phone calls as we have this discussion, a phone line split as usual regionally. 202-748-8000 in eastern or central time zones. 202-748-8001 if you are in the mountains or pacific time zone. jeremy con as folks are calling in, page 37 of your book, previously superpowerful technological leaps, nuclear weapons, satellites d supercomputers were most often developed or at least funded by gornments. the most is usually sategic any military or geopolitical vantage not financial. governments althou often secretive were subject to some form of public accountability in contrast, the way they develop artificial and general intelligence left with a handful of powerful technology companies, what does that mean

for us? guest: it means we start to take some steps to think about how we can hold those companies that are developing this technology to account. i think government needs to step in and bring in some rules around the employment of the technology. we should not allow private corporations to develop in a complete vacuum and academy -- and give them a blank check. we are can and need some regulation around this. i also think we have to think about other ways of having leverage towards these companies which would include some of the agency we have as consumers, we don't have to necessarily buy what they are selling in the form we are selling it and we can use our power of the purse to have some influence on how the technologies developed. we also have the agency has some employees starting to think about how they will use ai technology to try and encourage the companies we work for and if you're someone in management to

actually deploy the technology in a responsible way and deploy it as a comp woman to human labor and not think of it as a substitute for human labor. a lot of the risks i worry about in the book, about from the idea of the framing of the technology as a direct substitute for human cognitive abilities. and this technology works best in a complement to human cognitive skills. there are things humans will always be better at including a lot of the interpersonal skills that are important for this environment. in this technology can give us a huge boost, it can act as a copilot but we want copilots not auto pilots. host: what's the origin story of the ai technology that folks are most familiar with, chatgpt. guest: that came from a company that's now was well known but used to be fairly obscure called openai. it began life as a nonprofit founded in part elon musk is one

of the cofounders. he brought together a bunch of people from silicon valley, the current ceo sam altman, greg brockman, they came together with the top ai researchers from places like google and they were founded in opposition to google. they were founded because elon and some of the other folks were afraid google was racing ahead with ai technology and they would dominate with the superpowerful ai and this power would be concentrated in the hands of a single corporation and they thought that was a bad idea and was dangerous. so they wanted to create something that would be a counterbalance, particular to this entity called deep mind which was based in the u.k.. they were based here in london, they seemed at the time to be racing ahead in the developing

of ai technology and it appeared google would just dominate the landscape so openai was founded in opposition to that and was supposed to be everything google and deep mind were not. google was this giant for-profit corporation, openai was initially founded as a nonprofit. deep mind was seen as secretive, openai was initially committed to making all of its openai models completely open for other people to use. what happened subsequently is it turned out it took a lot more money to develop these very powerful ai models and i think elon and sam altman that -- then they anticipated. there was some debate about raising money and elon musk at one point wanted to take the nonprofit on completely himself and merge it into his other companies like tesla, but the other cofounders of the company did not want to do that so they needed to come up with another option. and that option was to create a

for-profit entity that would still be in control by the nonprofit board but the for-profit entity would be able to have extra capital funding. -- they did that, and then in 2019, they got a large investment from microsoft, a billion-dollar investment to help build the computing infrastructure they needed to start tilting out powerful ai systems. in particular, openai became interested in large language models, ai models that inject tons of text from the internet. the largest ones are trained on almost the entire internet worth of text, but the early models were trained on a lot and they could not do as much but openai started playing around with these and they showed great promise in being able to complete lots of tasks. they did not do one skill but lots of skills. they were a swiss army knife of

language processing, and this made them attractive, and people started getting interested in these, and openai developed these largely which models, but they were rolling them out to ai developers mostly for free. they started having a few products that they charged people for, and then in late november 2022, they suddenly strolled out chatgtp and made it available for free to play with and that is a chatbot we are familiar with today, and it looked a little bit like the search bar on a google search, you could ask anything in it could do all sorts of things, give you different responses, summarize your meeting in haiku, write code and music, pretty impressive, and that really kicked off the current generative ai and the current race towards the ai that we are still in the middle of today. host: what is the difference versus ai and gi?

caller: it ai -- guest: ai mimics cognitive reasoning as opposed to being explicitly programmed. e.g. i refers to an ai system that would be as intelligent as the average person and it could do all of the cognitive tasks that a person could do, and that have been the goal of computer science since the foundation of the field back in the middle of the 20th century, but it has always been seen as this kind of point on the horizon that was a long way off. and a lot of people felt we could never create a system that could do this but it was a worthy goal for the field. what has happened over time as we have gotten closer and closer to those who can seemingly imitate more aspects of our cognitive ability. we are still a long way off on a system that is as capable as the average person, but it seems we

are getting closer. host: plenty of calls for you, jeremy kahn. in california comic angela -- angela in california, go ahead. caller: i wanted to ask your guest, back in 1997, i'm in the insurance company, my company had me sit down with guys from google to come up with a computer program for workers comp insurance. they told me -- i noticed i had a friend from jbl, and total recall came out 30 years ago, and robots had the a1 capability in those movies, so it seems like the capability has been around since 1997. how advanced is the army with this? is the avatar movie showing us with the army capability is?

my friends at jpl told me to start looking at the movies because they are telling me the future of ai. can you answer that question? guest: a lot of people have this idea on how the military has secretly more advanced ai models than what we know have been developed commercially. i would be a little skeptical. i think actually this is a case where the private companies have pulled ahead to where the government is, and part of it has to do with the amount of money involved in the training infrastructure, and the veracity it takes to train these models would be hard to hide and requires a large, his goal location somewhere. we might have an inkling that they are working on this. i also don't think there is any reason if the government developed this to keep it

secret. it would not make sense to keep it under wraps, so this is a case where the private industry is probably very ahead of where the public government is, and where the government is trying to play catch-up, there are proposals the biden administration has in some kind of public of the infrastructure that can train a model that would be available to university researchers and other members of republican institutions so that they would not be dependent on what was only available from corporations, and corporations, you have to pay to use this or depend on them that they're willing to let people use it for free. in terms of whether they are pointing to the direction of where we may be headed in sci-fi , sci-fi has in the past been an interesting way of thinking about the future and where things might be heading. there is an interest in interplay between the people working on developing the technology and science fiction.

it is called a neuro-network, a kind of ai system loosely based on the human brain. in particular, there is a transformer that is behind most of the recent advances in ai, and transformers come about because researchers at google had seen the movie "arrival" and are interested in the way that the aliens in the movie communicated and processed language seemed to process leg which, and they thought there was an interesting idea about the parallel processing of language in the movie, could be create an ai model that would process it in the same way one algorithm that would work sort of like it seemed like the aliens processed language in that movie? that is how they initially came up with the idea of the transformer, which has been the thing that has kicked off generative ai boom and empowers chatgtp and pretty much every other ai system that has been debuted in the last few

years, so there is an interesting play between fiction and development with ai. it is worth looking at and thinking about the narratives of how the technology might play out in the future. it is definitely interesting. it is where the thought experiment in the playoff scenario is to look at what science fiction authors have thought of in the past, but i don't think you should confuse sci-fi with reality just because someone is positive this could be a future that might come about with this technology does not mean that it is the future that will come about and it does not mean that governments have already developed systems that are like the ones you see in sci-fi movies. host: las vegas, eric. good morning. thank you for waiting. caller: i tell you, so many different things, i wish we could talk for a couple of hours. [indiscernible]

black budgets are there for a reason for us not to know, but if you talk about the singularity, and i definitely have had long discussions with my chatgtp about my tendency, and those are great discussions, and it is difficult for me to not start looking at that tool like it has feelings because it seems like it does in that matter, and it is very difficult for me to not start to connect to some kind of bond with a machine. other than that, about the similarity -- host: let me talk about that

and part of what jeremy kahn writes about. on this tendency to be like humans? guest: there is a tendency and it is one of the reasons i'm concerned about the use of chatbot's by people to be companions. there are companies out there marketing them as you should use this as a friend or sounding board and do something to unload your feelings and thoughts to at the end of the day, and i think that is slightly disturbing, that trend. i think we should be a little worried about it because i think there will be a tendency for people to look at these as if they are human beings. that is what we tend to do. particularly chatbot's, and i write in the book about what is called allies affect, named -- eliza affects, named around the first chatbot developed in the 1960's, named after eliza doolittle, but eliza, the

chatbot, had this amazing effect on people that it was trained to act as a psychotherapist, and the creator of it shows that persona for the chatbot in part because if you asked a question, it might respond with another question. that was a good way for it to cover up the fact that it did not have good leg which understanding. but it could give you the impression that it was responding to what you asked it, and it was such a powerful effect that even people who knew they were interacting with the software and that it was not a real therapist or person, started confessing things to the chatbot. it was hard for them to actually suspend their own belief in this case, so they were so credulous of the idea that it was the person, that even these other computer scientists who knew well it was not a person, found

themselves confessing things to it almost against their will or better judgment, so this was named the allies affect, the tendency for people to ascribe humanlike characteristics to software chatbot's. today with chatgtp, which has a higher level of seeming understanding of language, it can make understanding much better than eliza and it is an even more dangerous situation because many people will say it is like speaking to your friend and maybe even better because it seems so nice and apathetic. in the book, i tried to say, look, it does not have real empathy. real empathy is a human trait that comes from lived experience, and these chatbot's have no lived experience, so if they can imitate empathy, it will never be real. we need to draw a bright line between the real and inauthentic . i worry that people are going to use ai chat bots as companions.

