Transcripts For CSPAN3 Heather 20240705

An intellectual feast. American history tv documents america story. On sundays book tv brings you the latest nonfiction books and authors. You think this is just a Community Center . Itis way more than that. Comcast is partnering with Community Centers to a credit wifi enabled tools so students from low income families can get what they need. Comcast along with these Companies Support cspan as a public service. Good evening, everybody. Can you hear me . I hope it is not echoing too much. I am the coowner of politics and prose along with my husband who is sitting right here. Along with our great stuff, we welcome you to tonights event with Heather Cox Richardson. She will be talking about her new book, democracy awakening. Notes on the state of america. It seems especially fitting at a time of such incredible tragedy and turmoil in the world that we are gathered here tonight in this wonderful meetinghouse. This Award Winning building with its values of simplicity, economy, sustainability and peace. In that spirit and in the manner of friends, please join me in a moment of silent reflection before we begin the program. Ect im not alone in hg been introduced to heather cox richar thank you. In now, about our author who all of you know. I suspect i am not alone in having been introduced to Heather Cox Richardson and the height of the impeachment inquiry. So how many have there been . Two that counted in my book. I suspect that once you started diving in this became daily required reading. Today the newsletter has grown to more than 2 million subscribers. It is pretty amazing. The synthesis of history and contemporary politics always delivered and calm, lucid and deliberate prose feels like and unhinged moment except on the rare occasions when she takes a day off. Even on those days i think you are aware she rewards all of us with beautiful photos. Except on those days we turn to heather for daily insights, clarity and galvanizing energy. A professor of history and author of the halfdozen previous books she helps us to make sense of complex and befuddling events as they are unfolding. Illuminating the historical trends that shape our reality. Radical minorities have used the power of language on which the United States is founded and how these forces have pushed toward authoritarianism. It is a pretty depressing subject but the message remains optimistic. She reminds us that american democracy has persisted for several centuries despite persistent attempts to undermine. We are delighted that in conversation tonight will be jane, an old friend of politics and prose. Jane is one of the nations leaving journalists and has won so many prizes it would take the rest of the hour to recite them. A longtime staff writer at the new yorker, reporting has uncovered the truths behind dark political money, the war on terror, the Clarence Thomas hearings and the irancontra affair. We are working on another book and writing for the magazine, she and her colleagues at the new yorker have a new podcast called the political scene. If you have not heard it, i recommend it highly. Thanks to heather and jane for being here with us tonight. Please join me in welcoming Heather Cox Richardson and jane mayer. Is quite a welcome. Thank so much. Its great. Its a great honor to share this stage with heather richardson, somebody that is quite a welcome. Thank you so much. It is a great honor to share this stage with Heather Cox Richardson. Somebody who somehow manages to be a success and social media star without click bait. Somebody who somehow doesnt talk down to the audience but actually tries to make them i think you said at some point that you wanted them to come away smarter than when they started reading which i found to be a great sort of contrast to the recent republican president ial debate where nikki haley turned to physic ramaswamy onset every time i hear you talk i feel dumber. The great thing about Heather Cox Richardson is every time you read her you feel smarter. I will say back to that that when i write i try to figure it out for myself as well. I think people say that i do not talk down to them but that is because i am, like, how does this work again . I spent a lot of time trying to remember how the vote works. Its a question of not talking down to myself as well. I told jane in the back room that i have two subscriptions to the new yorker. Two identical ones because i need to read her so badly that one night i was trying to write and i could not remember my stupid password so i got a second subscription. Every day when i get the notifications for the new yorker they are all double. I have to cancel that other subscription so it is such an honor to be here was somebody who has such a clear i about american politics and american money in the courts these days. This is a treat for all of us tonight. You are making up for my subscription because mine ran out. The first question has to be one that is on everybodys mind. It is a little bit personal but i have to ask, do you sleep or do you have some kind of potion you could share with us at this point . You know what is funny about this. You know my name as a kid was lounge lizard. I was so lazy. I do sleep. I do not sleep nearly as much as i should. I will tell you that you do and learn to catch up at odd places and i do fall asleep at my desk but i do try to get six hours of sleep. As soon as the letters are done and they will and has everything must, i will just m ms, kayak, sleep. You must read an incredible amount. How do you digest so much news and make sense of it so ugly . The way that it works as i wake up and i read the news going through social media