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And finally as you may have experience in virtual gatherings these last few months technical issues may arise and if they do we will do our best to resolve them as quickly as we can so thank you for your patience and understanding and now im pleased to introduce tonight speakers. Michael signer has worked as a Voting Rights attorney and hisfounder of the communities overcoming extremism project. He is the author of two books , the fight to save democracy from its worst enemies and becoming madison , the extraordinary origins of the least likely foundingfathers. He will be joined in conversation by Houston City Council or Amanda Edwards and former member of the United States house of representatives mickey edwards. They will be discussing michaels new book cry havoc which recounts the story of the white supremacist actions in charlottesville during 2017 that left one antiracist processor dead and the entire country wondering what the trump era had brought to the forefront. Kirkus reviews calls the book deeply introspective and its a complex, disturbing and valuable tale of racial disharmony, government failure and one mans frantic attempt to save the day and now im so happy to turn things over to my speakers. Michael, amanda and nicky the digital podium is yours. Thanks audrey. Im going to start first and i want to say that its really a pleasure to be able to do this, to be with amanda and mike both as friends especially because this book is so timely. It is actually mike, it would have been i thought its time right after charlottesville and i right after that happened if this book had come out it would be great but its more important because of whats developed since. Theres a point in your book in which we will get you and you will get to where you talk about what happened in charlottesville. About a storm that could in fact serve as a crucible for change. As a result of that and then more so what happened afterwards. So i think its really a timely and important book now. One of the things that moved me when i read this and also as i reflect myself i spent a lot of time as you all do on worrying about how it is that we can protectour liberal democracy. Which is not only a democracy in terms of the fact that we go to the polls and we choose who our leaders are and ultimately were in charge, its selfgovernment butalso it has all these various pieces of it. Deliberation, compromise. Rule of law. Until proven guilty, the free press, all these pieces that are really in danger at this moment. We have a significant number of people in this country who, and i dont think theyre all on one side who know what outcome they want and the process just gets in the way. But process is what liberal democracy is about. Oh i love the book. One of the things that i hope youll talk aboutbecause it resonated with me. We are seeing or Everybody Knows who knows me that i hatepolitical parties. I think there appears. And we can to think of things in a bifurcated way which is two sides. And in charlottesville, two sides. There were the right wing protesters, the White Nationalists, whatever you want to call them. There were also then the people who came to protest against the protesters to block them from doing damage but what i was struck by in your book that is so important to where we are in america today, there was a third group and that was the people of charlottesville. And you talked about how when you think back about that time and your memories of it , youre so much drawn to the people there that you knew, that you lead as mayor. And the effect on them and there are people on the right and there are people on the left and a good large part of america is not on the right or the left, just hoping to be able to make it to be able to have enough money in the back to take care of themselves. To be able to be treated fairly and equitably. Theres a lot of people are not part of the warring camps. And that was a big part of what happened in charlottesville which mike and cheryl i read what you wrote and i hadnt thought about that much. One of the points that i want to put on the table and see where youre going to go with this. As we move forward, we have a tendency wherever we are in the spectrum to look for a reason. Some of these, somebody is going to step up, be in charge. The current president says only i can fix it, hes done a pretty good job of only he can mess it up but we look for the great leaders that are going to come in and save us and thats dangerous because thats what you get is victor corbin, thats where you get tyrants all over the world but one of the things that you did. Im going to stop here and give it to you is that the mayor of charlottesville is not like the mayor of new york city. You dont have all the powers that the mayor has or the governor of the state. Its a fairly weak mayor position as you pointed out so you had to, you were to quote a leader, you had to step up from the position you were in with limited authority and exercise leadership. And i think thats reallya lesson for people all over the country. Amanda did it in houston and you did it in charlottesville so im going to stop thereand just tell us about the book. Tell us more than that the argument youre making about what needs to be done thank you mickey and thanks to the Harvard Bookstore for having me and i was looking forward to this. This was supposed to be live in person but this will be just as goodand i want to add a couple of bio notes. Mickey and i know each other because the heat ahead of the adl Fellows Program which is a bipartisan leadership training organization. His alumni are Extraordinary People and he teaches alumni and people who are in the program to about leadership