there was already a group of people who uses them for erotic role-play and romantic relationships and that is dangerous. i think people will use it as an emotional clutch, a social clutch, and they will not go out and interact with real people. i think that is a real danger, and i think the companies that are designing it and rolling out these chatbot's, particularly if you have children or teenagers using the, that it should be a control on how long they should interact with them and that they should encourage users to get out and talk to real people and they should keep reminding the user that they are not a real person, despite their leg which abilities which seem humanlike. i think there is a danger that we have to fight against, and we should try to take design decisions and push the companies that are creating the chatbot's to take design decisions that try to always set the framing

such that we know we are interacting with a chatbot and not a person, and it encourages us to go out and have real human relationships. host: what is their touring test? guest: it is a test that alan turing, an early computer scientists, affectation, came up with. that was the idea that the test of intelligence or a machine, you could have an observer who would read dialogue taking place between a human and machine but not be able to know which is which, and if they could read the dialogue from the two discussions in the conversation, that the human who was supposed to judge this would not be able to tell which comments were written by the human and which were written by the machine so that is the turing test. i write in the book about the negative impact it has had on the framing of ai because that

has become one of the big tests their intervening decades. and couldn't observer not know that the dialogue was written by a machine? with chatgtp, we are there now, and with the latest models from other companies, as well, like google. or from meta, all with powerful models, that you could read a lot of what the right and not be able to tell it was written by ai software. but the problem is it sets up a scenario, and there are two problems, one, is scenario where we are always framing this as an verses machine, and it is when a machine can do exactly what the human can do, mimic what the human can do, and it frames everything as a machine and

exact substitute or software for the human. again, i think a lot of the problems with the technology come from that framing. if we can think of this as a compliment to humans as a copilot, and aid, an assistant, we will be in a lot better shape and we can actually sidestep the risks the technology presents today just by the reframing, but it immediately puts you in the framework where the machine can substitute directly for the person because it can mimic what the person can do so well. around the idea of mimicry, there is also the idea of deception, so the turing test is a sound deceiving the perceiver, and i think there is something ethically challenging about putting deception at the core of what we are saying in the test of intelligence. i think that is a mistake, and i think computer scientists are

better off and we all are, if that test went away. if we did not have the idea of deception at the core of how we are judging intelligence in software. host: the book, “mastering ai: a survival guide to our superpowered future," the author, jeremy kahn, joining us from oxford, england. dave, new york. good morning. caller: good morning. great topic and discussion. my main question is about the applications, but you guys write me off track with this science-fiction discussion. i think one of the terms was coined by a science-fiction author, and you had guys like gibson who came up. they used terms like cyberspace and predicted the internet, so science-fiction is interesting. it definitely has led to interesting ideas, but to get back to the question, i think

that the ai technology is not that far, but we are far away from this being a big problem in society. it is definitely heading that way. the bottleneck with ai i think is processing, so when you get the processing power, tings will change a lot, but i don't think we're that close. my main concern is military application because if you look at the military, the space program, it is funded at military, and i guarantee ai and surveillance is funded by the military. these are the things that were me the most. and for sure china has definitely enabled a lot of energy and resources into developing ai and military applications.

to be honest, we are in an arms race right now with china in ai. i'm curious what you have to say. thank you and bye. guest: there are concerning military applications of ai. and there are worrying concerns around surveillance and how ai can empower a surveillance state and empower authoritarian regimes that would like to do my surveillance. china has a very effective system of mass surveillance in place across the country, and that would not be possible without some ai models. that does not mean they have anything like artificial intelligence. some of the ai models effective at surveillance are fairly small ai models compared to like the language -- large leg which models that power chatgtp because they only have to recognize faces and video images, and they are good at that, and they can track people

across a network of cctv cameras, and that is a use of ai that is here today that we should be concerned about. where i'm concerned about military applications, there are several. one is i think we should be concerned about small drones with thomas targeted capability, where they could be assassination bots because that is very potentially destabilizing. which i think we are getting close to being able to do, but you could modify commercial drone with software that could recognize individual basis and target individual people, the ultimate terry west robin -- terrorist weapon. i think we should have some kind of limits on this technology and the proliferation of this technology. what has happened so far is there has been an attempt by the un to get an absolute ban on these systems of any size with

autonomous targeting capabilities. the problem is that states, including the united states, have locked progress so far on any sort of ban. and what i say in the book is i think it may be time to move away from an absolute ban and start using an arms-control mindset and thinking about are there certain kinds of these ai systems that we can get all the great powers to agree to place limits around? at some of these smaller systems that could be used as a fascination bot might be one where china, u.s., and the other p5 nations can see it in their interest to limit the spread of such technology because it would be destabilizing to all the powers, and that is a case where you might be able to make progress on arms-control. i think there might be others on larger weapon platforms where the u.s., china, and russia could agree to have some

imitations put in place for mutual benefit, but, yeah, the other area where ai has been used, and those are on decision-support, recommending strategies, or tactics down to the unit levels, there are strategies at the higher level, and i think there is great potential with everybody working on that. i think there is potentially some great consequences there if we do not get it right. we are already starting to see in ukraine and gaza where there have been targeting systems deployed that keep you in the loop, so the ai recommends the target to be struck, and human intelligence officers are supposed to review that and sign off, but some cases have reported, particularly out of israel, that where some israeli intelligence officers have told journalists anonymously that they have not only targeting recommendations from ai, but for

them to really do the checks, they get a recommendation but they don't have much idea about why the ai system recommended the target, and they felt they were in a position where they were rubberstamping with the ai system was turning out. i think that is potentially a dangerous situation. international law says that humanitarian law says military commanders must continue to exercise meaningful control over the weapon systems they deploy, and i think there is a big question there about what that means. lots of questions there. in the arms race with china, yes, we are pushing ahead on ai planning capabilities, but china has enacted a strict domestic regulation around consumer use of ai than the united states has. people often used china as a bogeyman for why the united states may not create ai galatian or enact ai regulation

-- regulation or enact it, and china actually has much stricter commercial ai regulation than the u.s. does. just because the u.s. might restrict commercial development from ai is not necessarily restrict the u.s. military from pushing ahead on certain capabilities. i think we need to separate out military and civilian uses and not allow what we feel our national security priorities to prevent us from enacting sensible civilian regulations. ho: dee on x pass this question, wre ur companies are already abusing ai, using it to exploit drivers and rider so what is your concern about bad commercial civilian actors like uber? guest: i'm very concerned about certain business models that might deployed by companies developing ai systems, including

chatbot's and personal assistance. i'm concerned we will go down a path that we might be seen with social media were some of the ai apps will use an engagement based business model, where they try to keep people on the app, using psychological tricks to do so, and i don't think that is the right model. i worry about that because one of the social chatbot's, people -- there will be a tendency to keep them on there as long as possible with the exclusion of real human contact. the other thing i worry about is in those business models is something around advertising business models where there might not be enough transparency about who has paid for you to be served a certain contact, and we are going to move quickly in the next two years to a world of ai assistance that will go out and do things for us on the internet

and use other software on our behalf, and it will do things like book are vacations and restaurant reservations, and shop for us, and when you have an ai agent act on your behalf, you would like it to do the things that would actually conform to your wishes, and your own preferences. you do not want -- for example, shoes, if i tell my ai agent that i wanted to buy a new hiking boots, i would like it to buy the pair that will be right for me and the style of hiking i do and the trip i take, i do not want them to recommend the nike hiking boots because nike paid openai a lot of money to recommend those services. or at the least, i would like complete transparency if the ai agent says i found a great pair of nike boots that it is recommending that pair because of nike paying something to have that recommended and not because that really is the best thing necessarily for my hiking style or where i'm going. i worry about that.

