The “Find Something New” Edition

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S1: This ad free podcast is part of your slate plus membership enjoy.

S2: Hello. The Slate political gabfest for July 16th, 2020 defined something new additions.

S3: I’m David Plotz of Business Insider. I’m in Vermont in my airy attic in Vermont. Thank goodness. Not my not my dank fug thuggy closet in Washington, D.C. I’m joined from New Haven from her airy office in New Haven by Emily Matt Basilone. I didn’t even say your name right, Emily.

S4: Only had to. The New York Times Magazine and Yale University Law School. Hello. How are you doing? I’m good.

S5: John Dickerson is on vacation this week, harder and longer and vacation. Hopefully rereading his book, recognizing how good his book as being satis, smugly, satisfyingly rereading his book each summer.

S1: I have never smug. Yeah. He wouldn’t that word.

S5: And he would. He would. It wouldn’t be. I’m not saying it’s actually happening. I’m just painting an imaginary picture. Come on. In any case, sitting in for John joining us, I don’t know if you’re making your gabfests debut or not. James Forman, you may have sat in for me at some point, but you’re making your plots. Gabfests debut certainly is. James Forman, junior professor of law at Yale, author of the Pulitzer Prize winning Locking Up Our Own Crime and Punishment in Black America. Hello. Joining us also from New Haven. Nice to meet you.

S6: Yeah, nice to meet you. I did this once before, some years ago, but I see. Yes, I think you’re not there. I remember it because it was in New Haven and it was shortly after the shooting of Michael Brown.

S5: Yeah. I’m so glad that you and I get to be on the show together. This time on today’s gabfest, the pandemic worsens. Is there any chance kids are gonna get back to school? Should we hope that they’re even going to get back to school at this point? Ben, the state of Black Lives Matter and the George Floyd protests, what’s going on with police reform, with criminal justice reform, with the movement itself, and then cancel culture? What is it? Is it real? How to understand it? This is the segment looking forward to because I am completely befuddled and I’m looking forward to James and Emily explaining it to me because I don’t understand anything that’s happening. Plus, of course, we will have cocktail chatter. On Tuesday, the Trump White House launched its new ad campaign to help the unemployed Ivanka Trump help roll out their great new slogan, which is Find something new. How can any of us find something new? Everything has collapsed. We’re desperate. We’re clean out with our fingertips. They’re not new jobs for the people who have been laid off. There’s not a new world for all of us who wish there to be a new world. We are just stuck, stuck, stuck with the world that we have. Everything is terrible with this pandemic. Case loads are rising in 41 states and they’re rising at shocking rates. Deaths are also starting to rise. Mask wearing is increasing, but community spread is rampant. There’s little contact tracing, quarantining, anything that we knew we were supposed to do. Emily, the governor of Oklahoma, announced this week that he has covered 19. But has he increased restrictions or required Barth’s or put in more funds for testing and contact tracing in his state? No, he hasn’t. What? What can we do with this living hell that we are stuck with?

S1: I think we can make all the personal choices that we know are helpful. And I don’t know. I mean, it feels in the next four months, like we are just going to stumble along in this terrible way. I feel terrible not having some better solution thing to say, but it feels like the contact tracing, the testing that we needed that we were supposed to be getting during lockdown that was going to allow us to live with the virus. The way many people in Europe are figuring out how to do is still lacking. And I don’t I feel kind of hopeless. I mean, I feel hopeless about the federal government’s ability to do those things, to do anything other than pray and push really hard for a vaccine. Yeah. James, help.

S6: Wow. I wish I could come in with something more useful on this one. I mean, I remember early on, right, when Tremblay’s was rambling and lying and saying there was no, you know, crisis. And I never thought that he would sort of change based on concern about human suffering. But I did think that he’d be forced to take the virus seriously because, you know, the politics would make it.

S7: And I think my views are fairly commonplace at the time. But now we’ve learned that even cratering poll numbers won’t make him do the basic of his job, which is to mobilize federal resources and protect the country. And so I really do feel stuck like you. And we. I mean, I rarely feel or say this. I’m generally that annoying, optimistic friend to in response to any complaint is like, yes, it’s terrible, but here’s what we can do to change it. But it really does now feel like.

S8: This, you know, shambolic, narcissistic president and enablers have really produced a crisis that is bigger than what even the most dedicated school superintendent or mayor or governor can fix. I mean, those people can have an impact at the margins. And I you know, I think in my city, in our city of New Haven in Connecticut, the leadership has been strong, but they’re just real limits on the power that they had in a nation that’s as mobile as this one. And with a virus that only will be contained if everybody does their part. So I don’t know. Unfortunately, I do feel a little bit like you, Emily, that right now we just have to do our best to take care of our own families, our friends, our neighbors, and mobilize for November. And, you know, people have talked about lack of access to testing, but also just the delays in testing results are this enormous problem. We were going wanted to go on vacation with some friends and it was two families. And we all said, well, we’re all going to get tested a week before we were going to try to be together and we all did. After a week, nobody had gotten their results. So then we had to roll the dice and we all did go and meet up together in this house. And during the week over day eight, day nine, they 10, we were getting results.

S7: Your negative, your negative, your negative. But, you know, what would we have done if somebody had tested positive, we would have really blown it.

S5: Let’s go to favorite subject of me and Emily and I suspect of you, James, since you have a child school. So President Trump has come to the conclusion which so many parents have come to over the course of this hot summer that we. Oh, my God, we have to find a way to get kids back to school. It’s going to break parents. It’s going to break the economy. You cannot have an economy without parents being able to reliably count on their kids being educated and hopefully their kids being elsewhere while their kids are being educated. And so President Trump and Secretary of education divisive are animated about this, but their animation has taken the form of of exhortation and bullying. They are simply shouting about schools have to get reopened and there is no particular plan about it. So this is sort of what we saw, Emily, with the reopening, the quote unquote reopening of the economy where the president was shouting and bullying and exhorting and the economy reopened. And it was turned out to be a terrible mistake because now we have this huge amount of community spread in states that re-opened quickly. Are schools shaping up to be something similar where there’s this a tremendous pressure to reopen schools? Because all of us who have school age kids really, really, really want them to go to school. But it’s going to be a mistake. I think we’re seeing enough. You guys saw the results out of Israel where Israel reopened schools and there’s been a tremendous upsurge in cases that have come out of the schools. Thoughts?

S1: Emily, so just quickly about Israel. My understanding is that this school reopening was part of a surge of cover there that was also connected to everyone thinking the country had vanquished the virus and like throwing away their masks, like everything was open. They thought they were done. So I’m not sure how much you can really single out the schools for blame, but that’s really a side point. What I find so maddening and enraging about Trump, and that’s you Davos this week is that they’re doing worse than nothing because by bullying and threatening, I mean, they are threatening to take federal funding away from schools that desperately need many more resources and a lot of other kinds of support in order to reopen. And they are doing this bullying and urging without any regard to what the infection level is in a particular community or city or state, which seems like a crucial it is the precondition. In fact, it is the CDC is precondition. It’s every public health experts precondition. And they are behaving as if this question of school opening has nothing to do with all the other problems with addressing the virus that we were just talking about. And also, they are incredibly politically divisive figures. So if you are someone who lives in a city who knows people who died, maybe especially someone in a community of color or low-income community, and you have plenty of reasons not to trust the government and not to trust this government. Hearing people order you back to school, ordered the schools open is going to make you less likely to trust that happening. And so, you know, I think my deepest fear about the virus always in addition to just like the death that it brings, is the way in which it and it exacerbates inequality. And I really see that happening with the schools. You hear about private schools getting their acts together. You know, Yale University, where James and I work, has a ton of resources now, residental college. Different from K through 12. But still, there are resources to try to do something very difficult. Whereas, you know, our schools that our kids are the public schools in New Haven, like they are strapped in a really different way. And you can see parents making a rational decision that it won’t be safe to send their kids back even if they do open. And that’s in a state where the infection level is low, the places where it’s high. It just seems like it’s increasingly out of reach. And this for me, I’m just not going to get over this tragedy. It makes me so upset.