and seeing the stories that are out there. They do have patterns. That i have my day job and i do that. You watch the news and see what comes in. Sometimes it sparks other ideas. In that case, that is what i have been trained to do is to research. People send me tips and material i would not necessarily otherwise see. Often it is duplicates of stuff i have already seen. I tried from about 3 00 and 5 00 to get competitive exercise. I find that repetitive exercise, kayaking and walking helps to clarify my thoughts. That is when i see the pictures. If i cannot do that i have to do that through writing and it takes forever. If i can do that i know the story by the end of the day. I start writing whenever i can, usually between 7 00 and 9 00 which started during the trump administration. It was my husband that pointed it out that they dropped news after sean hannity went off the air. I did not notice but the breaking news was after 10 00 at night. The night that you all are probably asleep but the knife that trump announced he had covid he announced it at about 11 58. My cut off is 12 00 eastern time. If it was 12 12 01 i am good for the night but i was trying to keep a record. I start writing and then i have two readers who have been with me from us the full amount of time. One of whom has a brilliant eye for quality. She will say to me this is good and then she will say this sucks. Go back and rewrite. I listen to her because i do not have an eye for it. The reason i drag it out is because i have the best copy editor not just in america, not just in the world but in the entire universe. She is here tonight. She will be embarrassed. She is hiding over there. She also copyedited this book except the errors are mine or the other copy editor. You know how you talk about me being up until 4 00 . She is up until 4 05. She takes no nights off. She is the one that comes in and makes sure the word choices are okay. One of the things i think this represents it is not me writing these letters. Its a community of people keeping the record for the u. S. And working together to re create a new version of american democracy. I am so pleased to meet her and have her here tonight. So as we come together tonight, we are obviously in a very fraught moment. It also feels like a very fragile moment for democracy. I just wonder from your view as an american historian, do you feel we are closer to the brink than we have been before in terms of domestic threats to the survival of our constitutional democracy. I do. You know what is different . We have had challenges all along. We always have. Theres no happy moment when the day was perfect. August 13, 1923, or something. We did not have a perfect past ever. What we have now that has not been replicated since the 1850s is that one of our Major Political parties has been taken over by a group of people who are actively trying to destroy democracy. That is unique. We are in a unique moment that we are also seeing backlash to that. People trying to take the country back. We are indeed in a fragile moment that its not a moment for despair so much as to recognize that we are in the knife edge and to be willing to embrace the creativity and joy that will come with rebuilding the democracy. He wrote in the book that during this time building up to world war ii that the world saw the rise of hitler and spread of fascism to an astonishing degree america resisted these forces unlike so many other parts of the world. Instead we fought for democracy and basically won and became a beacon for it. You have some theories in the book about why america was able to resist falling to fascism and that there are toryism authoritarianism then. What do we have then that seems to be ebbing now . This is a great question. Why didnt the United States go full fascist in the 1930s . Because we were not immune for that. Remember on washingtons birthday before world war ii there was a party for him in Madison Square garden with washington flanked by swastikas to support the idea of americas nazix past. Seems like it should have been a short step to what italy and germany ended up doing. After the war, a number of scholars tried to figure out what it was that made america different. They came to a conclusion and they said, americans are just too practical. They are to moderate. They would never do Something Like that. It is so sweet. It is wrong, but we wish it were right. There was a whole school of thought about that. There were books written about how americans are generally in the middle and good to go. I think the reason that the United States ultimately did not go down that road or communism was because we have, in a sense, had until maybe now and maybe we still have it, and inoculation against that. That is the fact that marginalized americans have always had in front of them the principles of the declaration of independence. No matter what the conditions are they had a document that declared a set of principles that we all have the right to be treated equally. Those are articulated before the founders of this country before the framers tried to put a version of that into law. Its all true some that if you have right to look at the constitution. If you do not have rights you look at the declaration of independence. Its my argument that those principles were a touchstone for marginalized americans to make sure that the rest of the country, those people that did have rights could never forget that those were the principles of this country. That idea, the idea that the principles in the declaration of independence were always there for people to say what about us . When we were faced with the idea of losing those ideals, people knew