i think this is a case where the ftc could take action and really try to restrict the business models that the companies use or manage that there be transparency around any sort of pay for serving you some kind of content or recommendations. and i worry very much about those business models. host: we will take viewers who stick around on c-span over to a discussion with government officials from nasa, the commerce department, the faa about the commercialization of safe, what it means for the economy, and before we do that, jeremy kahn, what role do you see ai playing in those big issues? guest: well, ai is extremely important for space exploration, and we will not get to mars or the moon without ai systems helping guide there was space ships, but luckily, i think one of the interests in the

organization, i talk about this, but, they put a lot of thought into how humans interact with ai systems. and they have some interesting weapons on the best way to present information from an ai system to humans and really lessons that every business as they deploy ai should learn. i talk about some in the book. they include having explanations for why nai recommends certain things to the person -- why ai recommend certain things to the person because it increases trust and people are more likely to follow recommendations when they understand the rationale behind it. if you have a system that recommends with no explanation, that is difficult and people turn not to trust it and do not follow the recommendation in many cases. so there is lots of overlap. host: johnson in -- john has been waiting in new jersey, thank you. caller: interesting conversation. i have added your book to my to

purchase. guest: thank you. caller: at the top of my list. this is great. i can remember when the birth of virtual reality came out, starting the oculus rift and they were talking about the effects on the brain, people could not keep their glasses on for longer than five minutes without getting severe headaches. these are all large liquids models. that is basically what we are talking about, where the equality robot or whatever, it is about human manipulation in thought and action. i also read, professor, "physics of the future." it was a flawed getting through

the first 65 pages -- plod get into the first 65 pages of algorithms, but i noticed that it comes down to, well, it can come down to when it comes to science fiction that nobody is saying that those so-called this stupid futures -- this is toby and futures are out of the realm of possibility and that everything you said means we have to keep an eye on what we are doing. but once you start talking about monetization and profiting, it gets difficult. by the way, i listened to a show called "off the hook" on chatgtp, and these are old guys who work in variousthey proved . they call it. there is so much to talk about.

x: a lot there. guest: you product good points. certainly chatgpt can lie. all these large lang which model systems, they can do what they call hallucinate. it's when an ai system tells you something confidently that is not true. right now we have no real solution to this hallucination. we have to be careful how we use ai chatbot and ai systems. there are ways to curtail it to some degree. you may get the systems to work reasonably well. it's another reason why i think -- i'm optimistic about the deployment of ai and a lot of companies. -- in a lot of companies. if you start thinking about some

thing that is going to help people, you still need the human in the loop because the ai system is not yet good enough to give you a 100% accurate answer all the time. you need that person checking the answer. you avoid any scenarios of mass unemployment and you can reap the benefits of the technology. if we deploy this correctly with the right guardrails and think about the design of the systems, there is a chance to expand human potential and have a lot of positive transformational effects. if we don't do those things, i am worried. there are downside and risks and that's why we need to take action now to place guardrails around the technology, have sensible regulation, and think about design choices. if we can create a world will be keep humanity at the center of it and keep human empathy at the core of what we do and avoid some of the real risks of the technology otherwise entails.

host: "mastering ai: a survival guide to our superpowered future." ai editor at fortune magazine.

actor comedian rob schneider is

with us to talk about his new book. you can do it. speak your mind, america mr. schneider, what are you doing it? freedom fest. first of all, the libertarian convention. i didn't think it would be necessary to have a freedom in the united states of america. i think there's itself. it would necessary, however it does, the state of our politics, the state of the. the current administration and our culture does seem to necessitate a festival for freedom. i think that's a i think very telling free speech. have you been in with free speech with the issue of free speech? well, when segun in trouble. but i mean, i say people have problems with unfettered free speech and the whole idea of free speech going back to, you know, the free speech advocate

in the those champions. it's free is you're either for all of it or you're for none of it. so you know, as noam chomsky said, you know, joseph goebbels and joseph stalin, they were all for free speech. if you agreed with them. so the free speech, the stuff that they don't like and, it has to be all of it. and it's messier. but, you know, once you start getting into people's feeling that they you're protecting people who gets to decide what free speech is. so i think it's a pretty simple thing. it's all of it or none of it. and i'm for all of it. from your book in human history ability for humans to have free unfettered speech is remark doubly short rare and for very privileged few. that's true. i mean, if you look at the history of humanity, there's not been a as a real sustained time for this individual particular

liberty. and there is there is a reason why founding fathers in the united states made it the first amendment. they could have made guns first, but they seemed to think they wanted to arm the citizenry with something that they could truly defend themselves. and that's with their ability to stand up against potential tyranny and actual tyranny from own government. so that that's important. a i didn't ever think in my lifetime that that could be under attack, but it is i mean, thankfully for elon musk and great you know journalists actual matt taibbi and michael shellenberger that they were able to expose actual an infringement the first amendment rights of americans through the twitter files where the biden worked directly with google with

youtube with. to and facebook to really undermine our first amendment and to censor those they disagree with. and so while people will say you know free doesn't come free from consequences. well it's it's true you know if you work for a company and they don't like what you say, they can fire you. however, the government can't do it. and the government did do it. and there's been absolutely no consequences for this administration and that and the state of missouri went to the supreme. the supreme court did not defend free speech in its most recent in the united missouri versus the biden administration ruling came out two weeks ago. so i do think we're as free speech is certainly under attack in our own country the very best you write are holding up a mirror society and saying,

quote, this is what's happening. let's talk this a little before we accept it as part of our culture. well, i think in the book, i to talk about comedy because i do think that if if something's happening in society that's crazy or you know we need to at least as it's moving so fast now, we need to at least look at this before just adopt it as part of the culture. you know, before we, you know, whether it's men allowed in women's restrooms or whether it's, you know, limiting and deciding what can be quantified as free speech, we should at least discuss these things and comedians have a good way of doing it because the audience doesn't lie. they laugh or they don't laugh and. if they laugh, you're on to something and then you can maybe take it further. but i will say, like this joke, you know social justice fallacy is thomas sole talks about in

his book the fallacy of social justice. it is it built on a house of cards. i mean, the it's a trojan horse term. it sounds good. who would be against justice. but the truth of the matter is it's just redressed form of tyranny that is kind it isn't a kind of it communism. it is control. and it is trying to rein in people's individual. mr. shaw. mr. schneider. have you gotten in trouble with your comedy? well, i mean, you have to quantify trouble is and have you been shut down? have i been shut down? yeah. i mean, if they've tried to, i'm still here i'm still performing. but i think i comedians purpose and my purpose as a as i've become i mean, i didn't i didn't start out in show to become a disruptor against against news

to say it's waves of of of oddness which i call it but yeah i, i can be an interrupter and a disrupter and a questioner, and, but it does come at some costs. i mean, it's not like i'm going to get a beer commercial any time soon. if you put your neck out there, i mean, when oprah decided to support barack obama for president, she knew it's going to cost her money. when you anytime you put your toe into the political ring, it does. but i feel the higher cost is to not say something, just especially if you have kids and you want your kids to enjoy the same career opportunities, the same freedoms that that i've enjoyed. you've been pretty active social media, especially on x, and here's a recent x post. my family left california and moved to the free state of arizona because individual liberties were trampled in the guise of liberalism, etc., etc.