and taking risks but also the humility that you talk about and amanda one other thing that didnt make it into her bio, she just ran for the u. S. Senate and thats one reason we thought this conversation not only in your local experience but also could draw from that experience of getting out there on that kind of platform with those kinds of issues. Okay, so thank you mickey. You keep this upperfectly. Though, so its charlottesville to begin with was a very unusual and wild first times frightening, often enraging it. To find myself in this as these events unfolded you had three White Nationalists events in the year 2017, not just one the way they built on each other was important for what it said about how charlottesville comes to the ny joe biden is running for president by his own statement, why charlottesville figures into spike lees movie black klansman and wife become this touchstone in American History is also high for local story and the truth of it, the lessons, the insights , how did it get this hyper local story colored by individual experience and actors and the history. How did it get to become a National International story and to me the answer is very intimate. It has to do with slowing things down and telling the actual storyabout what happened there. So i wrote the book about this modern historical event that i happened to be there for. For two reasons, there was one in which was to tell as best i could the truth about what it is like to hold any position of leadership in the eye of the storm with the particular powers that you have whether youre a city counselor or a mayor or chair of the county board or school board member, whatever those positions are. To me the real learning is going to come from what was it like being there and what did you try to do, what could you not do and what was the emotionalexperience like . How did the events impact you and how do they build on one another so thats what history is like and thats how we learn. That was the first goal is to tellthe story and the second one is different and they both know to some of your questions. The second was i had this intuition through even some of the most painful violent episodes of this. That as awful as these events were and as chaotic and as ad hoc film that they still conserve some purpose in america growing through this trauma. And the city growing through this trauma and your right to call attention back to the people and the experience of the city so theres this kind of concept that the book that over arches the book, learning from disaster basically and trauma producing wisdom and theres this ancient greek tragedy idea of the agon which is agony can still produce growth and thats how a lot of greek tragedies were structured so i was mindful of that and its one of the things that i tried to just in my narrow way as the person who happened to hold a seat during this but think about what does the nation learn from this experience of such over horrific racist and antisemitic and violent conduct by a dozen ultra White Nationalists paramilitary organizations invade the city and killed a woman after the rally was disbanded. What do we learn from that and what do we learn from how appropriate it . What cascade support and i think there was a lot of specific growth that happened afterwards that are crucial to understanding the scope of what the meeting was. The first one, i just want to talk a little bit about the first, the personal under firestory. There are way to many books out there that are sanitized about politics, about government that are sort of constructed around the hollywood narrative where theres a hero and theres a villain and theres a clear structure and theres a clear take away. And the fact of it is when youre in a crisis, especially now where social media and where the extremes on both sides created such intensity and such conflict and the cadence of it is so rapid and so intense, its unlikely that the hollywood or fantasized version is going to mirror anything of what the actual leaders went through and the reason this is so important is if were going to handle right now today everybodys minds are on the crisis of the last two weeks which is horrific racist Police Brutality putting on top of a few hundred years of organized oppression and brutality towards black and brown people in this country and where theres been some progress but clearly not nearly enough and in a lot of ways weve backpedaled so this is the reality of the experience that people have and people witnessed Police Brutality and they have witnessed 16 times, average family has 15 times less wealth and an average white family and the average blocks are four times as likely to be sentenced or to be charged with marijuana crimes as whites so these disparities are present, they are real and they begin in history. These are all true facts but the question is if were going to deal with them its going to require government. Government is a means to the end of solving problems and the kind of government as you said, its not the government of dictatorships. Its not form on getting in order, if humans read a lot of it from strong different people positions and passions getting together in a deliberative process and a lot of times in City Council Chambers and trying to come up with answers using government to get them done so before going to deal in minneapolis, theres an article in the New York Times that says in order to dismantle successfully the police force and deal with longstanding problems they had, thats going to take at least a year for them to deal with the budget and the police union and the contracts and the way the funds are obligated and thats going to require government. Thats going to require that this book is about just people