there was an alternative history, a better history to cling to. We have the same constitution and bill of rights. I guess, it makes me wonder why so Many Americans are flirting with authoritarianism now. There are a number of theories about the rise of authoritarianism in a number of countries. Again, after world war ii a lot of scholars spent time wondering why we had a miscellany in a hitler. Theres a great thinker. Hes a longshoremen in san francisco. He writes a book called triple leaders. He writes why do we care about them . Because every generation has a gazillion people, paraphrasing by the way, who would like to be hitlers and mussolinis. They do not get anywhere. What we really need to study is not the leaders. What we need to study is the followers. Why are people willing to follow that which is brilliant if you think about it. What he argued was you get people willing to follow a strong man when you destabilize a population. Either economically or religiously or culturally or socially for about a generation. What that does is it makes them right for a strong man to come in and say you are really unhappy, your fathers were better off than you are, i can bring back a world he used to enjoy where you used to be the most important people. The only reason you are not important anymore is because of those people. Who those people are just not matter so long as you convince your followers that you can return them to a place where they can, for example, make their country great again. Once you have done that, first of all, they start to follow you because you promised to return to prominence but because you say im the only one that can do it because i know the true roles whether they are religious or traditional or universal. Im the one thats going to bring those roles back. Once they have committed to you it is very difficult to pry them away for two reasons. First of all, talking about how you internalize that as part of their identity. They talked about how the more the strongman abuses that other the tighter people are wedded to him because to justify the way they have treated others they have to believe those people deserved it. Otherwise they have to believe they are the bad people which is why it is so difficult to drag them away. You know you say the worst they behave the tighter somebody clings to them. The worst. We see the concentration of wealth upward, the language of other. We are the good americans and those people are socialists. They refused to work. You can fill in the blanks yourself the idea that we can make America Great again which was a tagline for Ronald Reagan before it was for donald trump. Only by silencing those people by suppressing their votes, by cutting them out of the body politic. Eventually goes this to an incredibly dark place. I think we have seen the conditions prepping for the rise of a strongman. We are now at the stage where we get to decide whether we will fight back against that or go down that road. I will say that one of the things that is really important to a strongmans speed. I think you see the travel ban in january 2017 was an attempt to create chaos really quickly. I also think january 6 was the day. If it had gone even slightly differently the country would be very different today. The reason we got the civil war in the first place was because the confederates were able to move really quickly. By december you had South Carolina out of the union. When things slow down and when people get a chance to say, that is not what we are doing here you can break that pattern. The fact that we have slowed down is a really good sign. That is such an incredible explanation for trump. I wrote a book about it. I recommend it. In this country have we seen examples before of the kind of cult like following that i think trump has at this point. What you explained that is very interesting as people keep saying how many more indictments, how many more trials, why dont they break away from him. What you are saying is the worse he behaves the more attached they might be. Have we seen this . Have there been earlier examples . I dont know if theres any other sort of cult like leaders who americans have followed like this . If so, how do you break the spell . I can think of three but they are at the state level. Ignatius donnelly in the midwest in the 1890s. I cant tell you how much i would love to tell you about him because it is information you did not know you wanted. He writes a book about atlantis. He is the guy that wrote the introduction to the populist party platform. He was a novelist and he ends up becoming so upset about the way politics are going he writes a novel that you can get on the internet for free we have he we long and we have coughlin both in the 1930s the kinds of followers trump did or has and they fell for different reasons. Huey long was assassinated. Father coughlin for other reasons. This is the first time we have had that as part of a National Political party. Its the first time it has happened at the national level. In 1850s we had a similar situation in the south where the Economic Situation was such that slavers had essentially taken over the whole region and pushed a lot of poor white farmers off their land and become a roving group of People Living very marginally. The leaders recognized they had to bring them on board so they really hammered on race from the 1830s going forward. They also really dramatically curtailed the information that is available to white voters that is in the 1840s and 1850s then they suppress the vote and kick out the people that do not agree. We do have the conditions in the south in the 1840s and 50s very much like where we have been for