Have a panel that turns very lively and i think this will be one of those because the people who are here today whove written some outstanding books on political social issues in our country have really given us some things to think about. So well be talking with them about all of that. So our first author whos sitting next to me, this is his book if you dont recognize it, hard not to miss mitt on the cover. Its called a reckoning by Mckay Coppins. This is mr. Coppins right here. Hes a staff writer. Hes a staff writer for the atlantic, amazing magazine that we love, i think graduated Brigham Young university, where he was the editor of the student newspaper. His previous book was called the wilderness deep inside the Republican Party is combative, contentious, fierce and chaotic quest to retake the white house. And its still going on right. So hes also the winner of the aldo beckman award, the white house correspondents association, for his coverage of the trump. That is mr. Mckay coppins. The next. Yeah you can applaud as many times as you as you are able. These guys have traveled a long way to be with us and we want to show them a really tucson welcome and appreciation. And so thanks. The next book i love the title is called how elites ate the social Justice Movement. Its by Fredrik Deboer frederick, whos sitting in the middle over here. His. Frederick is a has a book, a previous book by the name of it called the cult of smart. Hes got his doctorate from Purdue University and hes written extensively as a purdue person right there. He written extensively with a focus on education policy. Cancel, cancel and policy reform. He is a selfdescribed marxist of the Old School Variety and will certainly want to know more about that. Frederick i hope youll mention that a little bit. So how elites ate the social Justice Movement by. Frederick de boer right here. And the third book and third author is robert jones. Hes written a book called the hidden roots of White Supremacy and the path to a shared american future and is the third person to my left. We have arranged the the speakers in order of political leaning no, we have it. Its just not true. But you got to start with something. So here we go. I some questions for each of our panelists and im going to start with in order of folks next to me to my right to my left. I mean and let me start with Mckay Coppins mckay has written a really intriguing its a fascinating read. If you havent a chance to pick it up. I really encourage to do that and he has written, as you about senator romney and his history as a politician and his history as a family man, as a man faith and he as hes really gotten some intimate details that a lot of times book biographer dont get. So my first question, mckay, is your research for the biography of senator romney in your research you gave him access he gave you access to personal journals emails and interviews with him family, members and colleagues. What do you think the senator to sit with you and authorize your use of his answers and deeply held personal views about trump and other elected officials . Why do you do it . What was he trying to do unburden himself . Yeah. Thank for being here and thank you for the question. I his. He had a mix of motivation. And like all politicians do when they cooperate for a biography or profile. And i do think its important as a writer to understand motivations at the outset. They often are you know only somewhat aligned or often misaligned with the incentives, motivations of the writer. In his case, though, interesting, is that when i first approached him, it was just a few weeks. After january 6th, 2021, and he was in a kind of unusual headspace. He i had covered him for a long time. I covered his president ial campaign. I had profiled him for the when he arrived in the senate. And so i had in touch with him for a while. And i could tell after sixth that he something kind of shaken loose in him and he was in this really interesting stage of soul searching and he was asking himself difficult questions both about what was happening to the country, what was happening to his political, but also about his own career and his own complicity and what had had become of the Republican Party. And as a biographer, kind of like the best place you have a subject in, right . Where hes hes kind of vulnerable and, asking himself difficult questions. And so i think that a part of his motivation was that he just wanted to vent. He wanted to unburden himself. I could tell that was the case because, you know, when i went to him to pitch this book, i said, you know, i only want to do this if you feel like youre ready to be fully candid. And if youre not i understand, maybe we can revisit down the road when youre out of office. But i think this book makes sense if youre going to be guarded and trying protect relationships and all of that. And he almost took that as a challenge and immediately started blocking off weekly interviews. Me every time he was in d. C. , it would usually late at night at his house. He was done with his work. I would meet him at his townhouse near capitol hill and he sent me his journals, his email correspondence with top. In many cases he didnt read through the material before he gave it to me. And later expressed little bit of dismay at that fact. But but whats interesting is i tried my strategy at the beginning was to keep the interviews under an hour because i didnt want him to get sick of me right. And what i found was that he was often trying to get me to stay longer. Like i would try to wrap things up and he would he would keep going and keep. And so it was clear he had a lot on his mind. He also, frankly pretty lonely in washington. He didnt fit in his own party, his own caucus. He didnt you know, most democrats viewed him with suspicion. So he didnt a lot of friends. He spent most nights alone in his house where he had this giant tv on the wall