The authors will be deeply grateful for your support. And the panelists are, our esteemed panel today includes mr. Matt taibbi whos a Rolling Stone columnist, and his latest book is hate inc. , the next panelist is jonathan metzl, his book is diagnose of whiteness. And hes also a professor of sociology and psychiatry at vanderbilt university. And save you bhojwani, to my right here, is the founder and president of new american leaders, an organization that promotes incoming, new immigrants into politics, and her book is People Like Us the new t wave of candidates knockig at democracys door. All right. So i thought wed start with a moment of silence for bill de blasios president ial campaign. [laughter] and now continue. [laughter] so well start with matt. You missed that . Ive been moving. [laughter] okay, matt. Tell us what is hate inc. So hate inc. , it started off as a rethink of manufacturing consent. It was a book that i was really influenced a lot before i joined sithe journalism business mysel, and i thought it would be interesting to go back and look at it, whether the model held up in the internet age, whether anything had changed since 1988 or 89. But it ended up being a lot about how the business of journalism has changed particularly in the last 30 years, particularly p the commercial strategies of our business. That ive lived through personally, there are a lot of pressures in the business that are new. We have a very divided landscape now as opposed to when i was growing up, my father who was also a Television Reporter came up through the business when there were only a few media companies, and all the networks were trying to get the widest possible audience. Lewe now have a completely at mommized and fragmented at atomized landscape which is lets forgetet about going for e whole audience, lets pick out a demographic and dominate it by feeding them stories that they like, that was something that fox news did and now i think is common across the board in the media landscape, cnn and msnbc and fox and the daily caller especially on the otherhe side. And what that means for the Media Business is that weve learned that the that easiest wo keep our audiences is to feed people news about the people they dont l like. Of course, fox has been doing that for a long time on the ore side. But this is happening in the blueue state media as well, if i think its extended the rancor in our society in a way thats really, really negative. And a lot of reporters that i know are quietly disturbed by it because they feel pressure to kind of throw red meat to their audiences. And this has created a aksincentive to speak to the whole audience when you do journalism. And i think so thats really what the books about. It kind of tastes the history of the business, why we use the kind of objective going for the whole audience approach early in, you know, previous to the 80s, the end of the fairness doctrine which has incentivized companies to stop doing that. And the commercial pressures that exist now. Thats really what its about. Its about the segmentation of the media land a scape and how do we get out of it, and there arent any easy answers to that. In the a book you make reference to trump as sort of a product of crossfire. Yeah, exactly. Can you explain what you mean . The crossfire is sort of the template for modern media. One of the things that happened with there are a bunch of things that happened in the 80s that radically affected our business. One of them was the development of the 4hour news 24hour news landscape which suddenly put pressure on the News Business to create tons can and tons of content. Rather than a couple of news broadcasts a day and one newspaper per day, suddenly we had oceans of time to fill. And one of the things that the Networks Found out was one of the easiest and cheapest ways to develop content well, the asfirst thing they found out waa breaking news story, a submarine that sinks to the bottom of the ocean, something thats dramatic, we have pictures, we want to see whats happening every minute, people have to stay tuned t in. But thats expensive. You have to send a crew out, you have all these production costs. And the cheaper thing to do is to put two idiots on screen and have them argue with each other because it has the appearance of action, but its a complete hi phony kind of product. But people get very heavily invested in it. And crossfire was a very, very successful show that sent, that trained audiences to consume not only media, but politics in a certain way. They understood that not only are there really only two ideas in the world, theres left and right, democrat and republican, conservative and liberal, but that those two ideas can never come to an accommodation, they never agree about anything, they must always be fighting because the premise of the show doesnt work otherwise. Youre rooting interest your rooting interest stops if you turn on crossfire and they agree about something. The show is a dud. And sort of through the years they found that you dont just have to do d a panel show, you n do the whole news that way. Thats where, i think, we are now. Instead of having news, we have basically, you know,ew channels, the whole channels that are one side of the crossfire argument or the other, and thats what the media is. And i think its become very disruptive. What about when the news media agrees but chooses a really dumb storyline like the one you mentioned about john mccain and the pentagons right. Yeah. Yeah, no, i mean, i think that so a classic example here of how news media works. You have the 2018 military budget which had the largest singleyear increase in our history, 82 billion which is an e enormous sum of money. Its about as much as it costs to do a year of the iraq war. And when the budget finally passed, the lead story on most ofos the networks wasnt about e massive increase or what that meant or what was in it. There were new morals of Nuclear Weapons n in there forms of Nuclear Weapons, that wasnt in most of the stories. The big story was that donald trump had left out, had failed to congratulate john mccain or mention