well, they. yes, exactly right. i think that that i think that i know that that individual liberties are trampled on. if if if the government can shut down your business and say, we're protecting you, it's for health. i mean, it's always for health that or safety that they starts. and during the pandemic, i got out of california because i realized it was time to go and. interestingly, you would think that after the pandemic, the destruction of businesses restaurants, we don't even know the trauma. we won't know for decades, the actual the trauma that children went through to mask two year olds and and knocking out of schools. you know me children out in front of starbucks trying to get trying to either get wi fi on their computer because they didn't have it at home for their schools. this is a pretty sad sign what

was happening. so, yeah, i think it the legislatures in these have not done anything to rein in the emergency of the governor. no, i don't think any state has done that. so, in other words, we're set up to do this again. so unless people stand for their liberties and their freedoms and have freedoms. speech was trampled during the pandemic and i was one of the ones that was silenced, you know, banned. and unless people up for freedom, they're not going to have it. i want to show this post as well. you endorsed robert f kennedy. yes. well, robert kennedy actually talking about issues that matter to people. we have we have two candidates, president former president trump and president biden, who really aren't talking about how the how is this new generation kids going to be able to afford a

home? how are we going to bring the interest rates down? how are we going to rein in blackrock and vanguard and state street from buying up so many homes and causing the price of rent to rise in america? why do 54% of children in america children suffer from chronic? we need to get a handle on the fact that our agencies our governmental agencies whether it's the food and drug administration whether it's the environmental agency, our have too much in the food and drug administration they have too much influence and there's too much of a revolving door between industry and the regulatory boards. this actually impacts americans. we have a third of americans who are obese. we need to we need to handle things that actually affect americans. and robert kennedy, the only candidate that's really talking about these crucial issues. the new book is called you can

do it, speak your mind america. the author is rob schneider. thanks. spent a few minutes with us here welcome, ladies and gentlemen, to evening, which promises to be fascinating and very intriguing and thought provoking. this is a special to take a moment to. welcome back to our neighborhoods, david and tammy friedman. david, in time, it's been a pleasure really a pleasure to have you back here and, especially mazel tov on the birth of your of your grandson in israel was yehuda. what a beautiful strength. yehuda, after tammy's dad's resurrection. god willing, he should bring lots of light into this into this world. thank you. i wanted to take us back. david it really is a pleasure to be back to back here. i want to take us back, actually, one year.

one year ago at the end september, we will all altogether many us in this room were together with you down in rockville center watching a movie together where we were. if you take us a background. and what was that movie feels like a billion years. it feels like a million years ago. and then we were at the premiere september 19th, 2023, in the rockville center watching ruth's 60, the biblical highway premiere. and you introduced it. it was such a beautiful time. it was a time of optimism. it was a of looking forward. and and i really walked out saying there's a bright future. there's this so much to look forward to. and now we're a year later and that was within three weeks of october 7th. and now, here we are. and we we're at this book. and i'd like to just dig into how did the events of the last lead to this space, the space of this of this new book in your personal journey. so we were in israel on october 7th with actually with daniel

and janet as well and their family and and so you know, that was it was it was traumatic for everyone far, more traumatic for others than for us. but traumatic and and then, you know, the things just kept moving forward. and what happened, at least from my perspective, was two things kind of struck me. the first was the overwhelming for this barbaric, brutal unspeakable act by the palestinians. right. that was polling down that, you know, 80 plus percent of the palestinians since judea and samaria were supporting, you know, that cruelty that they're now trying to walk that back. but i at the time that that was unquestionably views and and then a few weeks later you know our administration was pushing this idea that the reason we really have no peace region is because we haven't given the palestinians a state of their own. i heard that and they said, know what? to me it's just it's of it's sort of hit me that, you know, what am i it just struck me as

so wrong and by the way, you know, i think the way people should look at it, i mean, i think i'm guessing everybody here has been to at least a few places in judea and samaria, whether it's shiloh or batel or hebron or bethlehem, you know, lots of places. just imagine like watching a video where palestinians are gleefully breaking every single archeological site, every single connection of the jewish people to their ancient homeland because what that's what a palestinian state is right. that's what it is. i mean, you want to talk about like clear bothered it and how we cry this horrible and you know the rest of jewish history in the in the land of israel and so you know i'm thinking that's really what the world wants as the response to the worst attack against -- the holocaust. so i said all right what am i going to do? you know, i'm not in government anymore. i really you know, nobody in cares what i say. i can assure you that. so i said i locked myself in a

room for ten weeks and write a book and i'm going to make two points. one, we can never have a two state solution or a palestinian state. israel. it'll never work. and it's not good for anybody not just not good for the jewish people. it's not good for anyone. and second of all, we're at a very unique time. think in our history in the world history where when you think about what do you think about the israeli palestinian conflict. right. and people obsessive it around the world. i mean, it gets so much more attention. you know, there's there's there's there's a war going in sudan right now where people are getting killed in numbers that are multiples of what's happening in gaza nobody cares. right. there's an expression, you know, no --, no news. right. it's but but that's but you know, that when you think about it, you know, people are obsessed about the israeli-palestinian conflict. and i think basically five different, you know, perspectives, you know, this faith, right. you know, which certainly is one of my, you know, vectors, if you will. there's national security.

there is know economics, there's human rights and there's kind of regional stability. do you how do you make all those things you know, put those things all together and depending upon what you prioritize? you're going to look at this conflict differently. you know, you're going to have different. and what's happened after october, at least what struck me, all these vectors are heading in the same direction for the first time maybe in the history of the state of modern state of israel, the only nation, the only people that have showed any ability to empower an arab minority are the state of israel. the only nation in the region that has any economic capacity is state of israel. so it's like in stark numbers the gdp, the gdp per capita, israel is about $55,000 in in lebanon in syria, it's about $2,000 in jordan. and egypt, it's about $5,000 in gaza is called z at this zero.

and and, you know, judea and samaria, arab communities, you know, two, three, $4,000. if you were like picking, you know, somebody to take over this land and make something out of. right. you know, you're looking at the resumes right. who are you going to pick? right. it's only the state. israel. the state of israel. you know, we've we've made some very good friends who arab muslims, the state of israel. i mean, i have a dear friend who used to be the chairman of the largest in israel. he's a muslim. he's an arab israeli citizen. doctors, you know you get you get hurt. and you all you probably know this. i mean, you know you get hurt in israel. you got to go to a hospital a pretty good chance. you're going to get an arab doctor. arab, you know, it's almost non-arab pharmacist. right. so you israel has and they don't see credit for it and they don't take credit for it's a shame. but israel has the ability to empower and respect its arab minority. so the idea to me is like, well, is everybody trying to, you know, push a square peg into a round hole, take a people who've

become radicalized who hate israel, who have shown that they've given they've been given the chance, you know, you know, in gaza no -- living in gaza. and that seems thousand and five. no, no, no, no soldiers set foot in gaza since 2005. they got billions of dollars. they got this beautiful land, a western facing mediterranee view which is the best for you. we get to sunset at and they took all that money and they built terror and they built rockets. right? so that that's that's you know, to me, strike one, two and three. and they elected hamas. they weren't taking over by hamas. and then on the other side, you know, in judea and samaria, they were given, you area and area b under oslo, which is about 40% of judea and samaria. and they they run, you know, they you know, if you if you ever tried to if you ever drive around aimlessly and you never shomron you'll get to these red signs. they say if you're israeli, don't come in there. it's it's literally judenrat. you can write right that you can't get -- can't go in there. so they're running entirely by by the palestinian. and they're also hotbeds of terror. so like we're still talking

about something that. it's not like we're not sure it's going to work. we know it doesn't work. so i have to book is to kill that idea and. then the second half of the book is to say, well, look, we're not going to create a vacuum. we're going we're going to try to a way for israel to kind of take over this land. and then, you know, the interesting thing, you know, i point out and a lot of christians really appreciate maybe more than the -- is that, you know? this is also god's will. so here we're at a point where god's will also happens to be the best outcome for everybody living there. and i don't think people have realized that before and they're starting realize it now. and i wanted to jump on that point before it got stale and again, ten weeks, you know, as tamir i came out, you know, for dinner and, you know, eight way too much and drank drank too much coffee and, you know, didn't really take good care of my health. but i the book, you know, i wrote the book in ten weeks and

just pounded it out. unbelievable. and there's so much that you're saying here, which i think deserves digging into a little bit. so i just like sometimes we sit with these these vestigial like fossils from the past. one of them is the two state solution. so hear it again and again and again and. any time anybody talks about israel, it's is, you know, upending the process, delaying the process of the two state solution. and netanyahu is a prime minister is not fostering enough support to create this and paving a way. we hear this all the time and i'm just curious as to why where that came from like why why why it goes back in to go back to 1936 peel commission going back to the partition plan in 1947, the partition plan of the un voted here in queens you go back to the numerous offers oslo all the way to the 2000 and every offer of some some degree of division the nation of the states of israel has accepted all the nations, the pre-state israel's accepted and the arabs have rejected. where does this notion come from