a certain part of this population. They did not have anybody to rally around. Nobody liked Jefferson Davis. Alexander stephens was a crappy speaker. There was nobody you could really get behind. Maybe robert e lee but he looked like a weenie as well. They did not have that kind of cult following. That makes me wonder how much you think the current rise of the Maga Movement is aligned with the backlash of the first africanamerican president. Thats a great question. Obviously that is at least part of it but this has been coming a long time. People argue that trump is a reflection of a long history where he is unique. I always about my card and say it is both. Certainly in that particular moment it was possible to mobilize the tea party and all the language that had gone into effect when president obama was elected. A couple of books ago i wrote the history of the Republican Party in part because of all the signs that you saw with people saying we have a socialist in the white house. I wanted to get to why they were arguing that obama who is really to the right of eisenhower was a socialist. The answer is race and class have been deeply entwined to the United States throughout our history but really certainly since the civil war. Partly it is a reaction to the election of president obama but it is also a reaction, i would say, to brown versus board of education in which the federal government begins to protect the idea that we will protect the quality and the reaction to the Voting Rights act of 1965. They either had to decide to embrace the multicultural politic or rejected. One party embraced it and one rejected it. It has been a long time coming. I was thinking how it must have been for you to see january 6, the Confederate Flag for the first time inside congress after youve written a book that is called how the south won the civil war. Do you feel that this lost cause has never died . It has not died since the civil war. The premise of the book was the idea that the world is basically divided in between people who think everyone should be treated equally on the one hand and on the other hand people who think they are better than everybody else and very few people have the right and probably the duty to roll. The premise is the idea that some people are better than others and rule never really died because after the confederacy when it should have died it simply moved to the American West that had a very similar economy and social structure and it found a ready home. I have to say, seeing that flag in the u. S. Capitol was probably the hardest thing i have ever seen in my life. For the simple reason that during the civil war, Julia Ward Howe came to washington with her husband and children to look at the troops and see the troops. She was a conflicted woman in a lot of ways because her husband was too old to fight in the war and she felt like she was not able to take on the work she wanted to to help because her children were little. She was known as a poet. People kept saying to her, do something. Write something. She was out one day looking at the troops around the capitol, and she hears a soldier singing the song about hanging Jefferson Davis from a sour apple tree which, it is a famous song at the time. That is what they are marching to. She goes home that night to the hotel and wakes up in the middle of the night and heres a poem in her head and gets out to write it down. She does not tremolite on because she has a kid in the room asleep with her. She writes about how the republic, mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the lord. The second verse of that is, i have seen him in the watchfires of 100 circling camps. They have will determine altar in the evening dues and damps. What she is talking about is these rings of sons and fathers and husbands who have built fires around the capitol so nobody could break in. So the confederates could not come in. They help those lines for four years. 6 billion, 600,000 lives and we had a president who invited that flag into our capitol. When he carried that flag into that capitol, i fell outraged. Not only for us today but for all those people that have given up so much since the 1860s to preserve the idea of the United States as a place where people are created equal and have a right to a say in their government. I am still mad about it. That is why i am in places like this today. [applause] you write a new book that false history, the creation of false history is a form of propaganda and a very popular tool in the rise of dictators and authoritarians. Did you write this book partly in order to write a true history that you felt people needed to know . It is funny. I began this book simply to be a series of short essays to answer all the questions people ask me every day. How did the parties switch sides . What is the sovereign strategy . What is the Electoral College and why do we have it . What i found was that i was writing how we got here, where here is and how we get out. I wrote 30 short chapters. They make up about 250 pages and then i put it aside. When i picked it back up i realized it was telling a completely different story than i thought it was going to pick that is why it is dedicated to my readers. It was clear there was a conversation going on between me and the people that were writing to me and talking to me with this book that had very little to do with me at all. I discovered that when i was writing was how authoritarians overturn democracy using the power of words which fits into what i study which is the power of ideas. Crucially, how they undermine democracy by creating false history just lying about the past. That is the idea that is the perfect