and a in front of it. And he would just watch, like ted lasso while eating dinner by himself. And so i think another motivation for him cooperating was frankly just because he had this guy who willing to talk to him when he was in washington. Very good. Well, what do you think about unwritten emails . Thats quite a concern. So now next our next my next question goes to Fredrik Deboer. So, frederick, in your book, you call out the nonprofit industry as one of the entities that coopted the Justice Movement in 2020. Could you describe for all of us what you believe . Is there a complicit city in taking over the black lives and the Metoo Movement . And what is to be done about it . Yeah, i mean, i about this a little bit at my panel yesterday yesterday. I think its really essential thing to understand is that im not arguing for the like. Duplass of anyone involved in nonprofits. Most people in that world are genuine, only idealistic. But the problem is like the nature institutions, right institutions are selfserving and selfperpetuating, which means that everybody this job in an institution ultimately becomes an the protection of the institution rather than the fulfillment of its aims. And then hopefully you can fulfill your aims to. Now, this is this is ineradicable. Its always going to be true. And you can just make some things better and make some things worse. The problem is, is that, like as its currently constructed, american nonprofits typically have very little incentive to do better, even years and years of attempts of reform terms of opening up the books and seeing what theyre doing and where the money is going. The average american nonprofit is a black box and we know essentially nothing about whats going on with these organizations that are taking in donations are effectively acting as tax shelters for people who many of whom are primarily motivated just not to give their money to the taxman. And they often pay themselves extravagant salaries, and they develop typically very vague, sort criteria for what they count as success, which is just a recipe. Even if you have people who really care in the abstract, right, youre going to be producing conditions that are not actually conducive to changing anything. So one of the funnier anecdotes i that chapter in particular was researching for three months. One of the funnier anecdotes i found is that. So one of the complaints about these organizations is that they never want to actually solve the problem because if they solve the problem, they would cease to exist. Right. And one thing that people dont do, they dont put themselves of a job. Right. And so i found to exist american nonprofits, which are still registered, still accepting and still receiving tax that are dedicated to the eradication of smallpox. The last case of smallpox, i believe, was in 1976. Right. You say, how on earth can that . Well, they just got kind of vague. Right. Like from were to eradicate smallpox to more and more vigor. Vigor, sort of general Public Health goals. Right. And they may or they may not do a better job of taking some of that money and putting it into that direction. But the point is, they were never going to say smallpox is a solved problem. Thats our doors. And lets sort set this thing up so that someone else get these donations and do good work. Right. And unfortunately, the government sort of mechanisms that are in place to police nonprofits tends to be severely understaffed, under muscled and just dont have a lot of incentive often to close down these things especially because the people who donate to in general are, by definition, people with a lot money who dont want to see their pet project go. So the sort of the many, many, many nonprofits dont sort of oriented around Racial Justice are filled with a lot of good people who care a lot. Right. But who have terribly goals. Who have Performance Indicators that are inherently selfserving and. Selfinterested. Right. Who lack outside accountability. Be able to say this is what were actually doing with the money and very often feel that theyre doing a good job because everyone in the building is really dedicated and passionate. Right. But the precise with the american nonprofit Industrial Complex is that it has a surfeit of and a deficit of results. Thank you, frederic. Next question for robert jones. Robert, youve written in your book that in order to understand history of discrimination and racism in our country, we have to go back further than the New York Times series, which many of you have read. Im sure 1619, which was when slaves were first brought to america. Your date robert is 1514. And why is that. Actually i go back little further. The date is 1493. Oh. And the book and that that date may sound familiar to many of you. Right. Because its a to a date that we all learned about in school. Right. In 1492, columbus sailed the ocean. Right. I havent quite come with the right rhyme. Jingle like that for 1493, but im sure some of you could come up with it and let me know afterward. But its 1493 and. And what was what im doing in the book and in many ways like to kind of connect it up to my case conversation with romney is trying to you know so yes we have like a Republican Party thats introspective and some of its leaders trying to figure out what happened and how did we get here. And theres that kind of conversation happening inside, predominantly White Christian denominations, churches. Right. How do we get there that on january six, not only do we have just the capitol being stormed but it was being stormed by people singing christian choruses, marching crosses, carrying bibles. With tshirts. With Christian Messages on them. So how do we get there . That happened. So part of what im is trying to trace this back and, making the argument that part of why this happened, it happened in particularly with christians of european descent. Right. And that the the contradict