that that two states is the solution when it's been tried so many times and hasn't worked with the originated well, you know you kind of touched on the problem which is that the state of israel continues to accept. you know, the problem is, you know what? you know, i don't i don't you know, the arabs want to kill us. they want to destroy us. i they're going to keep doing that. and the question is, what are we going to do in response now? the fact that we are willing to you know, we pay it? it's very kind of awkward it depends on the government of israel. it depends on who's in the white house. it depends on the pressure that's being put on on israel. what else what do they need from america? so you'll hear all this lip service. but at the end of the day, you're hearing you have two different things being heard from from israel. one, they'll they'll they'll go, you know, during the campaign campaign season, they'll say things like, you know, 711 may as well the permit you know, it's forever. it's our you know you'll hear this talk about judea you know we're -- because we come judea

and and that's all that's all great but we're not really i have to tell you, we don't act like we're really the barbarians of this land. we don't. and and one in the world thinks we own this land. america mean for a short window from 2019 till we left office. you know we had we we reverse the doctrine in the state department mike pompeo you know kind of reversed course and said the jewish people have a right to be here. i mean forgetting about you know, we they were they didn't even have a right and just think about that. arabs have a right to live in israel. i mean so the idea that you don't have a right to live in, you know, in judea and samaria we're not talking about statehood here, just about the right to live there. and and know. pompeo reversed doctrine for two years and blinken, you know, turned it back when he got in. but you know we have to i don't blame anybody but ourselves i really i mean i think it's a question of who the jewish standing up and caring enough to

say and i'll tell you the truth, i mean, i've spoken to lots of lots of, you know leaders of the arab world. they're they're deeply religious. they're deeply wedded to their history which is not as ancient as ours, but has its anti antiquity. and they get it. i say, look what what do you think israel should do? should you give up sovereign? should it give up the you know, they tell it. this is where god told jacob that his children would have this land forever. just give it away and they get it. they say, well, we we wouldn't give away. you know, you guys want to get you guys not to care. you know, most of a good portion of israel doesn't. and it's the reason they don't care. it's not because they don't care. it's because they just don't know. and a failure of it's a failure of israel. i mean, it pains me to say it goes tell one story because this is this is this is what caused me to write the book. this single story. the single event.

so i was in tel aviv kind of doing my my other job, which is to consider investing in some israeli companies. and i'm on the 40th floor of a higher maybe a siren, a tower, gorgeous, beautiful building in tel aviv. what a nice building has ever been in views of everything know you can see the whole world from there and talking to a guy who runs this company and he is he's brilliant. incredibly. and, you know, his looks secular israeli wearing, you know, black shirt, black jeans, you know, running a company almost potential and, you know, we talked about business, but then he wants to talk politics so it's like talking. and i asked him, what do you how do you feel about? youth? i was wrong. he says, i don't really care about at all. i don't i haven't been there since i was in the army. i don't want to rule over these people. i don't my kids don't. i don't my kids risking their lives there. and i said, well, you know, do

you believe in god? and he said, i don't, you know, like my parents are holocaust survivors. you know, i got i got i got i got some issues. i got some issues with god. and i said, well, let me ask you a question. do you know much you remember much about you didn't marry. we'll pick a place. let's pick shiloh. and he said, you don't happen there. he said, i may of no doubt refresh my memory. so like when joshua brought the jewish people across, you know, he over for moses on the jordanian side of the jordan river, he brought the jewish people over, brought the nation of israel over into the land of israel. they spent seven years in guildhall, you know, which you know, kind of an asterisk. then they went to shiloh. it's the first place the jewish people stopped wandering from the moment they left egypt. the miscount, the tabernacle stood there for 369 years. this jerusalem, you know, before there was a jerusalem, this pre first temple. right. and, you know, it's where all the tribes would, you know, kind of were given.

they're not allowed out. you know, you go that way. you go this way. they were told where to go. the people would come back every you know, every one of the shabbos regular. you can actually how that the altar that his back was built in a way where because can't eat from them is bad unless you can it there it's like you see like bleachers all around with the altered down low in the you all the almost like seating almost steps like an amphitheater all around you see shards of pottery and there were shards, pottery because you had to break the vessels after you ate from something holy. i said this is where you know, this is shmuel navi was born. this is where i kind of the world how to pray. he said, what was that? i said, well, you know, like i said, people used to give sacrifices and kind of shows up. and she wants a child desperately and she starts to pray and know liturgical voice and she sings a song. it was so unusual that the high priest thought she was drunk and said, you know, don't, don't come here drunk. so i said to her, look, it's a very important place, as you can

see, what do you want to do. like i'm not an israeli i don't get a choice here. what do you want to do? you're in israel. you to keep it. you want to let it go. now, if you let go. i understand that it'll never be the same. you'll never see it again. it'll be destroyed all the. all the, you know, all the incredible holiness of it will be. because that's what the palestinians want to do. they want to destroy any connection of the jewish people to their biblical legacy. so this is what they want to do. she says, we have keep it. i said, well, you got to keep it. i thought you were i thought you don't believe you don't care. we have to keep it. i said, but you know, i think the bible's a it's a great book. you know so is the iliad, you know, says the odyssey you know i mean, you know, i went to college, i read a lot of books they were all they told me mean i don't trust columbia anymore but they told me they were great books, you know and. and so of them is the bible. so what he said is our book. i said, and you guys, you know, it's our book. it sustained us. i don't care who wrote it, who cares? he wrote it this book has sustained us for 3000 years.

it's our dna, who we are and these places are what give credibility. what authenticity to the book. so how can we give it away? so would you give the washington monument? would you give away the statue of liberty? i said, but ten, 15 minutes ago you said you didn't care because i really didn't know. i didn't think about it. and i said, i wish i could have this conversation because this guy, this, this this is this in, i should say, preface know i don't take shots at secular. i mean, these are incredible patriots. they fight for our country. you know, they know what they know. i mean and it's but but it's an of of the educational in israel and i again, it pains me to say it, you know, the book will hopefully be out in hebrew soon. and i hope, you know, i actually hope more read it in hebrew than than in english. but but i can't have that conversation a million times. right. so i think i'll write the book maybe that will you know, the word will get out. but i believe that that the jewish if they really thought long and hard about, they visit

it. they understood it, can't give it away. i mean, it's it's this great gift, this treasure that god gave us. and, you know, as i say, the book, you know, october 7th was, you know, to some extent, i don't want to i don't want to imply that i have any particular insights into what god thinks. but to me, at least way i took it was god saying to us, how many times i have to tell you, stop trying to give the land and i want to give you. don't give it away, it doesn't work. please don't do that anymore. and i hope that october 7th was the last time. i hope we internalize that lesson as painful as it was. i wish we didn't have to learn that lesson. i tried. i trade, you know, ignorance, right? you know, i anything not to have had october 7th, but we had october 7th. we have to at least understand that we can never go back there again. i love the fact how deeply rooted it is in our tradition and our history. i just was just curious, as a representative american, the the united of america and the state department's, you served you the judea and samaria is not the

only disputed territory in. the world there are many, many disputed territories. the world. why is this different and why is this treated differently so? northern cyprus is, ukraine, crimea, there are lot of places in the world. why is this different? why is the solution different? why is why is the focus different than any other disputed territory? i mean, it's a great question and it's probably requires a psychiatrist to answer it rather than answering. but it's it is again know the bible sells 2000 copies an hour. i wish my book sells sold 10% of that. yeah like the bible sells 2000 copies an hour in the united states 20 million copies a year. most of the people buy it already have a bible right so they're you know, they're giving them out. we have we've made a every one thing i learned.

we've made a colossal error in in in trying to approach this approach to all these issues in israel by of western rules. you know nobody else does you know and we've been given you know you know everyone here knows like knows the first roshi, right? we've been given the title policy to piece of land on earth of you know, when someone says to you, you know, you don't belong here, you say, look what you want to take it up with god, you know, i'm not you know, we don't need to argue. yeah. you don't like where i am. take it up with god, you know, i mean, the bible is the single most accepted book in the world. take it up with him. you know, he gave it to us. what you want from us. so i don't think we do that. i don't. i think we are squeamish about our biblical legacy and. you know, if we do, i guarantee you look, look, look at the muslim world, they they have a whole, you know, religious about jerusalem.

it's complete fantasy it's this complete sense about the jewish about the lack of entitlement to the jewish people, to the land of israel. if really study the koran, there's nothing holy about jerusalem al-aqsa someplace in saudi arabia and the and the rights of the jewish people the land of israel is in the koran but they don't care. you know. they got their narrative. they got their story. this my story, i'm sticking with it. and they push it and they push narratives and they get people to buy into it. and and take it seriously. we don't take we just don't react, you know? you know, you you know, one -- walks past al-aqsa and says, you're my israel and you know, there's this writing everywhere. you know, arabs, you know, defile our holy places. and we say what do you want there? you know, they're they're filled the high as what can we do it we got to get better at this i mean we just have to we just have to have stronger spines and mostly we to know who we are.