S5: James, if you were if you were the czar, the coverts are that we don’t have if you were named Bill Gates and they have named you covered czar. Months ago at this moment, what would you do about schools?

S9: Wait. If I had been named if I had been named months ago, we wouldn’t be in this moment.

S4: I mean, that what you’re saying to me, your question is, is it OK? But so much the point.

S10: We can’t look backwards. Yes. You know, it’s you know, it’s we know it’s a wildly incompetent government.

S5: It is the worst government imaginable. It’s terrible. But we are in the state we’re in. So let’s say we’re in this moment now for you. Can you can project the premise of my question and go back to March if you want. But I we we we know that this is the worst government that we could possibly have at this moment. What do we do given that?

S11: No, I agree. And I will answer the question. I do. It does feel to me, though, like it’s this hostage taking situation where they have deprived us of all reasonable options, that any country with our wealth and resources and talent would have exercised. And now we’re we’re in this absolutely impossible situation. And the notion that the people that created this problem would even be bothering to open their mouths to offer an opinion about what a school superintendent or a teacher or a mayor would do right now is just outrageous and appalling. But OK, fine. I want to go back to your hypothetical. Am I the at the federal level now or am I this school superintendent federal level.

S3: But you have vast, vast powers.

S11: Yeah. No. At the federal. I mean, we would do the things that that the public health experts and that many countries around the world did, you know, three months ago and four months ago we would massively invest in our testing capacity, including not just the availability of tests, but the processing of tests so that people can get results back right away. We would invest in the actual type of tests that we would get. We would get high quality tests that have one in two day results as opposed to the longer tail that we have now. We would massively invest in contact tracing from the federal level so that we could start to stop some of this community spread. We would send the message from the top down at every press conference, and otherwise we would send the message that wearing masks is not a political act. It’s the Public Health Act. These are just basic things. You don’t even have to like it’s not even imaginative exercise. It’s just looking at the countries that have actually controlled this much better than we have and do what they’ve done. And it’s it’s not too late. We can I mean, it’s too late. We’ve created now damage that we will never undo. But it’s not too late. As your question suggests, to start doing it today, I think of the schools.

S1: I would buy a ton of tents and take over the parking lots like that and other ways of just expanding our vision of what school is like, especially for the middle and high school kids. They don’t have to have all of the electives and all of them moving around like they need to be doing more. We need stripped down version that is more compatible with the challenges of Cauvin and has some learning, but also just allows them to be together in some way.

S11: And just to follow up on that. Thank you, Emily, for sort of helpfully pointing me to this school specific asked aspects of the question. But on that, the other thing that I would do is I would massively and immediately invest in the technological capacity of all students to participate in remote distance, virtual learning, whatever you want to call it.

S6: Right. Every kid gets a laptop. Every house has it has broadband and related.

S11: I would invest in schools to buy teacher time and resources so that the teachers would be able to create those lessons plans. One of the tragedies that we had in New Haven this spring were where my child was in the public school system. Was that the teachers weren’t doing online instruction. There was some privacy concerns to some privacy concerns, although lots of other districts did it. So what I would do is I would use that. I would I would use the federal government to go look at those school districts that did distance learning relatively well. There are some I have friends in Washington, D.C. that are much better.

S4: Oh, really? My kids are in public school in Washington, D.C.. Oh, OK. So not D.C.. So where else? Or maybe or maybe baby D.C. was bad, but. But better than New Haven.

S8: I’m not sure.

S7: And and I would figure out a few places that have done this really well. Maybe you look at some of the private schools and you try to ramp up the resources so that public schools, especially those that are serving Low-Income Kids and Kids with special needs, had the ability to do those things.

S1: So I have a question about the politics of this. What is Mitch McConnell thinking? So, okay, like take Donald Trump out of the equation for a moment, because he seems to be drinking the Kool-Aid of imagining that the polls are all fake and everyone loves him because there’s a boat parade. But Mitch McConnell is like a person who lives in reality. And the Republicans so far have been refusing to extend the kind of aid to schools or state and local governments or even continue to fund additional unemployment benefits. They see the poll numbers cratering. They know that this election is happening in November. It looks like things are poised to get worse in the country, not better. Why aren’t they doing something about it? I don’t understand that.

S3: That is literally the question that I had.

S4: You know, now you have to address to. I only got there for.

S5: Yes. It is bizarre. So. So we have. We have the House Democrats that passed a three point five trillion dollar emergency relief bill, that which would be the fourth or fifth of those bills. And even that one, which was passed about a month ago, doesn’t have enough for schools in it. And so there’s a proposal, I think, for another 400 billion, most of which would go to schools and child care centers. The Democrats are pushing in the House. The Senate, meanwhile, and the Republicans in the White House are talking about numbers, which is we can’t have a bill. It’s larger than a trillion dollars. And most of what they’re talking about are things like certainly diminishing the unemployed, the bonus unemployment benefits that people are getting. Cutting that number way down. Sending another stimulus check. But but cutting the the income cap at which you’d get that check from seventy five thousand dollars to forty thousand dollars. Things like like capital gains rollbacks, nonsense like that. And nothing significant around schools and nothing significant around aid to hospitals. And it’s bizarre. It is. It is one of the most peculiar policy choices I’ve ever seen. This is a moment where Republicans can spend drunkenly on whatever it is they want. It will help them electorally. No one ideologically is going to hold it against them for having done it, because no moral hazard. A lot of desperation. There’s no. Yeah, well, there is a moral hazard, but like the moral hazard of not doing anything is much greater. And it is utterly perverse. And I assume that what’s going to happen is that in about two weeks, we’re going to realize, oh, yeah, they’re negotiating a bill and it’s going to come in. We’re going to get a bill. It’s 2.5 trillion. It’ll be closer to what the Democrats want. It won’t be as much as Republicans. It won’t be as much as what Democrats want. It’ll be pretty significant. And and a lot of the stuff will start to happen. But it is really strange because it is the only thing the only thing Republicans can hope for for November is that the economy is in some kind of slightly reasonable shape and they are seen as reasonably decent stewards of that economy. And they’re abandoning that right now. And it’s I mean, maybe it’s what maybe they’re living on their principles. Maybe this. These are actual principles that they they genuinely believe in. But it’s really, really weird.

S12: I don’t know. I think part of it is what you said, David, that they believe it. And part of it is, you know, we’re saying it’s a crazy political strategy, but they say we’ve been winning. We’ve got a majority on the Supreme Court. We have a majority of state governorships and state legislatures. We’ve got the presidency. We have a majority in the Senate. I mean, we’ve been told before that our strategy isn’t working and we control 90 percent of the levers of government. So keep having your podcasts, but we’ll keep having the power.

S4: The podcast podcasts are coming. There’s a huge podcast relief element.

S5: The Democrats are putting theirs. There’s, I think, 12 billion just for podcast relief in the bill. No, that is a joke. That was not serious listeners. The other point about that that I wanted to make, which is if you are a Democrat and you’re thinking about what might come after November, recognizing that unless Democrats capture the Senate and the House and the presidency, there is no chance that they’re going to get any significant relief bills or or or stimulus bills out of Congress for years to come. They’re the. We saw this in the Obama years that if Republicans have the capacity to block that large scale government spending during her Democratic presidency, they will block it. And so Democrats need to remember that, that unless they also win the Senate, this is the last bill they’re going to get. I want to finish this segment. Emily, with one point or one question for you, which is I don’t know if you guys saw the story about the CDC is no longer getting hospitals data about covered patients. Did you get this?