past. The dictator knows what the rules are that is preserved when we follow those rules. As a historian, even before the puritan set foot in the United States. We been complaining how we are fallen apart since the 1600s. It is not about a perfect past. Its about the lives of the majority of them the best it can be. It creates a government that is good for the most people. It is never perfect and never will be perfect. It goes forward and back. It is brilliant and terrible. The difference between those two things is that in the first one, we have no agency. And the second one it is all about us. That is what this country is all about. That is not what i set out to write, but that is what my readers told me the book was about. At least a third of the book is ideas youve got about how to strengthen democracy. Are you optimistic despite it all. I am optimistic not because we have been through terrible times before. Sometimes i wrote a piece on the great crash. We all know that it was miserable. It was really interesting because i looked through the newspapers and it was the opening of the opera. Everybody is going out and hearing some great opera and having fancy dinners. There is this little piece. This one guy has failed in business. He cannot pull his life back together. That night he dies by suicide. When i read it i thought, hang on just one more day because tomorrow you will discover all those people that are worse off than you are. Just hang on one more day. Sometime thats what i feel like. We dont have to hang on forever. We just have to hang on one more day. I believe in democracy but i also believe in the human project. Thats the idea that the human project is the right to self determination. I do not believe at the end of the day a majority of people will voluntarily give up their right to determine their own future. I do think we will come out in a good place, but it will take a lot of work. It is not guaranteed and that is sort of the whole points. We know at the end of the day even if we do get a strong man he will fall. They always do but they do a lot of damage before that happens. Michael is to make that damage as short or nonexistent as humanly possible. With on the edge of watching two horrific wars, one in ukraine and then israel and the middle east. Does history give us any kind of guide for how this might affect the 2024 election . Do you see the support of these allies being something that maybe increasingly divisive . How does it play out in terms of the two parties . How do you think it might affect biden versus trump . I will say one of the real surprises for me out of the past year. Last year everybody was saying whats going to happen . I dont to that because you never know what is going to happen. One of the surprises for me out of 2022 was the rise of zelenskyy is the world hero. If you were to ask me the most important sentence out of the last 40 or 50 years i would argue that it is, i dont need a ride i need ammunition. That was huge. Then there was Alexander Penman saying here right matters. That was the turning point. Adam schiff had talked about that before in a somewhat oblique way and the first impeachment hearing. He just stood up and said i am okay because right matters. Of course, then he got fired. Those things have enabled people to articulate what democracy means and how that will play out going forward. I am really uneasy about saying anything so early on about the horrific attacks in israel because every minute new information is coming out. That new information is already shifting governments through the middle east. It is completely unclear to me what is going to happen. I guess that is a long way to say i am watching it really closely and also following the institute for the study of war which is a very good website. Three paragraphs every day about what is happening in every conflict around the world. I think all thats are off. We dont even have a house of representatives right now. You are watching that today and some people are saying im not going to do anything without a package for israel but then we have to include ukraine. We are kind of in uncharted waters. I am sure that for historians the same rule applies for journalists, which is be very careful before you use the word unprecedented because there is always someone who can find something to contradict you. Mounted the loss of the House Speaker. They are good at dysfunction. In this particular case usually they keep their House Speaker even when they are dysfunctional. We have a house in 1879 that was crazy but they kept the House Speaker. That at least his new. The idea that we are trying to reorganize the house in the middle of the term is unprecedented. So we will take these questions that people have sent over here, but i was interested in a piece of news that many people may not of scene. There was a terrific story today that is about the founder of the federalist society. It basically describes a machine that he built, a political machine to take over the ports in america on behalf of the conservative legal movement. I just wondered if you are looking back in history, have the ports been the focus of such political attention in the past . And if so is this a new frontier to take that third branch . The courts have always been political. This particular court is different in a lot of ways. The precedent is in the late 19th and 20th centuries. I find it really interesting because it is called the the case about labor. Yes. It just did the bidding of big business. The ferguson decision which is the one saying segregation is okay but it is also a railroad decision. It is the one that says the government has no power to impose