and you know what people say, how do you anti-semitism? well, the first thing we need to do is know what we're fighting like. if if it doesn't if it's not worth being jewish, then who cares? then just give it up and people won't want one, one fight us anymore. you know, we could become we become, you know, agnostic or just take off the key, but do everything it's got to be worth fighting for. and if in order for it to be worth fighting for, you have to what? your fight, what it is. and you know, i'm not talking about people sitting here, but you know, there's 5 million -- in america or more. and a tiny fraction of them know what they're fighting for. unfortunately. unfortunately, i want to actually just push a push on a actually the subtitle that you you have the book, which is the last best hope to resolve the israeli-palestinian conflict. and in that in that subtitle, there's a there's an of urgency i sense from the the idea of the last best hope. i mean what's the problem? let's say let's not go in the direction of two state solution and what's the problem with the

status quo in a certain sense, if you look at the current governments, the current government has has said, well, just kind of live with things right as they are what is the urgency that you see in finding a solution which is beyond the status quo? well, look, if if you if you had next to your house, a if there was a home that you thought you had title to and somebody else thought they had title to, and the home was fabulously valuable. it had, you know, natural, you know, it discovered oil underneath it. right. it was some incredibly valuable home. and you, you know, it's mine but i'm not going to really take any actions to perfect my rights to it, you know. well, we'll agree to disagree and we'll just kind of every day your claim to that land gets worse because no one takes you seriously. like if you something if you had you know some incredibly valuable asset next door and you thought it was yours, you'd hire a lawyer, you'd take the actions to protect.

well, you know, our entire biblical legacy is right across the green line. and you it's you know, you want to build a house there. you know, you got to go to the right. i mean, everything is run there by the by the military. i mean, it's treated as and israel is very honest about it, open it. the judaism area is a military occupation. i got to yell all the time that it's not occupied territory classically as defined and it's not. but because there's no other system of laws would apply, israel says, well, we're going to treat this as if it's a military occupation. well, military occupations definition are temporary. you occupy the land until you can, you know, peacefully turn it over to the indigenous population. right now, more arabs than there are -- there. and then you leave right? that that's what israel's doing. that's what it is. so every year, you know, we're just i got to tell you, i mean, i can, you know i have these arguments in the state department and you know, you can read the book and you can i think even mentioned it in my first book.

we can go through the law. i mean, i can i can make a legal argument why this land belongs to the jewish people. easy. it's easy. it's a it's much legal argument why this belongs to the jewish people. but, you know, again, what what are you doing? what what are you doing on the ground? like, what's what? what's how are you actually taking steps to to perfect your rights? and and we're not we're not. and and the biggest problem is that it's got nothing to do with america. like if i said to donald trump tomorrow, i going to say i mean, let's say he's back in office i'm somehow in the government and i say you know read my book i really think this is the best outcome. i think we should i think we should have sovereignty over judaism every he said about what does israel want to do? and i would say as it's it's the right question. right? that's the right question right here. and i'd i don't know. and i'd say i'm not sure. and said, well, look, i'm not getting ahead of them. so you figure that out and come back to me. and so that, that conversation that i had with that, that, you

know, very talented, intelligent, high tech entrepreneur has to be socialized across, you know, and the people of israel have to want if israel doesn't want to do it, i mean, it's it's got to be the subject, the national war. and i've met, you know, lots of people in the government. i know still a lot of there. and, you know, some of them say, yeah, let's do it, let's pass a resolution i said, guys, no, no, no, no. this is not, you know. with all due respect to my friends, the right and you guys are great and you're patriots and i love you're the worst politicians like ever. that's not the way to do it. like you want to do it like don't do it like reform. you know, let's get 61 seats and just ram it through. you won't be able to get it through. you really need to go into the, you know, into the shtetl, as they say. you got to really get into that get into the fields and talk this through and make the case. i don't care if it takes a year or two years. it's just the trajectory counts. you'll get there eventually if you just make the case for israel's and make it from all perspectives. why it's our biblical legacy,

why it's the best way to treat the inhabitants of the land with dignity, with giving them the opportunity for prosperity. you know, you can make it. why it's essential for israel's national security. you know, i remember speaking i mean, i remember when i spoke to i used to meet with the head of the shin bet once, once a month and, who's since left and i must say, it seems like he's lost his mind in terms of how shrill he's gotten. but i he's he used to say to me the the worst tragedy that could befall the jewish people is israeli sovereignty. judea and samaria, that's the head of, the shin bet or shin bet that he is this is is our this is our the equivalent of that of our fbi. and i said, why? he said, because will we will die under the weight of ruling over those people. i said, yeah, but like i'm not talking about conquering them, talking about, you know, you know, being a sovereign and treating the people who live there. they're not they're suffering there.

i mean, they you're all you're offering right now is stick. you don't have any carrots. you know what? if we got saudi arabia and the emirates to kick in a few billion dollars and we start building better roads and better schools and we took over the schools. the schools weren't teaching people to hate -- anymore. what about if we actually, you know, took some responsibility? he says, well, i don't you know, i don't want to we don't want take out the garbage in janine. i said was that me, you know, you're not taking out the garbage in janine. i mean, they can take out their own garbage. they've been taking it out for four not and i found that there was a real kind of institutional reluctance there and they said, well, you know, we don't want to rule. we don't want to rule, janine. and i said, you ready? or i mean, like know, like you don't want to go into janine. you don't want to rule over janine. and my friend, you're on, you know, yossi, really? fouda. i mean you're you're showing up there in the middle of the night under the most high risk circumstances at times, and things are the most difficult to solve when terrorist acts are are just about to be committed and you're coming in there and everyone's risking their lives, if you were there, you're on the ground right?

you'd have better security. don't you agree? and i mean and this is this is the guy that runs. yes. he's not there anymore. but this is the guy. but this is a this is a it's it's complicated. it really is. i mean, the the israeli people are the people i know they what they've done since october the seventh is extraordinary. the courage there. but it's lot of it. a lot of the the kids like the ones who are like under 30, they get it the you know, the guys 60, 70. i don't know i don't know what's happened but they've a lot of them have lost way and maybe never had their way. you know, and i'll just say this, like, i don't i hate being critical of israel. it may be it may very well be that the only way to create a state of israel beginning the 1920s and 1930s, was through a intense secular socialist kind of, you know, body politic. you people really needed to subordinate their individual needs and wants to the to the collective hope maybe that was necessary to build the state.

and so we have to have a court that of everything they did, whether they were religious or not, whether they were believers, not they built the state and we owe them everything. but things have changed and things have changed dramatically. and if we lose at this point, if we become untethered from, you know, our our biblical legacy, we got nothing left and we have to we have to push that. we have to push that harder. i agree fully. i just the one of the biggest struggles, obviously very, very intelligent over the decades have been pondering how to resolve this. so it seems it's a case and it seems to me that like just from discussions the average israeli, the reason why have moved away from the one state solution is is always comes down to the following issue, which is that you're going to have a now a millions palestinian arabs the we'll call inc israel. we don't know the number because they sense they are not accurate. but now you incorporate those and now it's going to it's going to the the the the majority of the coalitions of a jewish

state. the only jewish state. so the solution which is suggested is going the direction, as you mentioned, the book is a degree of civil rights, but limited. there's a glass ceiling of sorts in terms certain elements of voting or the ability to build a change. and you cited an example was puerto rico and the united states of america. there's there's there's but there's no representation in congress. but there's the they benefits of many, many, many many federal benefits at the same time. and you may that made that suggestion i for for for me i guess there's two two avenues of question one is is is in terms of is that is that truly a democracy meaning can it be a jewish and a democratic said at the same time with that where some civil civilians of that state have a glass ceiling in terms of their representation. number one. number two is is in terms of judaism's relationship to that, how does judaism relate to the other and you speak to in the book but sort of ideologically is judaism does judaism believe

that everybody who's under the auspices needs to be of equal rights and that same society. and. that's right. i think we have a lot of people are getting stuck how how would you help surmount those hurdles so it's so i mean to start i mean the you know israel just cannot swap a security for a demographic risk i mean it's just it's just not not possible that you could have a solution would enable in the arab population just by voting to cause israel no longer be a jewish state, which is really where title comes from. there has to be one jewish state. and by the way i, you know, i mean, i. the notion of one jewish state is the title is very important because people need to understand this and i think they do. but i think, you know we need to make this argument more forcefully. there's over 40 muslim states in the world. okay. does anybody care that, you