him when he signed the bill because mccabes name was the mccains name was in the bill. This was sort of classic outrage media. Both a republicans and democrats were upset about it. The hashtag resistance crowd was upset about it because john mccain represented the kind of through older, you know, respectable kind of politician, and we dont take well to insulting that kind of person. And, of course, the republicans were upset as well. So its just an example how commercialized media works. You just ignore the important story because its too complicated, its bipartisan, raising the military budget, and you take the quick hit that gets people upset, you know theyre going to tune in and keep adading and watching. And thats why we have lousy media, because we dont have to do the indepth story. We know we can keep you all watching doing something dumber. Okay. So lets change gears a little bit. Jonathan, your book is called dying of whiteness, as opposed to the dying of whiteness. Can you explain why . Yeah, sure. Gladly. I cant decide if im talking about the downstream implications or the upstream timplications. I really look at the rise of politics that claim to make america and particularly White America great again. What i found, basically to summarize the main argument, is that the politics that claim to restore working class White America tore greatness end up making manyen lives, many peopls lives including working class white lyes harder, sicker and, in many cases, quite literally shorter. I went to, you know, the book traverses topics including guns, resistance to the Affordable Care act, tax cuts that eviscerated roads, bridges and schools, notably schools. I did interviews in kansas and tennessee where i currently teach and in missouri. And with what i found was that on one hand the politics that those positions represent, on one hand really represent a return to an ideology that many people increasingly agreed with, this idea of kind of antigovernment, antiimmigrant, progun politics. But just from the demographic and kind of statistical level, they ended up being as dangerous to working class white supporters as were asbestos or secondhand smoke. Were not or not wearing seat belts in cars. The data that i show shows how much they literally decrease peoples life spans by quite measure degrees. And it makes sense when you think about it, right . Here are states that, for example, could have adopted Medicaid Expansion but decided not to, the here are states that had common sense gun laws and then instead what happened was guns flooded the public sphere. And so what happens, again, as a physician was these took a cumulative effect on public health. And im writing as both an academic, but also as somebody who grew up in missouri, and i live if tennessee now, so this is kind of where n i live. And in part my book was written out of frustration about the politics of kind of what was happening, what was upending what had been traditional senses of collaboration and instead thisab idea that basically immigrants and minorities are gaming the system, that people are out to get you. The minute that took hold in politics, it had dramatic negative effects really for all working classly and middle incoe people including the people who you would think would be benefiting from those policies. So would you call it whats the matter with missouri, tennessee and m kansas . On steroids, yes. [laughter] so tell us about missouri. Tell us about the gun issue in missouri. Thats, you know, its a perfect example because its not overtly, obviously, about whiteness per se. I grew up in kansas city. My parents are upset with me right now because im having this panel during the Kansas City Chiefs football game, and, you c know [laughter] delayed, thank you. I did not pay this man [laughter] but, you know, the missouri that grew up in, there were many different political opinions, and people just largely, largely found a way to get along. And guns is a perfect example of it. In the kansas city that i grew up in, there were people who were prohunting and had grown up with guns in their families, and there were people who had tnever touched a gun and didnt want to go near one. And there was a system in place that was kind maybe a little bit uneasy at times, but if you wanted a gun in a state like missouri, you could certainly one. But, for example, to carry a gun in public, you had to go to the Sheriffs Office and be interviewed and get a permit. Sometimes there were shooting tests you had to take showing proficiency. And what happened startingg around the year 2008 is that theres a dramatic shift in state governance in which politicians come over this is kind of thewh rise of the tea party and the extreme right and the nra starts to become a far more dominant force in state politics. And what they did between 2008 and 2015 was really upended all of the gun laws for the state to the point where you could be 18 years old and walk into walmart and walk out with an ar15, and nobody would is ask you a question. You could go to a gun show and do that, and nobody would even ask you for any kind of test. So really part of the story is what happens when that happens in a state, right . A place like missouri where it becomes far, far, far easier to get guns. And one of the things i found was that it, if you just dont think about guns when theyre being shot, it changed the way people interacted with each other. Wwhite opencarry patriots. I went on a march, actually, as part of the research walking through africanamericanou lawys of st. Louis holding up the ar15s. Africanamerican pastors who i interviewed for the book saying, you know, were supposed to be like the face of gang bangers and stuff, but were just afraid of white people right now. And so it really, all these gun changed the way the people interacted. Butnt there was another story beneath the news story which was as guns became more and more prevalent in missouri, there was a dramatic rise in white gun suicide. And so for me, the most painful part of the research for the book was that i sat in on support groups for families who had lost children or