S1: You wrote about it. I mean, I want to ask you, because you must have thought about this. This just seems like a total disaster. I mean, what if the presentation was that, oh, the data is going to go to this private company and then the Department of Health and Human Services. First of all, why do we have a private company in the middle of all of this? And second of all, is this really just about taking money away from the CDC, especially because it happens in a week where some parts of the Trump administration started like weirdly attacking Tony Foushee, who is their expert.

S5: Right. And so so what it comes down to is the CDC has been the hub of data from hospitals about covered about hospital hospitalization rates, about death. And it is historically that is the hub of that. It is also true. The CDC is terrible at handling the data. Its systems are outdated. It does a lot of stuff by fax. Who knew there were so many fax machines left in America? So it’s not that the CDC is doing a particularly good job, but it is that it has been the data hub and it’s also a place where the data is all public. And now it is, as Emily said, this data is going to go instead through a private company to an HHS database, which is not public, which is subject to whatever forms of manipulation, hiding, massaging that the Trump HHS secretary wants to do. This is just one of many, many examples that we’ve seen in the past several years of the Trump administration manipulating, massaging, warping, hiding, changing data, which has historically been one of the most important sources of government excellence. The United States, is that we’ve been a great gatherer of data and disseminator of data and that Trump is eroding that trust. It’s eroding our capacity. And here we have a case where now we’re not going to necessarily know how many people are dying, how many people are hospitalized, and researchers won’t be able to understand that the public is not going to have a sense of it. And this feels to me like a really significant moment and a and and a really bad sign about the degradation of government under Trump. I got nothing. Not coming back on that one slate plus members. You get bonus segments on the gabfest and on other Slate podcasts. And today. If you go to Slocum’s, let’s get this plus to become a member. You’re going to get a bonus segment or we’re gonna talk to James about the access to law school program that he is starting. Super interesting. Very important. And have a great conversation about that. So go to sleep. Dot com slash gab fest. Plus today to become a member of Slate plus. George Lloyd was killed seven weeks ago in Minnesota. It has been an extraordinary, extraordinary period since then. There was a month or so of really, really active protests all around the country. It has quieted down. There’s still still activity in certain cities and certain places for certain reasons. Protests over the police, over funding for the police, over the militarization of the police, over statues and black lives matter of murals. There’s been discussions of reframing law enforcement and criminal justice. It’s been an amazing variety of discussions and activity since then. James, I know this is something you’ve been following. What is that? Where are we with the protests? The protest movements? And first of all, start with where where is there still active? Is the minister still activity on streets and in cities and in and in towns?

S9: I mean, I think it’s still happening everywhere. Just just a day ago, there was a seniors’ march on the New Haven Green. It’s an example of a relatively small scale, but still significant protests that isn’t getting necessarily the kind of press coverage, but that they did in the first month but that are continuing to happen. So on the protest front, I think it’s it’s certainly reduced in number that happens. But I think there’s still a lot of activity. And I think that we’ve also seen some of the protest activity now kind of channel itself into really more specific and concrete activism at it and in mayors offices and at city council offices and in state legislatures. And so I think, you know, the protesters are some of the protesters are still there. They’re just now at hearings in the state capital when they were previously on the streets.

S5: Stay with that for a minute. So give a few examples of. Towns or states or cities where there is action at a legislative level or where where there is speculatory change that’s happening. But you’ve been tracking.

S9: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, just yesterday, Pennsylvania passed a law that would create a statewide database for officers who had been found to be in violation of a particular city’s policies and had been disciplined. So this is to try to get at this idea that you get fired in one place and then you just get hired in another office in Boston. I’ve been following the story in Boston a little bit because there’s been really some staunch advocacy around the size of the police department in the city of Boston. The ACLU of Massachusetts has this really stunning report, which I just looked at yesterday for the first time. But it does a fabulous job of examining the police budget in Boston and revealing these mindblowing numbers about how it is that law enforcement budget became so bloated and is crowding out other priorities that the city might care about. I mean, that just just to say on Boston for a second that this police budget in Boston is three times larger than what’s devoted to health and human services, four times larger than what’s devoted to public health. Ten times larger than the library. And it just goes on and on and on.

S11: And a lot of it is driven by overtime.

S6: My not again, I’m focusing on Boston now, but this is a conversation that I’m seeing activists have in Minneapolis and Oakland, in Chicago and Los Angeles, in Atlanta.

S11: Is it these bloated overtime budgets? So. Fifteen percent of the ball. Boston Police Department budget is focused on overtime. That’s 60 million dollars. And a lot of it comes from these contract provisions that do things like, say, if you go to court, you get a four hour minimum, no matter how many times, how much time you actually spend in court, you get paid for four hours. And so so that’s bossom in Minneapolis. You know, I think very kind of famously discussed, the city council is really devoted to reimagining the entire police department and building it from the ground up. And they’re engaged in what they say is gonna be a nine month community wide process. And when people first heard nine months, I think a lot of people said, well, that, you know, that feels like too long. But the truth is this the job of rethinking what it is that your police department is going to do and how it should be staffed is this is not easy stuff. I think it’s being kind of appropriately done there in Connecticut. Gary Windfield was a state legislator, African-American state legislator from New Haven, has been pushing police accountability measures for as long as he’s been in government. You know, fifteen, twenty years, along with people like Robin Porter, and they just never have gotten very far. But right now, the Connecticut legislature, which is much more conservative in some ways than you might think, Earl, is, is really taking up very specific things about police accountability and budget allotments, which add those two to. To me, those are the two big issues, accountability and the size of police departments.

S1: The other thing that is distressing, but I think important to the conversation is there’s been an increase in shootings and homicides in certain cities, Chicago, Baltimore, New Haven, actually. And I think, you know, it’s important to include that because it reminds us what we need the police for and what they should be spending their time on is dealing with violent crime. And it also, for me, is a reminder of the fact that people whose lives are impacted by crime like feel that they want good policing. So it just feels like in this conversation, we sometimes the idea that the police are going to go away entirely. These shootings are a reminder that that’s not going to happen in a matter of having them be much more wisely and concentrated. Lee deployed.

S3: I was looking at the stories about shootings. So the police line is, oh, it’s because you’ve shackled us. We can’t do our job. You’re yelling at us. You’re not cooperating with us. And that’s why you’re getting crime in your cities. That’s your own fault communities. And then there’s a sort of a there’s a another take on that, which is, oh, actually, the cops are just not doing their job.

S5: There’s a there’s a blue flu quality to it all. Do you think any of the shooting and the rise in violence has to do with the cops not doing their jobs either because the public is objecting to them doing their jobs or they’ve decided they’re not going to do their jobs?

S1: So, I mean, first of all, people are getting more desperate right now. And I think the summer is a time where homicides and shootings go up. Really? But especially in Kova Times, where you’ve had all these people cooped up and they’re starting to be deeper economic fears. I wonder if that is going to wind up having more explanatory power than anything to do with law enforcement in the past where we’ve had exactly the competing narratives, David, that you just laid out. There’s been research on both sides. It’s pretty confusing. I find this set of accusations. There are some studies that suggest that the police stand down after a video of a shooting goes viral. And so then you can decide that that’s the fault of the protest or you can decide that the police are kind of deliberately withholding in that blue flu sort of way. That makes it seem like it’s their fault. Or maybe it’s just a dynamic in which the police are more conscious. They’re not necessarily out on the streets in the same way. And then there are that small number of bad actors. It’s always a small number of people in the community who are doing shootings who kind of take advantage of that either way. My understanding from talking to police chiefs like Scott Thompson, who was there to hire a police chief in Camden, is that what you need is not like a lot of stop and frisk, a lot of the kinds of low level arrests that often are unconstitutional anyway and alienate people. What you need is a presence of police so that people feel them in the neighborhood. They don’t necessarily have to be out there like doing minor arrests. You need their presence and then you need them investigating these major crimes. And to do that. Well, you have to have the trust of the community because it all depends on people telling you what they know.