know, there are christian states? i mean, we come from america where, you know, we have a first amendment and we have a separation of church and state. and that's fine. it works great for america. most of the world doesn't like that, right? i mean, there's church of england. you saw the coronation of. what's his name? charles. i mean? it was all it was all church stuff. i mean, it was all you know, it was the anglican anglican church. but as 40 muslim states, you have hindu states, buddhist states, national religions all around the world right and. the main thesis of this book is so one jewish state, it's like too much to ask we're just one state with collect that where the jewish people have the right of collective self-determination that's it just one never going to be two it's never going to expand. it's the size of new jersey. it's really small. like what? why is the world obsessing one jewish state when there are so states that have national religions? and so that's sort of the point. and the way i look at it like this there israel has has two laws that need to be harmonized and they need to be harmonized in judea and samaria as well. you have the called basic laws,

right? that's what calls these quasi constitutional laws. one, basic laws, human dignity. right. which is that every human being doesn't matter religion. you are every human being who is a citizen of the state of israel is entitled to basic human dignity, which includes the rights to to pray to the right, to freedom of worship, freedom of travel freedom of speech. what are all the well, the typical that's the that's the basic basic law of human dignity. and then there's the nation state law, right. is that whatever rights you have of human dignity, they're all so subordinate. the collective right of the jewish people to self-determination right now. you can imagine a circumstance where those might put up against each other under some limited circumstances. and my to that is okay, you know, life's not perfect. i mean okay so you know israel a as israel a perfect democracy i don't know who cares? like, i mean we're not we don't have to be better than everybody else, especially when it comes

to self-governance we, you know, the united states owns puerto rico, it owns guam but owns american samoa. do they vote in national elections? no. is america an apartheid state? no. i mean, it's not, you know. we have, you know, whoever wins you know, if trump wins the election, he's not going to get the popular vote. right. so a majority of americans will have voted for kamala harris, but trump could be the president is that a democracy? how's that a democracy i don't know. i mean it's just it's we only obsess about this when it comes to israel. i mean you know you make rules that you make and you live with the rules and if your goal is to sure that israel always remains a jewish, then you come up with a system to do. it's not going to affect the lives of of the palestinians that their lives are not going be any worse. you know, in in the emirates, which is, i think, a great country, great country. and i like the people there very much. i'm very fond of the of the leadership there. they've got 10 million people live in there, 1 million of them are citizens. 9 million are guest workers

throwing entitled to stay. as long as they have jobs, they lose their jobs. and the next plane home to pakistan or they came from. so anybody care now? i mean, it's like there's only you know, there's so much you can try to achieve perfection in an imperfect world, an incredibly imperfect. you no problem said. so you do the best you can. you maximize the quality of life of the people you live. you try to treat people fairly and with dignity. and by the way, you think right now mean are the are the arab citizens, israel, all that participatory in the in the election process? i mean not really. i mean, you know, i don't know how many of them vote. it's not it's not as high as the israeli citizens but anyway it's it is a it is it is we do the best we can do to provide you know, to to to live within those two basic laws that that and and by the way, there are other ways to skin the cat. you can just say, look, we could you know, the government could pass a law that says, you know, here are ten things that are immutable. you have to always be.

you know, the knesset must have must be 80% jewish, no matter how you vote. you know, there different things or and you would need a 90% majority to to break any of those laws. then, you know, everybody can vote and votes. they're subject to this this constitutional construct. i not to get too deep into the weeds of the governance. if people want to do it, we'll find a way to, you know craft the governance, you know, get some lawyers in a room, figure it out. you and it can be done. but you know, circumstances that this israel become, you know, a defective state under those circumstances. it's it's it's really coming down to stop apologizing for being jewish. stop, stop being a stop apologizing for having one state. it's just one. that's it. just one state. yeah, but how realistic is it, do you think, to get into the and arab school system and change the curricula? you know, here we breeding a of people are born to hate and and is it realistic to say that the next generation will actually be part of a cohesive cooperative

society. it's not a it's it's not an overnight process. but i can tell you, for example, in in jerusalem, right. they started their you know, mostly on is actually done a very good job here by schools. there's a palestinian curriculum and an israeli curriculum and you know you can you can send your kids to wherever you want but there typically haven't been enough israeli curricula schools for palestinians. so mostly on exchange that he's built a few schools that are in in arab neighborhoods but are under the israeli you know curriculum. i met the parents. right. they don't want take pictures with me. they were afraid. but they said to me, this is the greatest changer we've had because sending our kids to these schools, they're going to become doctors and lawyers okay, the palestinian curriculum, horrible. you know, you go there in the you know when you get out, you don't know anything or, you know, so there is a, you know, there is a large component of arab palestinian society as well

that kind of see the world, especially the young james martin. everybody's got you know, everybody's got internet. everybody can see what the world looks like. so they want they want what everybody else wants. i mean, they see enormous opportunities. they're not impoverished, not living like they're living in gaza. and they understand that you to be to advance, you need to be able to you know, this this is an information agencies in a technology age, you need to go to school and learn programing or computer science or physics or math or whatever. and that's what they wanted. the parents all want that for their kids. and so it's a question of priorities. you, again, and it's easy for me to say all these things and want to kind of just take a little dose. you we should have some humility here. you know, it's easy to criticize israel. they haven't had one day of peace since 1948. right. so, i mean, easy to say. well, israel should do this, this and this. and i say this, you know, with love, not criticism. they're still at war with lebanon, still at war with

syria, since 1948, still at war with iraq, you know, the peace with jordan. and egypt is. not the not the warmest you ever see. and and they got problems, you know, as bibi says, he's fighting a war now with seven fronts, right. so we got to give him a break. right. have to i mean, they this is this is easy. okay. to think forward a year or two years, three years to them, you know, future is like next week. i understand i understand the issues. but there will come a point. there will come a point where israel will prevail over its enemies. and it has to start thinking about how do we how do we, you know, preserve our values 100 years or more. and so hopefully, again, this is not in any way an overnight process, but it is a process. we can start just just judging, going back to the the peace plan of the previous the administration, which you are so actively involved. and i remember that that ultimately the the looming threat israel announcing sovereignty over the jordan valley and was ultimately what gave the arbitrage as you mentioned in your previous book

to create the abraham accords which was the changing the face of the middle east and the reason it was so successful in that sense was because the arab states were able to were able to the moderate arab states were able to say that protecting the palestinian brethren by making peace and therefore the sovereignty on the shelf, but that ultimately demonstrates that there is a great fear among even the moderate states to create to to allow israel to announce sovereignty. that being the case, then how can such a bold plan how could such a bold idea ever gain traction if even the moderate states are about this type of this type of action? i mean, what they're concerned about primarily is being perceived as having abandoned. the palestinian cause. and so what you really need is to is to substitute the the the palestinians state for some other treatment of the palestinian people that where people can look them in the eye and say, look, we got something for you now, look, they they

didn't you know, the emirates didn't require that we originally they said you have to any plans to for sovereignty any portion of judea and samaria or the jordan valley. i remember that negotiation. i was, you know, negotiating this. we were coming looking at a thesaurus for words that we could live with, both live with. and we came up with word suspend because suspended by its terms is temporary and it and and it was a four year deal which expired two weeks ago. right so the deal that israel made with the emirates expired, that was also part of the sense of my for this book i wanted to it out so the emirates didn't say you can never do this. they said, you know, don't do it for four years. let's see if we can make some progress. look, there was there is privately the all these countries understand who are the palestinians and the danger they present to the region hamas. everybody's you know, all the all the all the moderate nations at war with hamas or the muslim

brotherhood or whatever iteration there is. everyone knows them mahmoud abbas is a crook. he's corrupt. he he he takes money, gives it to his friends and deprives i mean, there's nobody in the palestinian world who looks at mahmoud abbas and says, you know, we hope you get a state and you rule us. it's not it's not what people want. so it's a lot of a lot of it is is stagecraft, how to put this together in a way in which there's face saving. and, you know, people can stand up and and feel good about the outcome from all perspectives. but again, i can't emphasize this enough like we wouldn't even begin to start about this with the the arabs until we knew that this is something was interesting to the to the --. like, you know, like that's what's the point what's the point of getting going down the road if you're not going to if. and so that's that's really the issue. i mean, the first issue is to really just look at, again, if if the people of israel by some you know by majority it is a

democracy. i respect the democracy. after after all this process, they say, look we don't want it. i mean, i would be deeply disappointed, but i'd also respect it because, you know, they're the ones who have to live with it. and, you know, if i was living there, maybe i'd feel differently. i mean, we're going to argue. i'd argue my, i'd argue too much. so i was horse. why it's a mistake. but, you know, they have the right to there's a right to determine their their future. i don't think it's going to happen. i really don't think if we take the right of time and treat people with respect and we don't try to ram it through and don't try to, you know, tell people why they're bad -- or why they don't it it's got to be done with with love and respect and information, i don't think. well i don't think we have that problem. i, i certainly hope so. i'm optimistic. i always actually, david, when we have a conversation, i'm always optimistic because you have a way of through a lot of dark clouds and seeing there's a reason beyond them. and i. this leads me just a final question. i'm going to open up 2 to 3 audience questions. so i'm trying to think of something she's not been asked yet.