income tax. Within three months they said they can go after individuals. It is the one that gave us the insular cases that said we are going to have foreign lands in a domestic sense. We can take all of the Pacific Islands without actually making inhabitants citizens. The courts have always been political. This court is different. It is different because it is the first court we have ever had that does not have an elected official. Theres no law that people have to be dutches judges or even lawyers. It gives them some sense of what is happening in the world. People live for a very long time. If you think about it that is one of the key reasons we have such an order governing body is because people are living a lot longer and much healthier lives. Also modern transportation. Back in the days when you needed a horse or you had to get to washington on the boat and railroad and carriage, people just quit and said i am done. Im 45 or 50. I am done. I want to go home and attend my petunias. You think about the people he used to retire. The idea that you get carried out toes up is a very new idea. Those things are different and have created a different opportunity. It six years for it to turn over. It also does not go with the brushfire the way the house of representatives does. Judges are there as long as they behave with the idea it would not be a break. It was never intended to be a break that would be on. I think some of the judges are there even after they misbehave. I have seen people suggesting things like term limits for Supreme Court which is a very popular position now. You have convinced me that horses are the way to go. Could you imagine if you put them on horseback . Even if you give them bicycles and said it is 35 miles to court. How many resignations do you think you would have before the sixth month . This is a movement that we can launch right here. Taking some questions. One is a Pretty Simple question but what was it like when you brought in to have your tjte tjte with joe biden . I think they call me during the pandemic. They called me and asked if i was interested in talking to somebody. I spent time with an interviewer and i love hearing stories. The answer to that is virtually always yes. They came back and asked if i was interested in talking to a principal. They said would you like to talk to the president. I said that would be great. The president of what. Then he told me and i was literally shaking. I still remember looking out my front door saying i cannot believe this was happening. We were supposed to go visit my kids but we were not allowed to tell anybody because of security. So im not telling my kids if im coming or not and they are getting more and more mad. My son finally said, i am tired of waiting for you to make plans. Then the war broke out in ukraine. I assumed it would be called off but we decided to go that direction anyway and then, of course it happened. What i thought was interesting was that the white house to me is a historical building. It is also a modernday office building. Of course, the people running around putting stuff in envelopes, he was very knowledgeable, believable wide ranging ability and what you did not see on the tape was i talked a lot about taking over the position from Strom Thurmond on the Senate Relations committee. He was absolutely terrific. Then we went to lee and they said we are going to give you all the tape. They kept emphasizing that we could do whatever we wanted with it which would be great. The system will get you all of that information. We walked and i turned to my wonderful assistant who is a standup comedy guy when hes not working for me. I said, nicholas, what people . We dont have any people. I went to a pizza part parlor and we were wondering if this person or this person knew how to cut video. I texted michael and said do you have a video guy because i need one immediately. He said what you need about one immediately . A week or month. I said i need somebody tonight. He said i cannot get you anybody tonight. I said i think it might be worth it to them. He said what you got and i said an exclusive with the president of the United States and he said i will call you back. Within an hour he had a video guy for me which i have never actually met. It was a wonderful experience for me being able to talk to a historical figure. Minor all on paper and they are supposed to do what i tell them to and he had ideas about his own career which i found shocking. I think it was a great example of how immersed he is in history and how much he cares about reaching people, ordinary people. He is going out of his way to do that. I felt that was incredibly impressive. People think i have his ear. I do not. It was a wonderful experience and i texted my kids a picture of myself in the press room and they were also mad they did not answer. Finally i said, dont you want to know why am in the press room . Finally one of my kids said okay i will bite, what were you doing . So i said i was in interviewing the president. Then they all jumped on. You write about biden maybe more so than a lot of the Political Press corps. Do you think he does not get enough credit or people dont really understand what he is doing . I think he is a transformational president. I have said this. I use my words extremely carefully. People often read into that things that are not there. If i am not on solid ground i will not Say Something. Its not that i dont have an opinion but i will not Say Something unless i know i am in on solid ground. I called him a transformational president because no matter what happens he is the end of the reagan revolution. Is the president that has overturned the idea that