S9: Emily, the point that you just made about investigations versus stop and frisk is, I think, completely under disgust when we have this broad based discussion of, you know, well, do we have, you know, too many police or too few police?

S11: You know, if you look at the statistics, the United States actually has a relatively low number of police officers compared to certain European countries. But what we do is we have those officers over deployed in this preventive prophylactic stop and frisk kind of harassment, and we have them under deployed on the investigation side. So anybody who, you know, is thinking about this should read Julio’s book, Ghetto Side that came out at four or five years ago and is focused on L.A. But it’s absolutely a true story nationally, which is to say that we have homicide detectives and robbery detectives. David, you talk about fax machines that are still trying that are trying to get their fax machines to work, and yet we have this sort of onslaught of stop and frisk. I just I mentioned Boston. I’ll just say it one more time with all of that budget that I just talked about. What was the proposal from the police department for this upcoming year? It was to increase the number of field officers, those out on the street and to decrease the number that are devoted to investigations. So when black communities focusing on black communities, because that’s that’s what I’ve studied about and write about the most, when people say, you know, we want police officers, one of the things that they’re saying is that we want people to come and investigate the crimes that are committed right now in our neighborhoods. But it can take two, three, four, five days to even have a detective come to your house to take an incident report after you’ve reported a robbery or a burglary or something like that.

S7: So it’s not just the number, but it’s also how we we allocate these officers that we have to spend some time focused on.

S5: That is such a great point. And so I’ve I’ve heard it made before, but never so clearly. What was the policy decision that. That ended up with us doing this. It doesn’t seem because I think about it doesn’t seem to make sense to me. I would have thought we’d want to have lots of people investigating things and that cops would want to have those kinds of jobs. How did we end up in a world where where cops are doing things, where they’re just harassing black people instead of investigating crimes?

S1: I mean, broken windows policing. Right. Like that took off and people thought that it was working in the 80s and 90s. And it sort of. James, is there a more sophisticated answer?

S11: No, I think that. I think that’s it. I mean, I think it was. It was exactly. It was. It was the kind of intellectual argument behind broken windows.

S7: And then, you know, we can never overstate the impact that the New York Police Department in particular has on the national conversation about policing.

S8: And they’re absolutely full throated, over-the-top embrace of the most aggressive style of stop and frisk, combined with crime decline numbers, which again later it turned out a whole bunch of cities that weren’t doing that stop and frisk had those same crime to crime declines. And New York continued to have those crime declines after they stopped the stop and frisk.

S7: But in that moment in the late 90s, early 2000s, when people were so scared based on the higher crime rates in the 80s and 90s, when New York comes in and they talk about stop and frisk working and winning and with their publicity department and their communications and their, you know, how many people pay attention to them. It really had an impact on the national conversation.

S1: And speaking of the NYPD, The New York Times did this sort of amazing video project this week in which they went through lots of video from the protests after George Floyd testing the NYPD had claimed that they only used force very rarely, you know, that that any excessive use of force was very much the exception. And in fact, in these videos, they’re more than 60 instances of what looks like unreasonable, unnecessary use of force. The vaunted image of the NYPD does not really hold up to this reality that that that a lot of people just saw in the course of these protests.

S3: There was an op ed in New York Times actually to this question about who the police are, what they’re doing, why they’re doing it. An op ed in The Times making the case that if you want to abolish the police or if you want to defund the police, have you want to change the way police work, become a police officer? The analogy, of course, Emily, is a world that, you know, which is reform prosecutors in a lot of cities who have changed how laws are being enforced and prosecuted, especially at minor minor crimes are being enforced and prosecuted in those cities. And one way that’s happened is that people who had previously worked on the defense side or had not worked in criminal law on the prosecution side decided, you know, we’re going to become prosecutors and we’re going to change the system. Do you think, Emily, that this this model can work for the police where you get a bunch of progressive minded young people who say, I’m going to go become a police officer and I’m going to change the system from within?

S13: So I feel the same way about this. I feel about the idea of working for a progressive prosecutor, which is I’m all for ethical, smart and good people throughout the criminal justice system. I totally agree that’s crucial. I think if you really want to do this, you have to choose very, very carefully because you can easily without meaning to become part of the problem.

S1: This is brought home to me with police very poignantly when I read that incredible story about the African-American officer who was one of the four people present at George Floyd’s death. He had actually gone into the Minneapolis police department with the intention of making it better. But then as this new recruit, like in one of the first days on his job there, he is like part of this just excruciating tragedy.

S13: It’s really hard to square that. Now, that’s really dramatic and I hope unusual.

S1: But I do think that if you are going into a profession and you’re going to have to spend some number of years without a whole lot of power working your way up, you have to think a lot about the environment you’re going to be in and whether you’re going to be able to do what feels to you like good work. James, what do you think?

S9: You know, I couldn’t agree more. And I do think the analogy to prosecutors really does hold.

S6: I mean, for a long time, when students would come to me and say they wanted to become prosecutors, I would you know, and these are students that say, I want to change the system. I want to resist mass incarceration. I want to fight racial bias. And the prosecutors have more power. So I’m thinking about becoming a prosecutor and I a former public defender.

S7: And I would tell them, I think that they’re making a mistake. And it was for exactly the reason. Emily, you said that I think that in the 90s and the 2000s, they were going to be going into environments that we’re going to be so hostile to. Their vision of what they were going to do. And they thought they would change the culture of the office. But the office was going to change them. And that’s a point that Paul Butler has made very powerfully in his writing. And I think it holds as applied to police departments. So now when I’m talking to students that are thinking about becoming prosecutors, I say just what you said, Emily, which is that it’s a pretty small list, but that there is a small list of prosecutors, I think, who have a vision that would align with where these students are trying to go. And those chief prosecutors, they actually desperately need a staff full of young prosecutors who buy into that vision because their problem is they may be wanting to bring reform, but they’re trying to bring reform to an office that that’s full of people that maybe doesn’t want to change their behavior. So on the police side, I do think it’s harder because I don’t think there’s a clear cut list as clear a list of departments that, you know, I would advise people to go to. I’m not sure really where to send anybody other than, you know, the Camden, New Jersey, that everybody always talks about. And it’s a little sad that when we’re talking about reform, we keep coming down to this like relatively, you know, small city city with seventy five. New Jersey is like our go to example. It’s like the new Sweetin, right.

S4: For Let them have their day, man. Let campaign have its day. You’re right. Bad press. But so still.

S7: So I don’t know where to tell people to go. But I do very much like the impulse. David, I do want to say just one thing in your. The way you frame the question. And I think it’s an important distinction. But you said, you know, if you want to abolish the police or defund the police or reform the police, go in and be this kind of officer. And I do think there is a distinction between I don’t think abolitionists would embrace that. They would not say they would reject what both Emily and I. Even the limited story we’re telling. They would reject it.

S1: I mean, you have to if you reject the system, you don’t want to have incremental change that saves that. You want to just, like, dismantle it and start over again. So that is a really important distinction to make.

S5: So I saw it really unsettling statistic this week, which is that Republicans are half as likely to be sympathetic to demonstrators as they were a month ago when the protest movement, the Black Lives Matter George Floyd protest movement was picking up steam. There was a tremendous universal, almost universal in this country, sympathy for it. And now. For Republicans, for Democrats and independents, that sympathy remains for Republicans. It has subsided. Is that something to be concerned about, Emily?

S1: Yeah, it is. It suggests a kind of linnett or like expiration date on empathy and on thinking across lines, especially of race, since there’s so many more white people who are Republicans than people of color who are Republicans. I find that really dispiriting. James, can you put some optimism on this one, please?

S9: Well, I do know I do think it’s it’s I don’t know that I’m going to give you the I you know, I promised early on that I was that that I was going to be this optimist. I’m not sure that I’ve quite.

S4: I don’t know that I deliberately did not stay home, stay on for Slate plus. That’s where you’ll get the. That’s where you get the idea.