are deepest inside of those traditions that can trace their christianity to europe and that one of the, you know, the title gives gives us some of this way or that whats buried in that tradition is this old assumption that christianity is the only legitimate religion superior to all others in the world and that european civilization is superior to all others the world. Like those assumptions run very, very deep into the dna of even contemporary christianity. You lest you doubt we just heard last week President Trump addressing the National Religious broadcast meeting where talked openly about saying the biggest thing we need to do is we need to bring our religion back. We need to restore the power of christianity in this country. And what does he mean now . Who is he talking to . Hes to a group of white evangelical protestants. Thats who we saw. Thats who was in the room when he says we need to bring our religion back. So its like front and center out there in front. But im trying in the book to kind of trace back. So how deep does this go. You know, this division, this this struggle between a vision the country as a pluralistic democracy on the one hand and the vision of a country as a White Christian nation on the other. How deep does it go . And turns out you could trace it all the way back and. In fact, it is the dominant version of christianity that lands on the shores of the americas. Has that claim that these are essentially a Promised Land for european christians. And so that goes back to this set of documents in the 15th century actually called the came to be called the doctrine of discovery. And they they basically claim this they explicitly have it in. The documents, in fact, the it is columbus actually in 41 reasons 1493 is because columbus is appealing to the pope and rome, who at the time he was the head of all western christendom. Right. This is before the protestant reformation, as before the break of the church of england with the Roman Catholic church. So this is essentially the closest Thing International law and moral legitimization as youre going to get. And he essentially gets this set of things that called him, culminating in one in 1493 that basically give the blessing of the church to the entire colonial project, including the kind of genocidal and displacement of Indigenous People and the transatlantic slave trade. Its all there. And in fact spells it out in black and white. Theres actually great website called the doctrine of discovery dot org. If you read these documents in latin or in english or in spanish, i think theyre in three different languages there. But it spells it out in black and white. It literally says like this from the you know, its a papal bull. Right. So from the office of the pope literally says, you know, that you in the question that he asked people, he says here, heres the question you have to ask yourself about whether these people have rights that ought to be respected by european christians. And the question is, are they christian . Right. And of course he knows the answer to that question. Right. And the answer is no. That a whole lot of things follow right from that. That means you have the right take their goods, take their lands and it even spells it out. And to submit persons to perpetual slavery. Right. Its right there in the in the documents. But that that sounds like far afield. But it has come through our traditions right in terms that we know manifest a new zion. Right. All these things. Right. These are not far back. And so thats kind of what im trying to sort out in the book and trace back 1493. Oh, great. Thank you for. I want to come back to the doctrine discovery in a minute. Yeah. So back to mckay. You have that romneys defining trait is a meld of moral obligation and hubris. Could you could you explain that a little further and what you saw when you made that description . Yeah. So. I mean, its actually, i think wrapped up in his participation in this book. So, you know the thing that he wanted to get off his chest more than anything is that over the last 6 to 10 years he seen he had been behind scenes in the Republican Party as donald was completing his conquest of it. Right. And he had seen republicans who he knew and respected and and thought very highly of almost a person, sell out everything that they had believed to get in line behind the this guy. And so it caused him to start to think about, well, what does my party actually stand for . And what are the kind of extreme list roots of the party . And how far did they go back . But he also was asking questions about politics more generally, right . He had seen what he believed was a depth of and hypocrisy, especially inside the Republican Senate caucus during his time in the senate that he wanted to warn people about basically. I remember the first sort of tangential, but its related. The first meeting i had with him once agreed to do this book was in his Senate Office and he showed me this map he had on the wall called the the histo map and it the idea of it is that it to kind of chart the rise and fall of the most powerful civilizations throughout Human History. So you have the assyrians and romans and the greeks and the mongols. You know all all throughout throughout Human History and he said, you know, the thing that that strikes looking at this now is how i almost all of the most powerful civilizations throughout history are autocracies some kind right. Theyre led kings or kaisers or emperors or rulers and the idea of selfgovernment of democracy is fairly new and kind of a radical experiment. And its it goes against almost all of Human History and. He is of the belief now having seen what hes seen that american has american democracy is in much graver peril than most people realize. And so that thats what he wanted to talk about but the thing the thing about him is that he will he has this this sense in him that he wants to rush toward