markets are they solution to creating a just society which was the principle behind the reagan revolution that went into effect in the 80s and has carried on since then. As quite explicitly said this is it. We are getting rid of the monopolies that have been created. We will try to get rid of the concentration of wealth upward. He is doing all that. He is articulating it and saying it and also transformational in terms of Foreign Affairs which i really believe he is trying to deal with the problem with the expansion of democracy without colonials which is a very intellectual problem and one that i think he is trying to solve by focusing on regionalism and creating regions around the world that can handle their own problems with the u. S. Having a seat at the table but not being part of a group trying to dictate to others which is why he was so keen on having me African Union join the g 20. All that being said, we do not know how that will come out. The question is, why doesnt the press give him more credit . I think that is threefold. One, because since watergate and the lack of faith or since vietnam and the lack of faith in the government it is not cool to say i dont like the government. It is that i dare to say things that other people think but do not say. I dare to say i really think that is a good policy. First of all could people say it is way easier to cut them down and build them up. Second, its much harder to talk for an example about antitrust policy and the roots of antitrust policy and how that was overturned in the 1980s and really doing a deep dive than it is to have a really quick hit. One thing about the radical right is they are so easy to cover. They are made for tv. Nancy mace from South Carolina in that tshirt. You all know what i am talking about because everyone covered it. Who cares . But in contrast to that, understanding the imaginations in the cabinet, that is really competent. I think the third problem, i think the radical right was very effective in saying unless he reflected both sides equally you were somehow unbalanced. That is, of course, not at all the case. We are looking for what happened making everything a horse race. We are not you and me but money in newsrooms is being slashed and they simply do not have time to cover things the way that they used to. The american journalists need the story because it is coming out tonight. There are literally a number of journalists i talked to from European Countries who call me just to chat. Not for anything secret but to say i do not understand what is going on in georgia. Im not writing a story about it but i feel like i need to know what. You just dont get that from american journalists. They cant afford to. I think there is a lot of stuff going on. That is sad that we are falling behind that way. It is dangerous in a lot of ways. I was just thinking you were up there in maine with Tucker Carlson. Not quite with Tucker Carlson [laughter]. Remember, i got into this public stuff because i was on the first incarnation of the professor watchlist. I had a fairly public career and when charlie kirk who is now in a great kirk, now in a great deal of trouble for simply gifting the money that was given to him of his organization, i know exactly where he got my name but i was only early watch list and i was so angry because there has never ever ever been any concern about my teaching. I was a very popular teacher. And i was so offended by that. But i didnt really think about it. I came down the stairs that morning and my pajamas and opened my laptop and i was flooded. Flooded with messages from all around my friends and around the world and facebook and everything with people saying, we stand behind you. And i thought, that is great but what have i done . And i found out and i wrote a message to them telling them not to worry and telling them that i would not shut up which is what people have been concerned about. They are were afraid i would stop speaking out and i actually said to my kids that i would shut up if they were concerned about our safety. One of my son as spaz said, mom if we cant trust you, who can we trust . And so i decided to stay in the game and i wrote this message and i put it on facebook and it went viral. And that was it. I was in the game and i have not been able to get out sense. I want to thank you for not shutting up. And for coming here tonight [ applause ] thank you. I dont have any idea what time it is and im so tired. Are we good . We are good. What a cute dog. I actually have something to say. I want to thank jane for everything that she does and im not kidding when i say, she is a mustread in this country. And it is such a joy to be here with her. I also want to add a thanks to you all. Not just for coming tonight but because of the book is really hours. It is not mine. It is part of an ongoing conversation that we have built over the past four years now and counting about what we want for this country. And thank you so much for teaching me so much and for pushing me so hard, for challenging me and for making me hopeful about the future. But also for being with me on this attempt to keep a record of these incredibly tumultuous times. And is a historian, if you had given me the choice of any position in the world, not that i knew this one existed, keeping the record of these years would have been beyond my wildest dreams. And unaware every day that i am the luckiest woman in the world and then im here and able to do that because of you all. So thank you for everything you have done for me and for the conversation and for the world, for the last four years and lets keep it going. 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