S7: But so some of this has to do with how people take cues from. Right. From from national leaders. And so I think early on, people saw they saw the murder itself and they saw a bunch of police officers and police unions even around the country condemning what happened to George Floyd. And there was a little bit of silence from from the White House. And now I think that Trump has really decided to run on this aggressive anti protest, anti racial justice campaign.

S6: I think that some of these Republican voters who are either watching these ads or just consuming the media environment, their attitudes are starting to line up with what they what the leaders believe.

S5: We’re going to do a segment now about cancer culture, and I am honestly as fuzzy about the conversation about to have as I have ever been about, which is weird.

S10: It’s like a conversation made for you. How have you gotten? So I just used.

S5: I’m just so I find it so hard to follow. So I want to lay out what I my sense of what I think has happened. And then you guys will take it from here and I’ll just ask questions and listen.

S3: So as I see what’s happened is that the Black Lives Matter protests lit a series of or kind of planted a whole bunch of seeds around the country which have grown in different ways. And there was a some of them are directly coming out of the conversation we just had around police reform. And police funding is one big one, sort of central one in police violence. There are also things about representation and that the taking down of statues, like the renaming of bases, the fight over the Confederate flag and the way that the president has has kind of moved into that is another one. And then cancel culture, the kind of the flowering of the debate about it is another not offshoot. But it’s it’s been it’s been accelerated by what happened with these protests. And what I see or again, just from my reading, there’s the series of skirmishes that’s played out in magazines that I have not been reading for a while. And on Twitter, there was a letter in Harper’s signed by tons of public figures and academia and journalism, a counter letter, raging Twitter debate, a vast array of columns and essays from the left and the far right. And then there’s a person named Barry Weiss, who is a person who merely to say her name is to bring some kind of curse upon yourself, apparently, like just to talk about hers, to end up you will spend the next month talking about her. And this is all being carried out in the midst of the greatest economic and public health catastrophe.

S10: You didn’t say anything about Barry Way. So if for the readers that I don’t understand. I don’t understand. You’re going to explain it. You’re going to explain it. Our listeners or listeners may feel like he would be really dismayed by that choice. Anyway, go ahead. Continue.

S5: Anyway, this is all happening in the midst of this total national catastrophe, the misrule of the most dangerous president history. And there’s this enormous fight that’s going on in academia, journalism, sort of public intellectuals, Twitter, that is about something. And I just I’m not sure what it’s about. And I please would you please explain it to me? What is that to fight about? What is. What are we talking about? Who is. Who’s at issue? What’s at issue? Why is it at issue now?

S13: Barry Weiss was the New York Times opinion editor and writer. You wrote a resignation letter that was about her complaints about the Times and how she’d felt bullied. And also that she was being punished for what she called wrong. Think Capital W.. I actually recommend on this front a piece Ross Douthat, another New York Times writer. He wrote a piece just sort of explaining what he thinks canceling and cancel culture is. And I thought it was very incisive and I recommend it. So basically, the definition of getting, quote, canceled is to either be fired or have your reputation severely tarnished by people attacking your ideas. And obviously, people get fired for lots of other reasons all the time. There are efforts to impose this kind of canceled cost from both the right and the left. The real fighting about it right now is sort of this internecine fight on the left. And so, yes, David, like amidst all the other problems we have, this can feel like it’s small. And the timing of it seems really troubled and weird to me, actually. But I think a lot of people who did sign this letter that ran in Harper’s that was sort of like finger wagging are concerned that the boundaries are shifting in kind of the world of public intellectuals in a way that is making it harder to express contrarian ideas that there are costs for deviating from a kind of, in their view, increasingly narrow liberal framing of the big conflicts in our world. So I think the question is whether that’s correct or not. Right. Like, to me, the timing of this seemed all wrong. So I actually chose not to sign that Harper’s letter because it seemed to me either like a really unassailable statement of support for a broad range of views and free speech, which I am totally down with, or a kind of crotch shot across the bow at a moment when there are these really important critiques about racial justice and who gets to speak and who has power in journalism and in the kind of world of letters like an all of that’s just sort of bubbling to the surface and starting this debate. And I don’t want to be someone who’s, like, undermining it right now anyway. That’s my my first salvo. James, what was what have you been following this? Do you feel like. Matters what are what what’s your reaction?

S11: Yeah, no, I have been following and I mean, I think the points you all have made so far.

S6: Like first, right. David, first of all, your point about like, well, what exactly is this, you know, that we’re talking about? And then, Emily, your point about the timing.

S7: I mean, both of those feel like, you know, important points to me. I mean, for me, I toggle back and forth about the utility of this conversation because sometimes it feels, you know, important, even urgent. And then other times it feels pointless and exhausting and it often just feels impossible.

S8: And it seems like there’s two ways into the conversation. And the problem is, neither of them is is is super fruitful. One is to start with a specific case. Was this person.

S7: Barry Weiss, or whoever you want to talk about, where they treated fairly or not when they were fired or criticize, had their reputation tarnished, etc..

S8: And that all seems almost hopeless because we’re never going to know the detail. Enough details of how to adjudicate that and where we land, I think is more often going to be about how much we agree with the views of the person that has been criticized. That’s to me, the trouble of kind of working from the specific to the general. And the problem with working from the general to the specific. Emil, you kind of made the point when you said, well, the letter at one level, like what? You know, kind of what could you disagree with? So. Right. It’s true. It’s true that people are rude and some people are rude and mean. And that’s social media in particular seems to be built for kind of outrage and sometimes even cruelty. And that, you know, Twitter is where nuance goes to die. And all right, all of these things are are true. And it’s also true that the best way to counter bad arguments is not to wish them away, but to confront them that, you know, good faith disagreements shouldn’t get people fired or demoted. And I and I at least want to live in a world where people generally get second chances. And we try to repair relationships rather than, you know, rupture. Right. Those things all feel right to me. And any letter that says things like that, you know, I would be inclined to endorse. And at the same time. Right. It’s also true that people in power should understand that criticism. Sometimes even hard criticism is a price that you have to pay for having the power and that the central problem in American society throughout history and today isn’t too much accountability for people in power. It’s too little accountability. Historically, I mean, we’re still sitting here right now with with army bases that are named after soldiers who took up the cause of slavery. And so it doesn’t feel to me like we’re at this stage where we’re like post racism. We’re like the number one thing that we need to worry about is. People being too concerned about racism. Right. So the major institutions are still overwhelmingly, you know, run by white people and and by white men. And so I don’t know. I guess I don’t know what to say about that. I don’t know.

S5: Does that would really help me if you guys could cite for me if you’re able to like what’s an example of someone who has been canceled? I mean, I, I look at the Andrew Sullivan, Andrew, who is a friend and who I think is a brilliant writer. And Flick’s said so many interesting, important things over the years. Andrew heads platforms. He’s got places to write. No, not. Nothing happening with Andrew. I mean, he I’m sure he’s getting savaged on Twitter and ratio’s on Twitter or whatever it is, but. Who whose can’t? What is an example of cancellation where someone is literally canceled there? They’re there. They are career is gone because of something they have done or said it. And even if it’s just a moment of something they’ve done or said because that that’s what’s so funny.

S13: Well, I should just say that one of my other main criticisms of this letter is that its answer to your question was not specifics. It was these weird sentences with passive construction like EDS are fired for running controversial pieces.

S5: Well, you didn’t read James Bennet at The New York Times. James, you love and admire. And he lost his job. And that that is true.