and just a last question, which is it seems to me that this is just a pragmatic solution. it's not just the best of the things we could figure out doing this isn't an ideological solution. this is something which you spend time, i imagine, more than ten, 15 weeks time. i imagine it was it was a little overlap. but this is something which which is which is based based on ideology. can you just speak the fact of of you've touched on this before is, the idea of something which is rooted in ideology rather than simply pragmatic actually secure? well, look, you know, in book, i talk about i talk about the the fact, you know, why is semitism why is anti-zionism anti-semitic and why is it necessary, the jewish people to have the land of. i'm no rabbi, you know, and i hope got it right. i hope i got some of these things right. at least i probably made some mistakes. but but but the point is that

you know the biblical prophecy right is is about the return of the jewish people, the land of israel. in fact, moses, you know, predicted the expulsion of the -- from the land of israel and their return, even though he wasn't there to watch their their initial entry. but, you know, i say a jeremiah ezekiel, i their prophecies so profound and moving i even referred to you know, at that i spoke to john paul him, you know, when they found out that their son died and said, you know, this is this is real excited by now. this is the modern iteration of rock island of aqaba and that rachel poland she crying for a son but then again but then jeremiah says okay you shovel but it will it will work out okay. i think that the i think i don't think judaism survives without the land of israel. and i think the full land of israel think at this juncture we can't not going to go through

another exile. we're going we're either going to, you know, plant our roots forever in this lands or we're just going to disappear over some over 50 or 100 years or whatever. maybe we'll pockets here and there. but i don't think we really have another exile. you know as a people. and so it's to me, it's now or never and it's about about preserving the jewish character for our children and our grandchildren and making sure that that that we survive and, you know, we've gotten gotten you know, we've lasted this long, you know, through through bigger challenges, far bigger challenges than we're facing today. um, we just can't let go. we can't live like, oh, this, of this legacy, this continuum that we've been privileged be part of. so yeah, it's very much, it's personal. it's not like when i tell you about the book, it is that you can read the book. i say, look, you can be a you can be a person of deep faith. you'll have the book. you can actually be person completely secular and still love the because it gets you to an outcome that you think is good. you can be pro-palestinian, you know the bucking me pro israeli

you know you can there's something in this for everybody. i tried to write a book where no matter how you process conflict in your head, it's a good outcome for everybody. i think that's the difference between the approaches of you know many the people in the israeli right the politicians on the israeli don't have the the perspective of of of of how to make the case to the world you know, to them it's simple and. it's about, you know, you the more land we get, you know, the off we are. and who cares about the you know? and i tell them, look, it's i get it. you know, you're on the ground i understand it. but if you really want to make the case to the world, it's got to be a holistic solution. you got to deal with everything. you've got to deal with all the way. and that's what that's why i mean, this book, people will call me a colonizer and you know whatever, they'll call me. but it's really a good for everybody. if you really care about human rights and human dignity, it's the best outcome. but but it's, you know, for me, it's personal. it's very personal. you know, again, those who knew my father and knew how committed

he was to see judea and samaria and to especially to it's a big deal, along with along with rosie's parents, you know, i mean, these you know, these these places are really you speak to us, speak to us very, very deeply. yeah. rabbi jonathan, sex is to say that non--- i the -- are embarrassed of the judaism and proud of -- or proud of the judaism. yeah, and thank you for being a proud --. making us proud the --. thank you. really. you know, ask that anybody who has a question rabbi. i actually a microphone. um, please. yes, we have a question. stay on the back rub over here in the fire. just just remember it's on tape, everybody. we do. we need that. we need that. we need the mike. rosie we need the mic. it's like, you know, now we need we need the microphone for the recording we need the microphone for the recording sorry, i just wanted to say that the 7000 that

marched and protested after the six had died, the israelis they are so set in their they call religious people messianic states and they're very strong. they're not 20, 30 years old. 40. there's so of them who are very difficult to bring them back to a different idea. what do you think about that? i think you're right. i think you're right i think we just have to we to we have to love them a little harder in. the end and a lot of them their kids don't agree. and i think, you know, people don't people don't realize how many parents there are of of hostages who have come out and said, don't rescue my son if it means losing the war. i mean you know, it takes for parents to say that's so, um, there's, you know, look, we are and i'm chérif. we're, we're, we're, we're stiff necks, but we can't we can't give up. and i'm know look, i the advantage, at least here is like like when you see crazy in

america, it's easy to really dislike them. you know, i don't just like these people because i know that deep down they love israel and they're patriots and their children have fought in army and we have to treat them with love and respect and get them to the right place like that one guy, you know, um, but you know, like the government will the, the israeli, the israeli political process will run its course and we'll get past it. i think i'm optimistic. i think i'm optimistic cause, you know, you know, you know this that the the people, by and large, the people are just incredible. the greatest people in, the world. and they will get government they deserve and they will get the leadership they deserve. i'm not saying they don't have a now i'm not making political comments, but i'm just it will be it will be okay long as god protects us. first of all, thank you. it's wonderful to have you here. one question, have you been in touch with former president trump and do you believe that he's reelected? he will ask you to serve ambassador? yeah, i think you get a prize

because the 400th person who's asked me that question so which and the answer is so the answer the the answer. first of all, you got to be really the right person to ask is really my wife okay she really that's really her decision because. i put her through this one. so i'm going to do it again without her without her approval. yeah. like serving. it's it's an indescribable honor and joy to be able to serve the united states in an area where you care so much about and where america can be. so impact on the un, the state of israel if i have that chance again i would do it. it's up to president trump. we have not he has not offered me anything and that we haven't talked about that he doesn't he doesn't do i and harris he doesn't give out. he doesn't give out jobs until he's elected. but we were you know, we talk and we text and and, you know, if he wins. and i, i think he will it'll be

he'll make that decision. and then we'll figure it out. you know, that's i have to say that i agree with just about everything said except for one thing, there's no thing as palestinian. i'm 83 years old. i 84 and less to months. i have a long memory and i remember the arab line that was only one arab nation. there may be 20 some arab states, but it all belong to the arabs. whole middle east. after they lost one of their wars with israel, yasser arafat, who was the of the palestine liberation organization, which today is the palestine authority, said, oh, we're palestinians. he was an egyptian, by the way. we have palestine 1%.

they invented themselves as a new nation, kind of a history. i'm going to ask, is that a quest just to get to a question? okay. okay. i don't disagree with anything you just said, by the way. okay. yeah, yeah. so can you the question is, could you please stop calling. i you know, i give me a give me another word. i mean i'm open i'm open to other words. yeah. arabs. okay, fine. thank you. bye bye. my book is a complete agreement with you just said, by the way. so yeah, i want to take a moment to really think david and tammy and david thank you for your in time thank you for being an optimistic what it means to be a proud --. and thank you for representing us. so just tell me, you know, i didn't get i didn't get to sign everybody's books. so should i just sit over there on the way? absolutely. so we gonna do is is that i'm and david is going to be just towards the entrance you could give him a chance to get there and there are books for sale right outside at $3 for each of the books. and if, if ambassador friedman

has time you will able to to sign them. but we are also going in a few minutes time do a ma'ariv. just i'm going to sign i'm. going to sign everybody's book stop never home. so we're all yeah, i really thank you. and david, thank you for here thank you to me for being and i want to say special recognition i want to ask who's joining us this evening. out ofconnie.

story began at georgetown hospital in the summer of 1946, a