who have enough skins and big enough hearts and who care about the ins and outs of what leadership is which is really just ordinary people taking on a position of trying to get something done in the system and the book, its hard. Local government is hard. Its the most proximate, the intense kind of government i would say because when you are failing somebody that is right in your face at the Grocery Store and the parking lot or the bagel shop as i tell in the book and when people are frustrated, its going to be right in the City Council Chambers and a lot of the battles about how to get answers are also going to be incredibly intimate and in the book, the book is a pretty intense, was very intense to write, pretty intense to read because you had a lot of open conflict and a lot of commands and anger but to me the devil is in the details. If were going to deal with injustice we have to understand thedetails. Im going to read only in my talk before we get to amanda only a handful of paragraphs but they are better than me just summarizing. The first one is i will suggest in this book there are five underlying urges to greatness by resort in charlottesville and in each area conflict between ideals and constraints created friction, and combustion. First the conflict between freedom of speech and public safety, first our collective your to come up with constructive ways to address the history of racism in public spaces because a lot of what happened in charlottesville was prompted by call to remove a Confederate Monument put in place during the jim crow era and third clash between order and the passions of todays politics and the fight to define civility itself or the challenge of providing accountability in a crisis to a public clamoring for real answers and finally how the newfound drive for equity and up and generations of policy and governance and in each area we were exampled not just by the difficulty of an answer but people demanding one should be easy to find and we were flawed and even evil if we couldnt. Supposedly easy answers dangle like sweets. Repeated business by White Nationalists denied the permit and stop them from coming here. On the lee statute, tearing down. On accountability, just tell the truth and on equity just do theright thing. So charged with energy these demands could be distracting and even dangerous parking blazes that could spread in an age of into slogans at that social media and oppressed the struggles to cover complexity and substance as little appetite for leaders doing what leaders needed to do, grapple in the gray area that lies between the seductive balls of black and white this remind you is notmild or equivocal , it was the gray smoke and ashes. So telling the story of what its like to be a mayor in a week mayor form of government which 60 percent of American Cities have painful for me and i hope for the way the book is set up its rewarding because i had taught about democratic growth and democratic resilience for a long time and prior, the prior two books that i wrote were on different angles of this project, the problem about how this democracy last and survive and grow and strengthen and i wanted to share the experience in that position and clear eyed i wanted people to understand the stakes of committing to this kind of government and theres a lot of hope in this book. There are a lot of specific advances that were sparked charlottesville. One example was we sued along with Georgetown University a student for constitutional advocacy protection nonetheless groups using a provision in virginias constitution was 200 years old that nobody ever used before that made militia groups illegal. Unless they were operating with authority and permission on the civilian authority weve never needed to go back to those laws before as weve never seen armed groups taking over the streets of towns like charlottesville before. So its an innovation parked by necessity that existential and that is about reclaiming space for democracy itself and there are a lot of other examples like that in thebook. To me the greatest states we see right now with what tropism at its core is about is threatens selfgovernance. It threatens our commitment to invest in deliberative selfgovernance through democracy and you also see threatened on the very far left there theres anarchism dominating some parts of that discussion. The sentiment is right to deal with these injustices and to achieve extremely progressive and but its going to have to come through government and this is a book about what government is really like. So i think thats what i want to, thats all i want to say for right now. There is a whole kind of ending part of the book which is about Lessons Learned and specific people out there. Leaders, nonprofits who are doing the work of overcoming extremism. There was a project we started called communities overcoming extremism with a Bipartisan Group including the antidefamationleague , new america and folks interested in looking at that you can go to overcoming extremism. Org and theres a final report there at 80 pages long and it has tremendous insights and paste and best practices for both how do you deal with extremism using the hard tools of Law Enforcement and the soft tools of engaging with marginalized people so theyre not victimized or radicalized and at the end of the day imhopeful but i want people to understand what it really is to fight for democracy. Thats great mike and in fact make a transition here, going from somebody very much involved in local government at a relatively small city, to mandating houston as the thirdlargest city in america. You have been a leader there in the city council but not only that , you have in common with charlottesville houston has become a cent