S13: Yes. And there were some really sad things about that. It was also a complicated story. But there’s also Ian Buruma, who’d gotten fired from the New York Review of Books for running excuse me, like what I thought was like a pretty horrible apology. A piece about me, too, from a Canadian writer whose name is not in my head. And Buruma is a signer of the letter. So maybe that sense is about him anyway. I, I think the example of late that has really troubled me and which does feel to me deeply unfair, is this young researcher, David Shaw, who got fired from civics analytics and I think actually talked about this on the gabfests. He tweeted the research of this African-American, I believe, sociologist Omar Wasow, who had looked into the question of the effect of different kinds of protests in the 60s. So protests that were entirely non-violent versus protests that included some looting or rioting. And Shaw tweeted about this. And then, like people criticized him for being racist, for sharing this research and he was fired. And that did seem like a real overcorrection. But is it a trend? Is it something that we have to worry about generally? Right. Like when social movements include a lot of upheaval and people are wrestling for power and taking power who haven’t had it before and who deserve to have more power. They’re never going to, like, do it all correctly. Right. It’s going to be messy. They’re not going to say everything with complete decorum. They’re not going to only go so far that like the establishment finds acceptable. That’s just not how it’s going to be. And so I don’t mean to sound callous about David Shaw, from what I know. And I don’t know anything inside. It looks like he was treated very unfairly. But does that mean we have some big problem in our kind of culture of letters that we have to deal with? I feel like that I feel really uncertain about it. Just feels way, way premature to decide that right now.

S5: I didn’t follow that issue. There’s just the one I did follow is there’s a story about a woman who had shown up in a kind of ironic blackface to a Pallo random Halloween party a couple of years ago and washed away in a random party.

S13: It was a tub. But Washington Post cartoonist Tom told this party, sorry, go ahead. I mean, he was randomly reason it got. I mean, I agree with you.

S3: This is B.S. And he got written at the Post, wrote a 3000 word story about this woman. And you know, what happened when she showed up in blackface. She was trying to comment on Megan Kelly in blackface. And it was a disastrously stupid mistake and she felt terrible about it. And she went to therapy afterwards. And this was about kind of what happened to two young women of color who who confronted her and her at the party.

S5: And there was nothing wrong with the story. There was nothing wrong with what these young women did to speak to her. What was wrong with this woman’s employers fired her. And the problem wasn’t with David Shaw. It doesn’t seem to me that that there was this reckoning or this attack on him on Twitter. I don’t know. I don’t know the issues well. The problem is like what kind of employers like? Oh, yes, there’s a mob at the gates here. Have have have my employees body take it. I mean, that seems to me where the failing is. It isn’t that the debate is happening. It’s that these employers are so gutless that they that they just are like toss people out the door.

S9: I wish I had read more about that. David. Sure. Peace before having this conversation.

S11: Emily, I thought that there was that the story was a little bit more complicated than the way you presented it. But but but regardless, I think David Europe point, I think the response to your point would be that the people who are complaining about this part of their target is the employers. Right. They want employers to not. Inappropriately fire people for four years. Once the when people have been criticized by, you know, by the mob or, you know, on Twitter or in whatever whatever sense. Now, again, I I’m not taking a position on any of the particular cases just because, again, my view is that then I think that the David Shaw one is an example of this, is that we simply do not know enough about everything that happened and everything that that employer was aware of. And again, I might have this wrong, but I thought that there was a nondisclosure agreement that was signed in that case, which. That’s true. Yeah, that’s why we don’t. OK. But as a lawyer, when when I hear that there’s a nondisclosure agreement, my immediate thought is that there are some things that both parties don’t want to disclose and.

S1: Well, right. But I think it was maybe a preexisting anyway, getting into the weeds of this. I’m not positive about that.

S5: Is it is one of the issues. It’s one of the things that. Which side is the side that wants all ideas to be expressed in this. So it feels to me like we’re not we’re not in a world where people are unable to express.

S4: I know we are. Ideas are everywhere.

S3: I quite like it’s. There’s too many ideas being expressed like people. People need to, like, chill out and, like, listen a little bit more and stop expressing.

S13: Well, I think that’s fair. I think a lot of this is just about social media. Like, yeah, you can express any idea. But the consequences of expressing some ideas can be that you have a ton of people come after you on social media. Now, I have two minds about that. Part of me just thinks like you have to have a thick skin. If you want to express controversial ideas, that’s how it goes. You don’t have to look the other side, though, as if it’s starting to translate into real world consequences like firing. Then we do have to take this seriously. And also people who work online when their online presence gets firebombed in that way. That’s a huge problem. So there was another casualty of this letter. A trans writer at Fox named Emily Vander Wurth wrote a post and also, I think, a letter to her H.R. department in which she was critical of Matt Ecclesiastes, who is one of her colleagues, one of the co-founders of Vox. He had signed the letter and Emily’s note said she didn’t want any kind of professional repercussions from that, but she wanted to know she was really disappointed that he’d signed the letter because J.K. Rowling has written some anti trans things and kind of made a point of doing that, had signed the letter, along with other people who’ve been part of this discussion in a way I think trans people have been critical of. Emily Vander ended up being just like completely trolled in this horrible, horrible way on real media. Yes, one way off. Hey, why? Because the right wing like media, you know, places like The Daily Caller got ahold of this post and just really, really went after her.

S5: But what what possible criticism could there be of her saying that, saying it’s sort of like in that respectful sort of.

S13: Well, she did also say that Matt had made her feel slightly less safe. So that’s OK. Yes. Well, but I mean, she was seen even though she said I don’t want to have any professional repercussions, I think the part of an I do not share this view. I felt terrible for her and what happened. But I think there were people who are super skeptical and were like, this is really disingenuous. You are calling out one of your colleagues in this public way. You know, you’re pretending that you don’t want him canceled, slash, fired, but actually you do. And so then there was a lot of suspicion of her and then this sort of horrible, like migration into right world crazy town land. I just to me, the that it was an example of the fact that the people who end up really bearing the brunt of this kind of trolling are people from disadvantaged, marginalized groups. It was not an accident that the person who ended up like bearing so much of the brunt of this was a trans person. Now, this also happened to a lot huge tidal wave of trolling to Jenny Boylan, who is also trans, who had signed the letter. And there’s just something so sad and awful about that. Right? That, like the people who are vulnerable end up paying a price for this discussion, that lots of much more, you know, kind of traditionally safe white cis male writers were not having any kind of repercussions like that come their way. Anyway, I think that is both about this cultural moment and also just like the real pitfalls of social media.

S12: David, can I ask you a question? Am I allowed to do that? Yes.

S9: I was just wondering, David, if you if you think there is any problem here that’s worth talking about and by problem, I really do mean I’m not taking a position. I mean, the problem might. Be that keep you know, the problem might be there’s too much criticism of holding people accountable or the problem might be that there’s too much vitriol and, you know, pushing people out of jobs or or sort of harassing people so thoroughly online.

S7: Do you think there’s a problem on either side?

S5: Well, I. Let me try to get to that. So I was thinking about me, too. And when ME2 happened, it was so clear in almost virtually every case of somebody who had their career ruined and and their reputation disgraced. In almost every case there, you can argue and a couple on the margin that those people were real serial misbehaviors, you know, who’d done grotesque things, sometimes criminal things. And it was hard to work up a lot of sympathy for almost everyone involved in that case. This what’s going on here, I find so confounding and confusing. The only through thread that I see that I can hold onto and then I’m going to try to spin into a rope, is that the Internet culture and the way that people talk to each other and engage with each other and gather around each other and gang up on each other is a very bad thing. That the theme the theme here seems to be the Internet has this capacity to cause, you know, a fusion reaction that just makes everything explode in a way that things get blown up when they should, when it shouldn’t, when they shouldn’t get blown up. There should just be a small little fire instead. And and that part has me concerned.

S3: And I don’t know whether I’m concerned because I am on the side of the Harper’s letter writers or counter letter. I just can’t I literally can’t even wrap my head around it.

S5: I feel like the medium and the way these debates are constructed. I just get this from looking at Twitter a little bit. You know, from the time I spend on look at Twitter a lot of the time I spent on Twitter and just feel like, man, I don’t want to be in these conversations. I don’t want to engage. This is seems like such a poisonous, toxic way to engage with with people. And that makes me feel like it’s the medium is the problem. Not either the people who want free speech or don’t want free speech or want to Canceller don’t want to be canceled, that that part of it is harder for me to follow. It’s the medium that has me concerned that seems right to me.