spouses or grandparents to gun suicide in the very southern part of missouri. And no matter what your politics are, its just, i mean, theres nothing like the pain that was in that room. But the interesting thing was people would come to the interviews with me having lost family members to gun suicide, but they would be wearing camouflage and bringing their ar15s, and they did that to tell me this terrible thing happened to us, but we just want to tell you its not the guns fault. So we would interrogate again, i grew up in missouri, these are people i knew grewing up, but i just really interrogated what does it mean to say its not the guns fault, and what do you imagine the gun doing for you. I think really that became really the most powerful part of all the research i did. Okay. Well come back to the other two states. So, sayu, can you tell us about your new immigrant candidates, some of the dilemmas they face candidates at all levels of government, right, from city council to state and federal legislatures. Yeah. This is a very hopeful book, i just want to start by saying that. [laughter] and, you know, ironically, you might think that immigrants who are under attack in all ways and have been facing attacks for several administrations now would be really discouraged by democracy. But i start by saying its hopeful because i d do i thik of immigrants and refugees as being some of the most optimistic of americans. Like, we truly believe in the possibility of american democracy, and we are doing everything we possibly can now but have been doing everything we possibly can to build the democracy that we came here believing that we were coming to. And the book that ive written is organized around what i started to see as a systemic obstacle to voices like mine being in politics. And i tell the stories of 11 people who ran and won office in 2016 or before. And the reason that i got this book out last year is because, a, i wanted to tell these hopeful stories, and i wanted to share that this has been happening prior to the election of donald trump and that even in the year that donald trump won in arizona, for example, two women whose stories iwo tell iny book one state office, one who is formerly undocumented and one has who is half palestinian inand half undocumented, [inaudible] and its important, it was important for me to tell these stories but also to analyze issues that have existed in our democracy long before the election of donald trump, right . That there is we have a unified enemy, possibly, i think everybody in this room have a unified enemy in donald trump and in the current incarnation of the Republican Party. But when this unified enemy goes away and when we have someone, you know, that is a relatively centrist republican or a centrist democrat for that matter, that many of us who are not experiencing the daytoday trauma of being working class, of being a person of color, of being an immigrant go back to business as usual. And i thinkbu that, you know, is so hopeful to see all of you in this room as well on this beautiful sunday, one of the few that were probably going to have for the next few months in new york. Because i do think that theres a level of energy and belief in the importance of us, in our democracy. But what has, what i want to encourage folks to do is to think about whats happening at our local and state level. And the example that you gave of missouri, right, and what we saw happen with the tea Party Elections in previous midterms and how we chose to ignore this as some sort of marginal thing that was happening, that we in new york didnt have to think about or that we who had certain access didnt have to think about. So the story is about the issues of Public Finance, its the issues of redistricting and not in the way that we often think about redistricting and gerrymandering, but what does it mean to have, for example, districts like the one we have in new york city where the Council Member is elected by a group of constituent withs in a certain Geographic Area which allows for working class people, people who dont have generational wealth, people who are not as well known to get elected. I talk about dark money through theon story of jose moreno who, again, another formerly undocumented person who wonni a seat on the anaheim city council. He raised about 7,000 for that race and disney, through various entities, spent about a Million Dollars trying to defeat him and make sure he wasnt elected. These are the examples of how i address systemic and ill just mention because ted asked me about ill ilhan. Can i ask you a specific question . Something i didnt know, her district is 63 white . Yeah. As you say in the book. But an increasing arely diverse increasingly diverse district that has a large number of somaliamericans but also a lot of young people. Okay. I say this because ilhan, many of us got to know her when she got elected to congress or perhaps through a tweet by donald trump. But ilhan was elected to the Minnesota State legislature in 2016, and she defeated a 44year incumbent. 44year incumbent, a person who was elected to office before she wass born. And what that means is that theres a power of incumbency that s had transcended the chans in their district that had, frankly, transcended this particular legislators ability to serve the district, right in its not so much that they had been in office that she had been in office for so long, but that she had lost touch with the reason she got elected in the first place, to be accountable to her constituents. And i think that having someone like ilhan in that position, she basically built a Campaign Infrastructure that when Keith Ellison whose seat she now occupies, when Keith Ellison decided not to run for congress in order to run for a statewide seat in minnesota, she had a Campaign Infrastructure to rely on. And so i kind of am a missionary for state and local elections as well because they help people build the chops that they need to run for congress or statewide election. Sure. Okay. Well come back to some of the other examples you mention. So, matt, you have a chapter on as the wwe cand