S6: And I guess and and this is, you know, perhaps an obvious point. But what’s so hard about that is, again, to connect to, you know, the police reform conversation of criminal justice conversation we were just having or even the mid to conversation. There are so many instances where the bad actors, the only reason they were revealed and that enough outrage was generated to hold them to any account was because of because because of the Internet and Twitter and Adatto. I just I don’t know what to do about.

S5: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

S13: That’s a great dilemma to bring up. I mean, I sometimes feel like journalists in particular would be so much better off without Twitter because we are not at our best in that forum. And it leads to the kind of vicious debates that are not really that constant with our profession in some ways. Right. Like, we don’t have editors, we need editors. But then, of course, what you just said, James, is totally true. When I get out of my own sort of narrow slice of this world, you see how important these tools are for bringing pressure to bear mostly on government officials and people who had no forum for that, had no voice, who were dismissed by the gatekeeper. Publishers like now they have this direct line. It’s incredibly powerful and it can be really important.

S5: You’re absolutely right. Yeah. I mean, both the point that you guys make are true. And and it’s a good tonic to my unsettledness about. I do the social media.

S6: I was just going to say to connect this back to the conversation we were having in the very beginning when we were talking about Cauvin and Emmental, Emily and I both talked about our our personal choices. And I am somebody that that likes to think in terms of structures and institutions.

S7: But this this dilemma about the Internet and what you just suggesting about the role of journalists does May does make me think that we don’t yet have a structural fix to this problem of the Internet. But what we can do is think about our own personal use in our own personal consumption and how we behave and how we perform. And it does feel a little bit like the obligation for maintaining what’s really good about this medium and tamping down what’s bad resides with us.

S5: Let’s go to cocktail chatter. Apparently, James, former junior, is not a big fan of cocktail parties, but I’m hoping he’s a fan of cocktails even without the parties. So, James, when you are when you’re having a cocktail. Not at a party. Just with some other person. Some. Any human being. Maybe with your with your child. Help your child out having a cocktail with you when you have any cocktail. What are you gonna be chattering about with them?

S6: I think I’m going to recommend a family dinner activity. I don’t know about you all, but a long time ago we gave up asking our son, how is your day? Because we never get a response, you know, other than fine. But it turns out he has plenty to say if we ask the question a little bit differently. So for years we’ve had dinner time activities like peaks and kids where we go around the table and talk about highlights and lowlights of our day or two truths and a lie where you say three things that happen to you that day, two of them being true, one of them being made up. Everybody has everybody else has to guess which is the lie. So my chatters about a company that I found recently called Viertel US based out of the Netherlands, and they produce a card game, which for us has been a great way to prompt family dinner conversations. So the game is essentially a stack of cards with a question on each one. And we don’t play it as a game. Exactly. We just have our son pick a card out of the stack each night and then we all answer the prompts. And the cards have questions like if you win the lottery tomorrow, which three things would you do first? Or on one that our son has really enjoyed. What do or or don’t you like about your upbringing? And so our son loves this and some of the questions all resonate with him. And when they don’t, he picks another one. But lots of them do. And he often ends up actually wanting to pick more than one card, which given that television awaits after dinner, we consider a could sign. So this game you can find at at four, tell us dot com and I highly recommend it.

S13: Emily, top that form in Chad or my cocktail chatter this week is about a really interesting, I would say, investigation that NPR did. NPR tried to figure out how many ballots have been rejected, how many mail in ballots specifically in the primaries thus far. And they’re concerned about this, obviously, is that we can expect a much higher percentage and just higher number of mail in ballots in November. And so they’re trying to figure out what’s the risk here of these ballots not getting counted. And they found that about so far this year, 65000 absentee ballots had been rejected because they arrived past the deadline, often through no fault of the voter. There are also other problems with signature matching and other technical flaws that come into play in. What NPR was finding was that about one percent of the ballots in these races were being rejected. And that’s actually high when you start thinking of thousands of people being disenfranchised. So I think the question here is what states should be doing about this. They’re already a bunch of court challenges that the Democratic Party has been behind to try to extend deadlines, to give people more time to return the ballot. You know, does the ballot have to arrive by Election Day or could it just be postmarked by Election Day? Are there other ways we can try to make sure that people who want to vote. Why end up having their votes counted? So check out this NPR story. It is by Pam Fessler and Alaina Moore.

S5: My chapter is about a photograph that Mike Pompeo shared on social media. Secretary of State Pompeo. So it’s a photo of Pompeii’s dog with a surrounded by a bunch of toys, most prominently a Winnie the Pooh toy. And I think the caption was something like Mercer, which is presumably the name of Dog, which is weird. I wonder if he named his. Isn’t Mercer one of a really rich Republican funder? Robert Mercer, one of those Republican funders, anyway, Mercer with his favorite toys. There is a vast amount of speculation which appears to be founded, in truth, that this is a coded insult to Xi Jinping and the Chinese because Winnie the Pooh is a censored nickname for Xi Jinping. You cannot search for Winnie the Pooh on the Chinese Internet. If you do, you’ll just get sort of harmless Chinese government controlled pages. His. Because he reportedly has a he looks his body type. He looks a little push and his body type. And people who know a lot about the Chinese Internet know about what what’s going on. Think that this is clearly a coded insult that pump Payo has sent towards the Chinese. I don’t know what to make of it. I don’t know if this is good strategy. It’s a bad strategy. It doesn’t appear to have actually made it onto the Chinese Internet because, as I said, Winnie the Pooh is censored. So if you search for this in China, you wouldn’t see it anyway. But is it useful for Mike Pompeo to be taunting, mysteriously, secretly, photographically taunting Xi Jinping in this way? I don’t know. Maybe it’s good. I’m not sure. But it’s just it’s just a curious, curious episode, and I would love for someone who knows a lot about China and the Chinese Internet. And Mike Pompeo to tell me whether this is, in fact, some need a lean strategy that the U.S. has to try to unsettle Xi Jinping. Listeners, you have sent us Great Chatter’s again this week. You’ve tweeted them to us at at Slate Gabfests. Thank you very much. Please keep them coming. And actually, we have a a a China related listener chatter to James Edward Dillard at James Dillard sends over a podcast, which I have not yet listened to, but I’m super excited about it. But it’s a podcast about the different kinds of corruption in China and which ones hurt economic growth and which ones do not hurt hurt economic growth. It’s called How Corruption Works in China. It’s a podcast called China Talk. And I’m excited to listen to it. So thanks for sending that. James Dillard. That is our show for today.

S14: The Gap is produced by Jocelyn Frank, a researcher with Bridget Dunlap. Gabriel Roth is editorial director. June Thomas is managing producer. Alicia Montgomery is the executive producer of Slate podcasts. You should follow us on Twitter at Slate Gabfest and tweet Chatto to us there for Emily Bazelon and James Forman Jr.. So great to have you, James. You should definitely, definitely, definitely come back. I am David Plotz. Thanks for listening. We will talk to you next week.

S5: Hello, Slate, plus, how are you, James came on the show, as we talked about during the show, promising optimism, promising to be a ray of sunlight, a dark time, failed miserably at bat, as gloomy as you’d expect, given the new blooming mayhem. But he promises now and our Slate plus segment to bring some cheer and optimism to the world. So, James, you’ve started a program. It’s called I think it’s called the Access to Law School Program. And we’re want to talk about it. So tell us what it is it’s for. Why did you start it and what its purpose is going to be?

S6: Absolutely. And I appreciate having the chance to talk about it. And I’ll say upfront so that any listeners are primed. I am looking for a new name for the program. The access to law school program is kind of a place holder. So if anybody hears this and is has an idea for for a name, they can communicate it to me on Twitter or however you want to do it. The idea of the program is that we’re recruiting 20 fellows from the New Haven area. It’s important for me to this that this is a local program and I’ll talk a little bit about that. But these are aspiring in some sense of the word law student. So you have to be a junior or senior in college or you can be a college graduate. And indeed, we’ve gotten all of the applications in and we have a bunch of people that have been out of college for five, 10, 15 years. In some cases, the kind of person that always, you know, maybe argues a lot, but their friends always thought, oh, maybe you should go to law. You know, people said you should go to law school. But life got in the way. They had they had kids, they got off track. They got incarcerated. We’re very aggressively recruiting from among people that have been in incarcerated and in the criminal legal system.

S7: And so along with 12 year law students who are going to be taking a seminar with me on this topic, we are going to be teaching this year long class, which is going to be about exposure to different legal careers. Lots of people think all, you know, I want to be a lawyer, but they don’t actually know what the real careers are or how to navigate the admissions process, how to navigate the financial aid process process, how to deal with stereotype threat and imposter syndrome and micro and macro aggressions that as a minority student, a student of color or a first generation student, you will face and I should say I should have said this earlier, but we’re really targeting students of color, underrepresented minorities and first generation students and also a very intensive LSA team, which is the test you have to take to get into law school preparation programs. So the basic idea is to try to provide students that have a lot of potential, but not a lot of access, the kind of resources and support that students from a wealthier background maybe just take for granted. You know, I’m hopeful that we launch this fall. We’ll have our first 20 fellows. And the idea is that a year from now, they’ll be applying to law school. And I really view this as, you know, individual mobility for those students. But I also view it more more broadly than that. I view it as a kind of economic development program. I really want a way of diversifying the legal profession. I really my dream is that 10 years, 15 years out from now, when you go into a courthouse I New Haven. Our fellows may go to other cities, but when you go to a courthouse or when you look at the bar, you will see a much more representative, diverse bar. And a lot of those graduates out in the world will have come through our program. That’s my dream.

S1: So one question I have for you. I mean, this is such an exciting project and such a great use of your resource of Yale Law School resources. Are you going to continue to support people when they get to law school? And by support, I mean, stay in touch with them, help them, because it seems to me that that transition is going to be something that people are probably going to need continuing help with, just in the same way as like anyone who goes to law school. You know, if you’re trying to fill this gap in people’s backgrounds, are you going to stick with them?

S9: Absolutely. I mean, at all, 20 years ago now, I started an alternative school in Washington, D.C., the Maya Angelou School for Kids from the juvenile justice system.

S7: And one of the things that we learned, I mean, we kind of knew this, but we really learned it as soon as we had our first graduating class and they went off into the world, either to college, into the workforce. It was I think it was 72 hours before we got our first call of somebody who needed help. So, yeah, this is going to be a sustained relationship. I see the relationship over time happening in a few ways. First of all, all of the fellows are going to have a law student mentor and a professional mentor. So somebody from a lawyer of color, most likely from the New Haven community that’s going to serve as their professional mentor.

S8: My hope is that those relationships, once built over the year of the program, are going to continue over time. But in addition, behind that, we will organizationally in the program have been building an alumni network. And one of the messages that we’re we’re gonna be sending to our fellows from the beginning is we’re not going away. We’re here if you need us. And more affirmatively, we will be building out our own outreach so that we don’t, because sometimes there can be some comes shame and stigma. Right. You you go off, you been launched and maybe you are afraid to reach back out to the program. So where we ourselves will be reaching out to people to check in with them. Yeah, you’re right. That’s a that has to happen.

S5: James, you’re a lawyer and a law professor, so obviously it makes total sense for you to do this in law when you’ve looked around. Law is not the only profession in which people of color, low income people, black people are underrepresented. Do you see? Are there similar programs that exist for STEM fields or have you got there are there models that exist or are there? Are you trying to be a model for. For perhaps for other fields?

S8: I think both there are there are small little models that I’ve seen across in almost every field. If you go somewhere in the country, you will find kind of some version of this. But they are they are small.

S7: And there are two ways in which what I’m trying to do is somewhat distinctive. And I and I think a sustainable model as well. My law students are working with me. As I said, they’re in a class and they’re helping me to run the program. So I think for universities. Right. One of the features of American cities is that we have a lot of very well-endowed universities that are in places that are that are very poor. And Yale in New Haven is, you know, can be exhibit A for that. But there’s there’s lots of other examples. And so universities, I think, are particularly well positioned to work with their students to both develop these programs. And as part of that, help educate. It’s education for my students as well, because it’s you know, it’s one thing to teach a class on poverty and segregation to talk about how, you know, northern cities had a form of Jim Crow themselves and had deindustrialization and housing and homelessness and all those issues. I can teach those in a law school seminar, but it’s so much more powerful to have my students, my law students see how this is playing out in the real lives of people that they’re working with. So that’s one piece that I think is distinctive. And then the other pieces, the local focus, you know, a lot of programs that do this are much more national in scope. And I think that’s I think that’s worthwhile. I very worthwhile. I don’t I don’t even want to hesitate when I say that. I think it’s extremely worthwhile. But I also think there’s a real place for a program that is grounded in a location, because I think what it does is it helps to build up a cohort in a community.

S11: And so that over time empowers the community itself.

S1: In addition to empowering the individuals who may go through the program, earlier when you were talking about the professional mentor part of the program, you said that the people doing it, we’re gonna be layers of color and I’m just interested in that choice. I mean, I can completely see why it would be helpful for students of color to see these role models. I also wonder, though, about the idea of making white people part of the solution, making sure that the burden of mentoring, which is a real thing, is shared on the whole sort of line of like sometimes the best mentors are the people who don’t look like you and you don’t have that much in common with because they don’t necessarily have the same set of responsibilities that people in your community have. And I just wonder how you’re thinking about that.

S7: Yeah. No, Emily, it’s it’s such a good question. And I think my thinking is, is in flux on this point because I think you really raise exactly kind of the right set of arguments.

S8: I have been deluged with offers of assistance from lawyers of color in New Haven and in the in the Connecticut area.

S6: Right.

S7: Who have said, oh, wow, you know, I wish something like this has existed for me when I was, you know, in high school or in college or applying to law school. Is there anything that I can do to help?

S8: And I’ve gotten I’ve gotten those from lawyers of all colors from from white attorneys.

S7: I’ve gotten them from you. So I think I have that a little bit in my head. But no, I don’t I, I shouldn’t have said I shouldn’t have suggested that it would be exclusively lawyers of color. I do think that it may it will disproportionately end up being that. But but not exclusively so.

S8: Excellent.

S9: And I hope you’re coming to I mean, I’ve already asked you and I will now ask you on the podcast so that we can have some accountability that I will that you will come and and help teach a writing class.

S1: Excellent.

S5: I accept there’s no accountability on this one. Last question. What those many, many, many thousands of Slate plus listeners listening now, if they want to support this program, is there anything they can do?

S7: Oh, wow. That’s a great question. There is something super concrete. If people want to do it, we. The one part of our budget that we have to raise, 90 percent of this is in kind. But the one piece that we do have to raise is the LSA t preparation. So we’re hiring professional LSA t tutors to work with me and my law students to help teach our fellows. And so if anybody wants to support. That aspect of the program, if there’s an individual or if there’s a law firm or a company that’s used it as part of their mission, they can reach out to me at James Dot Foreman at Yale that you. And beyond that, I think that if there’s anybody who feels like they have some sort of expertise, whether it’s expertise in the law school admissions process or the law school financial aid process or on any of the issues that I just mentioned. Right. Navigating law school as a black student, a student of color. If if you’ve heard anything and you feel like, you know, I have something to offer, maybe I don’t have money, but I have my time. Then please also reach out to me at that same email address.

S5: James. Thank you. Byfleet plus.